[Z]

Originally Posted by Jesus.

It's not really optimism that drives this emotion, it's fear, as your last few words prove.

Life doesn't owe us anything, and a twist of evolution doesn't mark us out as special in my view. We evolved a set of skills due to the environment we were living in and nature took care of the rest. It's an insurmountably nonsensical leap from that to theories (I use that word extremely lightly) of floating consciousness and the divine communicating with the most ignorant.

If a belief in god/reincarnation gets people through their days, then knock themselves out. Just don't make scientific claims about it.

Some people choose to mask their fear with optimism; but it's the same thing at the end of the day/your life. Perhaps not, but that is why people think there must be a greater purpose to our lives because we, as a species, consider ourselves top of the pile. I've always held the view that science has come to explain the mysteries of God and that they are in fact one and the same. People have always attributed miracles and plagues and diseases and disasters to an act of a god; but science has come on in leaps and bounds dramatically over the last couple of centuries and has started to explain things that our ancestors couldn't.

Perhaps the end result of all that scientific explanation will be categorical proof that there is no God or afterlife; or perhaps it will prove that there is one. I don't know, I'm not making any discoveries. Like yourself, if people want to hold their beliefs about life and death that contradict my own, that's their prerogative, they are no more right or wrong than I am because we're all still alive and when we die, we're no longer a part of life.