What’s the worst possible thing that could happen? Having to listen to John Lennon’s “Imagine” end on end for eternity? That could be pretty bad. It might be just as bad to listen to “Only A Fool Would Say That” by the Dan for a similar period of time. Most of us, of course, live somewhere in between the naive utopianism of the one and the stark cynicism of the other. But imagine, for a second, there is no heaven.
Ok, if there is no heaven, that supposes no God, right? Maybe THAT’S as bad as it gets. That’s how bad it is today, on the Holy Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. We’re just holding down the fort here until God gets back. Or Jesus, supposing he is also God. He’s not to clear on this point, but that is another discussion for another time. Right now we are talking about a world without God.
Which, judging from some atheists I know, would not be such a bad place. Ok, some atheists are shitheads, but so are plenty of theists. There are also plenty of atheist who recognize that a) atheism is a belief because you can’t prove God doesn’t exist and b) if you believe there is no God, it’s time for us to put on our big person panties and behave ethically. I think we are clear on the fact that religious belief does not, ipso facto, mean ethical behavior.
So the intellectually honest person would be an agnostic, believing in neither the existence or absence of God. That place, in my humble opinion, is much hard to be in than on either side of the theist – atheist divide. That is the place where I think we find ourselves on Holy Saturday. We can choose whether or not to believe in what is to come tomorrow, but today we don’t even have the information to act on. You can’t even imagine what is to come, and only a fool would try.