This one comes as a meditation on the implications of atheism, particularly the doctrines of the mindlessness and purposelessness of nature. Surely it is true that many atheists themselves have acknowledged the tragic logical consequences of atheism.
It Will Forget You
It will forget you.
The universe does not know you,
is not thinking about you,
did not intend you,
does not love you,
would be content without you,
and will not preserve those who could preserve you.
All your thoughts are kindling for the great thermodynamic funeral
pyre.
There will be no eulogy in praise of you;
no soaring words spoken en
memoriam.
Give the earth a few centuries and not only will your
bones be broken down and assimilated into the chaos,
but so will your name!
For you were nothing and to nothing you return.
Indeed even now you are only matter in motion;
a knotted mass of
hopes and dreams dissolving into the randomness from which
you sprang,
prologue to the long descent of man.
What is
all your creativity?
What are
all your descendents
but the vanishing inglorious churning
of molecules?
Amid your “imagined self-importance,”
your anthropocentric arrogance,
you are nothing but
debris scattered aimlessly amid a universal wastleland,
clumps of soil fermented from scattered star dust.
You are not only nothing,
but you know you are nothing.
You are utterly alone,
and even the thought of your aloneness is also
alone,
suffocating in solipsistic isolation.
Look at you, adrift, swallowed up by
the vacuous black ocean,
shouting all your sublime boldness
into a cold bottomless abyss.
You cling vainly to a racked vessel,
seeking comfort from what cannot comfort,
hope from hopeless fate,
and truth from truthless brute circumstance.
And still some onboard sing and cheer,
claiming,
“We are evolved!”
“We are man!”
“Let us love!”
“Let us plan!”
“Let us argue!”
“Let us win!”
While others hate and kill and behave as jackals to claim
hedonistic redemption before what they know themselves to be
already
succumbs to its material reality;
when consciousness merely melts away.
For the religious man would sacrifice self to be conscious
of all things,
But the atheist sacrifices the dignity and meaning of consciousness itself.
The religious man would ascend to a higher plane,
but the atheist accepts his descent into the nihilistic
noise of the universe.
The universe has already responded to the heaving passions
of the ages,
all the fevered arguments of man,
all the ingenious manipulations of nature,
and all human presumptions to impose his ordering mind
against a mindless universe,
by plunging the whole of the race into despair,
then agony, and then
a particularization that strips the
pith out of all passion,
despair,
agony,
thought,
and all the vaporous ambitions of man.
