Thread by @BrentBeshore

Below is a beautiful, intellectually honest secular materialist perspective trying to make sense of our existence.

As a former atheist, I too stared into the abyss and felt similarly. If curious, here's my journey:

https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore/status/1342470804974481411

Here's how I'd rewrite it now...

https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore/status/1364971507810787330

We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then you’ll be reunited with God, your creator. Your friends, who knew their shortcomings, admitted their failures, and relied upon the forgiveness of Jesus, will be there, too.

Heaven will come down to earth. All sickness, brokenness, injustice, and hatred will cease. We will be perfected in love, living richly into eternity with purpose and in harmony, finishing the work we started prior to death.

Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be restored and remade. The sad and bad will come untrue.

But that’s not how we live our lives. We live under the illusion that our existence is essentially meaningless.

We beetle away distracted, into our minutes, hours and days, with an auspicious void hovering over us. Yet, to look directly into it, and respond with an entirely rational descent into despair, is to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition, categorized as somehow faulty.

We do our best to ignore it.

The cure for the horror is the true story of reality, God’s wonderful, loving, redemptive response to humanity’s rebellion. Our brains distract us from this beautiful truth by filling our lives with false goals and encouraging us to strive for them.

What we think we want, and the ups and downs of our struggle to get it, is the story of us all. It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from both the dread of the abyss and the beauty of our creator.

There’s simply no way to understand the human world without these stories.

They fill our newspapers, our courts, our arenas, our government debating chambers, our school playgrounds, our computer games, the lyrics to our songs, our private thoughts and public conversations and our waking and sleeping dreams.

Stories are everywhere. Stories are us.