It's taking Jennings a bit...

...so I thought I'd just go on and post again anyway. I was recently watching a video on youtube, which I don't know how to embed here so have a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTO_dZUvbJA&feature=channel.
Tedtalks are rather entertaining to watch and also tend to drift to the enlightening side. Some rather notable occurences have happened there, from Bill Gates unleashing mosquitoes on the audience to (more important to me) Richard Dawkins stepping out and calling other atheists to stand up for the first time. The video linked above is less of a headline grabber and more of a thought provoker, which is more in line with the talks at large, and provoke my thinker it did.
The idea, and from here on I'm going to be pretending you watched the video as the 3 people who read this blog, among which I am one, will probably enjoy it through to the end, that boundaries are key to human happiness is, at first brush, somewhat disheartening. We shy away from boundaries, prefering to "keep our options open" or to have a bit of uncertanity in our futures, but the data indicates that boundaries not only make us more satisfied with what is here, but truly do change our opinions of things for the better. But we still prefer boundless opportunity, and why shouldn't we? Now I could expound on the joys of childlike wonder and an evergrowing thirst for the horizion and the unknown, but that isn't what this blog is about, so I'll move on.
Religion is often given as enriching life, bringing hope to the hopless, joy to the miserable, etc etc. But one thing it doesn't do is put a boundary on your life. Not in the sense of mortality...although in almost every other sense of the word it is wonderously good at tossing up boundarys, but I'll come to that in time.
Death is a period, not a comma. Not a new paragraph, not a time to turn the page and find out what comes next. I say this in such an unequiviocal manner because we have no more evidence that we persist after we kick the final bucket than we do that unicorns and fairies are dancing the mexican hat dance below the surface of Pluto, and I have my personal doubts that we ever will (you cannot prove the nonexistance of the nonexistant). Now to many that's probably a pretty dreary statement, and at one time I'd have agreed with them. Who would want to stop existing? Now, granted I certianly don't, and if given the choice this very instant I'd pick immortality over being shot in the face, but...as the speaker showed, we're really bad at picking what is going to make us happy in the long run. (Still wouldn't take the shot in the face option.) The depressing fact is that eventually we're going to stop existing...or I should say the reason it's a depressing thought to some, is because you grow up with this idea that you get to be immortal. Sure you'll die but thats just a fleeting thing, because after that everything gets better. No more pain or unhappiness. No more misery or hunger. No more anything that pushes us to be human.
Do you know what I've learned from living some rather miserable times? Misery is good for us. It drives us and it makes us enjoy life. People voluenteer for the most horrible assignments in the military because that defines the times they aren't on them. The most comfortable nights sleep I've ever had in my life was on a $30 cot, an eighth of an inch of foam padding and tucked into a poorly insulated unzipped sleeping bag all while wearing clothes I'd worn for 3 days straight. It was so amazing because I'd been going on constant mission drills for 72 hours prior. It was freaking miserable, but I still to this day remember how good that cot felt, something that laying on a $2,000 bed couldn't come close to.
To exist is to persevere. Take away the sadness and the joy looses meaning. Hand out olympic gold medals to every first grader who can run 100 meters and suddenly the gold wouldn't matter. If there is an afterlife I desperatly hope it's as full of struggle and heartache as this one, otherwise we'll never meet a poet there, and anyone who wants to live in a world that doesn't produce poets has excused themselves from the human race.
But I digress from the point I was intending to make, and that is that the happiness from religion is worse than false, it's demonstrably false. We are happier when we are able to come to terms with something. We are happier when bounded. And I would daresay I am happier than most religious folk I've ever met, certianly moreso than when I was one.
Religion is the promise of fantastic amusement park just out of sight. Now queue up kids, the line is just a little longer we promise! Just stay in it and right over the horizion is the great reward you're going to get! Atheists step out of that line and take a look around and realise that, unlike what the religious leaders teach us, we aren't standing in some dreary sun parched parking lot waiting to go to the great party, instead we're in a magnificant world full of light and love, joy and sadness, pain and wonder, ten thousand things that make THIS life worth living and ten thousand more than make the first ten thousand pale to insignifiance. I will not stand in that line ever again, not because of a hatred of the horizion, but because I really do want to know what's on the other side of it, and waiting for the kid in front of you to shuffle forward isn't how you explore this world, it's to turn around and look.