Unbelieving Materialist Poster boy, Sam Harris
“TO THE UNBELIEVING MATERIALIST, man is simply an evolutionary accident. His hopes of survival are strung on a figment of mortal imagination; his fears, loves, longings, and beliefs are but the reaction of the incidental juxtaposition of certain lifeless atoms of matter.
No display of energy nor expression of trust can carry him beyond the grave. The devotional labors and inspirational genius of the best of men are doomed to be extinguished by death; the long and lonely night of eternal oblivion and soul extinction.Nameless despair is man’s only reward for living and toiling under the temporal sun of mortal existence.
“Each day of life slowly and surely tightens the grasp of a pitiless doom which a hostile and relentless universe of matter has decreed shall be the crowning insult to everything in human desire which is beautiful, noble, lofty, and good.
“But such is not man’s end and eternal destiny; such a vision is but the cry of despair uttered by some wandering soul who has become lost in spiritual darkness, and who bravely struggles on in the face of the mechanistic sophistries of a material philosophy, blinded by the confusion and distortion of a complex learning. And all this doom of darkness and all this destiny of despair are forever dispelled by one brave stretch of faith on the part of the most humble and unlearned of God’s children on earth.
“This saving faith has its birth in the human heart when the moral consciousness of man realizes that human values may be translated in mortal experience from the material to the spiritual, from the human to the divine, from time to eternity.”¹
This Easter, may the unbelieving materialists raise the bar; may they take a moment to unpack the “mechanistic sophistries of a material philosophy,” and truly reflect on just what a “destiny of despair” does to their psych. It takes far more courage to embrace that “one brave stretch of faith” and discover eternal life, than it does to accept the hopelessness and despair of “eternal oblivion.” Go for it.
¹ From Paper 102, THE FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGIOUS FAITH, THE URANTIA BOOK
