Signs of On-Coming Depression: UFOs

I know that I'm heading into a period of depression when I start to become interested in all things bizarre and esoteric, such as UFOs, alternative ancient history, etc. At least I have warning signs.

The Romance of Angst

Existential angst romanticizes the lonely and ultimately futile struggle against complete annihilation. At the same time, it places the burden of finding significance on the individual existent. It is both a liberating and terrifying place to live, each day saying “yes” to a world grinding inevitably toward an eternal “no”.

At least that’s how I felt when for many years following that day on the train, the day when I admitted to myself that I no longer believed in God, I traded away the false hopes of simplistic Christian faith for the wistfully pleasant contemplation of my alienation from an indifferent universe.

Personally I think people can only support that seductive sense of the human condition in a godless universe for so long. Eventually the reductive view of Man prevails leaving atheists with the bleak conviction that human beings are electro-chemical reactions advanced by chance and necessity. We are only physical and purely physical things aren’t about anything; they just are. That perspective is literally dehumanizing because it dismisses as illusions the very things that make us human, such as rationality, signification, choice, and personal identity.

As I see it, hope is not about clinging to comforting illusions; but the choice to leave open the possibility that human beings are more than we think they are. It is about taking the existential stance that our capacity for reason reflects something fundamental about the universe (not a convenient instinct) and that experience can access facts about reality (a relation versus alienation). These are two ideas that lead me away from atheism although I did not realize so at first.