Not me, thanks. I'm not leaving any audit trail in the event Judgment Day draws nigh.
However, I would like to share someone else's story, involving one of the most powerful scenes I've ever encountered in fiction -- the opening of John Updike's 1996 novel "In the Beauty of the Lilies." It concerns a moment of reverse revelation, so to speak, experienced by a Presbyterian minister on a hot afternoon in the spring of 1910, when he suddenly realizes there is no God. The full scene (excerpt below) depicts the humdrum everyday actions of other family members around him as the minister is hit by this dread cosmic truth. No one else present takes note of this event, since it occurs only in the minister's head, but it transforms their lives -- depriving him of his livelihood and impoverishing the family.
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"[At that moment] ... the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the parsonage of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. ... [He had been reading "Some Mistakes of Moses" by famous contemporary atheist Robert Ingersoll] in order to refute it for a perturbed parishioner.... [However,] his thoughts had slipped ... into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that Ingersoll was quite right: the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be.
"Clarence's mind was like a many-legged, wingless insect that had long and tediously been struggling to climb up the walls of a slick-walled porcelain basin; and now a sudden impatient wash of water swept it down into the drain. *There is no God.* ...
"Life's sounds all [around him] rang with a curious lightness and flatness, as if a resonating base beneath them had been removed. They told Clarence Wilmot what he had long suspected, that the universe was utterly indifferent to his states of mind and as empty of divine content as a corroded kettle. All its metaphysical content had leaked away, but for cruelty and death, which without the hypothesis of a God became unmetaphysical; they became simply facts, which oblivion would in time obliviously erase."
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Carl
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