God like Santa Claus is a figment of your imagination

Well, it is one thing to tell our children that santa claus does not exist. It is quite another to tell them that God is no different from Santa Claus, that is, he is imaginary too.

Imagine telling our children that our religion is nothing more than wishful thinking and god is a creation of man to ward off their fear of death. And telling our children that life is what they make of it and death is what nature makes of them. We come and we go. In between, we reap what we sow.

So, no supernatural being created the universe. It came about on its own. By fluke. By chance. By whim. By fancy. Just a whole lot of good jabbing, jibbing, jiving and presto!

Everything took its turn to evolve. From dead energy to blind atoms. From chemical reactions to emergent properties. From natural selection to group selection. From nothingness to somethingness.

There's no infinite regression. No "who created the creator". No mutilations from occam's razor. No fuss about the uncaused cause. No more mystery, wondering and pondering. And science is merely dabbling in the realm of the decimals.

Think about it. If atheism is true, isn't it an honestly unpretentious world? It's a short dream of aliveness ending with an eternity of nothingness (if eternity is the right description after all). What is our children to think? What is their life script? What is their purpose then?

If the purpose of life is to make life our purpose, what then is life if there's no life after life? And neither was there ever life before life to start with.

Stripped of the myths of heaven and hell, creator and eternity, our children will have to learn that their ancestors came from the sea and make land their final burial place. And their hope is in the "here and now" as they brave through a Christless past and a faceless future. So, God like Santa Claus is a figment of our imagination?

Now, here's a pause for reflection. Is my bias that obvious? Is my pessimistic undertones unfair? Have I been so lulled into a blessed assurance that I can't imagine living without one? Is an atheist universe that unthinkable? Is the Christian fish really the last to discover the godless ocean?

Well, as Bismarck once compared the folly of humanity as "committing suicide for fear of death," maybe the equivalent of that is for a fool to say in his heart "there's no god". Maybe I am more a realist than I am biased as David Ben-Gurion admitted, "In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles." I am therefore a miracle believing realist.

And maybe it takes just that first miracle, that first miracle of life, to magically turn all reality we observe today into a world no different from a child's fecund and unbridled Imagination. Thus the God "fiction" is indeed stranger than the godless "fact" although no less true.

But then, come to think of it, and after what the universe had gone through, I guess an atheist has to quietly admit that to live life without god is itself no less a miracle; a miracle that is as defined by an atheist. Cheerz.