On Atheism and Its Built-In Irrelevance

Noted atheist Richard Dawkins now says he's not sure there isn't a God.  Well, he's not getting any younger...

But what is the point of family, friends, community, love, etc. , if they are nothing but the product of random chemical interactions and freaks of statistics, no more or less significant than any other?  Your own personal chemical fluctuation in the slow march to entropy will inevitably fade and all of the above will have meant nothing.

The Greeks who stared at the shadows on the cave walls and faced down the arrows of Xerxes at Thermopylae? Irrelevant.

The Romans who took the riotous rude democracy of the Greek city states and codified it into, however briefly, a Republic?  Idiots.

The Christians who faced lions and emperors to profess their belief in a higher law binding all men?  Fools.

The anonymous Irish monks who archived the wisdom of a fallen world in their isolated monasteries as Rome and Europe collapsed?  Wasting their time.

The men with the rusty metal shirts and shining swords who breasted the tide of Islam again and again, in Spain, in France, at Rhodes and Lepanto and Vienna? Deluded.

The printers and brewers and lawyers and farmers who stood up in Philadelphia and told the greatest power in the world that all men had rights that derived from a nobler and higher source than the indulgence of the powerful, and forged that defiance, however briefly, into a Republic?  Madmen.

The 300,00 men who died to renew that claim, and the 300,000 more who died to assert that it applied to all men, regardless of race or color?  Lunatics.

All the millions who have stood and died since then to deny that men are things, property, at the disposal of the king or the state or the party or the revolution or "the people?"  All the men, women and children who have lived and died building homes, factories, farms, universities, stocking museums, a world? Gullible buffoons, one and all.  Deluded moths imagining they could manage the flame — unless there is a flame, and there is some way we can aspire to embrace it and become, in our own small ways, transcendant.

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