It's A Quote

[Belacqua]

Beyond the bright cartoons
Are darker spaces where
Small cloudy nests of stars
Seem to float on the air.

These have no proper names:
Men out alone at night
Never look up at them
For guidance or delight,

For such evasive dust
Can make so little clear:
Much less is known than not,
More far than near.

— Philip Larkin

[Fake Messiah]

Last words of "Carl Sagan" before death as told by his wife Ann Druyan to magician and skeptic James Randi:

"I held Carl’s Hand as he died and I looked at him and he smiled and I said ‘Goodbye, Carl.’ And he said 'Goodbye, Ann.' And he closed his eyes and he died. We knew as we said those words we were never going to see one another again, and it was okay. It was very sad. But it was okay".

For thousands of years, the human mind has been crafting multiple dogmas to replace that 'Okay'.

But it is the ultimate conclusion.

[Belacqua]

“Leopards break into the temple and empty the sacrificial vessels; this is repeated time and again; in the end it can be foreseen and becomes part of the ceremony.” — Kafka, The Zurau Aphorisms

[Belacqua]

He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

    And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

final lines of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

[The End of Atheism]

‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith,
‘And truly it’s a blessing,
For what he might have done with us
It’s better only guessing.’

‘There is no God,’a youngster thinks,
‘Or really, if there may be,
He surely didn’t mean a man
Always to be a baby.’

‘There is no God, or if there is,’
The tradesman thinks, ‘twere funny
If he should take it ill in me
To make a little money.’

‘Whether there be,’ the rich man says,
‘It matters very little,
For I and mine, thank somebody,
Are not in want of victual.’

Some others, also to themselves,
Who scarce so much as doubt it,
Think there is none, when they are well,
And do not think about it.

But country folks who live beneath
The shadow of the steeple;
The parson and the parson’s wife,
And mostly married people;

Youths green and happy in first love,
So thankful for illusion;
And men caught out in what the world
Calls guilt, in first confusion;

And almost everyone when age
Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like him.

[arewethereyet]

‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith,
‘And truly it’s a blessing,
For what he might have done with us
It’s better only guessing.’
...

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[Angrboda]

[Fake Messiah]

[A. Secular Human]

‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith,
‘And truly it’s a blessing,
For what he might have done with us
It’s better only guessing.’
<snip>

If you're implying that this is about atheism, the only thing *ALL* atheists have in common is the lack of belief in deities.

A minority make the additional claim that there are no deities.

The two statements have quite different meanings.

This is one inconvenient fact that most theists refuse to acknowledge.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

‘My Father Christmas passed away
When I was barely seven.
At twenty-one, alack-a-day,
I lost my hope of Heaven.

But not in either lies the curse;
The hell of it’s because,
I don’t know which loss hurts the worse -
My god or Santa Claus.’ - Robert W. Service 

Boru