Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: I've seen about a half-dozen UFOs.

"A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest"
azstrummer — (archived)

Boy, we have had a similar evolution in our thinking ERman. I think the day I became an atheist and a realist was the day I taught myself how to remove or ignore the very loud and strong wishful thinking that existed in my own brain.

I remember it wasn't an easy task. Some of that thinking is deeply programmed within us and part of our basic survival instinct, especially in regard to belief in an afterlife. We are wired to want above all other things to survive as long as we possibly can and our brains (which have evolved into philosophical organs) extend that desire past what our logical side tells us is a finite experience.

Once I identified that in myself, not a thing about a notion of an afterlife made any sense whatsoever and once that revelation came about the rest of the religious stuff that supported it fell apart as well.

Let's just take on the whole issue of ghosts of the departed. That "ghost pool" would keep getting added to with every death of every person that ever existed on the Earth and, since proponents of an afterlife seem to not require any conditions for ghosts to have a limited "lifespan", it would be a logical assumption then to believe that each year the number of encounters with the departed would continue to rise so that they were happening all the time to everyone.

It was the same thing with alien-piloted UFO's. Because of my love of science, mystery, and intrigue I've always wanted so badly to believe that extra-terrestrials are hovering above us. It meant that there was hope that our dumb species really had an evolutionary direction that would somehow enable me and future humans a real chance to fly out of the bounds of our little pocket of the universe. I fought the buildup of knowledge that was countering that possibility as I studied physics and astronomy but eventually, once I removed that wishful thinking, it was relatively easy for me to understand that our universe is so huge and dangerous and the distances so vast that the likelihood of other civilizations visiting our insignificant planet is incredibly small no matter what technology they've developed.

Now, I refuse to give up the wishful thinking that Ashley Judd will walk by me and find me sexually attractive. There are limits to logic.

Art

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