Ken Ham, Being Wrong Again

That is one thick motherfucker.

Hemant Mehta relates a conversation with a non-believing chaplain about death and the meaning of life:

A few months ago, I had a long conversation with Bart Campolo, a former evangelical Christian and current Humanist chaplain. Our talk was both illuminating and emotional since we spent the bulk of it discussing death.

Campolo is explaining how atheists, too, can find meaning in life. Smith asked: “What spiritual nurturing would someone who doesn’t believe in a spiritual life need?”

If somebody came to the conclusion, as I did a number of years ago, “I think this life is all there is. I think that when I die I’ll be dead,” the most immediate question that came to me was, if this is it, how do you make the most of it? I have this wonderful opportunity to be a sentient human being, to be able to think and feel and understand and fall in love and have relationships. How do you make the most of this life?

Who ends up feeling the most fulfilled?” It’s people that have loving relationships, and who do work that they feel makes the world a better place, and who cultivate a sense of gratitude and a sense of wonder at just the amazingness of being alive and living in this universe with all its beauty and all of its stuff.

Love it. That’s how humanists roll. It is the wonder, the gift, that makes it all worth it.

Ken Ham, however, did not get the point:

Campolo believes that once he dies, and when others (including the people he supposedly helps have a fulfilling life) also die, then that will be the end of them! They won’t even know they ever existed. So for all his fluffy talk about living a full life and falling in love, and so on, ultimately life is all totally pointless! All he is doing is leading others to a purposeless, meaningless life.

Won’t even know that they ever existed? What the hell does that mean? If he means that people are forgotten because they are dead, then there is Ken’s first mistake. It’s called memory, Ken. It’s called a legacy that can last across generations.

A full life is what we all want. And we don’t, as the chaplain said in the article, have to go from thrill to thrill to have a fulfilling life. And nowhere did the chaplain say that falling in love was part of that. But nevermind-what Ken misses, is that there is reason to live. We get the opportunity once to do it-and that is the point. This life can hold purposefulness without having to imagine that God will take you up so that you can kiss his ass for eternity. I don’t know how dumb you can be to not see that we can find fulfillment in the life that we have. Some trash the gift, and leave us early-but being a good person while you are here is what we atheists strive for. I have yet to meet the atheist that doesn’t feel a deep sense of responsibility to do good and to be a force for positivity.

Yes, we will die, and that is the end. But that does not mean that we are born to do just that. There’s a whole array of things we can do in between. And people like Ken Ham are the enemies of true humanity, the dupes who insist that you can only do good if only you would believe what they do. A lot of blood has been shed by promulgating that kind of shit, Ken. Go fuck yourself.