>
> I just read something loosely related, "A Free Man's Worship" by
> Bertrand Russell. Possibly more relevant to some other threads
> currently going on in alt.m, but here it is anyway:
>
>
http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/fmw.html
>
> ...
> "Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is
> the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if
> anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the
> product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
> achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves
> and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of
> atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
> can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours
> of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
> brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast
> death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's
> achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe
> in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so
> nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to
> stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm
> foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth
> be safely built. "
