I would relate better in any ‘origin and end’ discussion to someone who has a default position of ‘lack of belief’ in contemporary worldview and then proceeded from there – seeking to rescue the beauty and elevated creative human outputs that religion has hijacked, shackled and to which apparently the ‘god-less’ have not contributed much.
In similar vein, I couldn’t connect with pure rationalists, or lazy scientists, who dismiss or degrade human characteristics, aptitudes, and endeavors that fall outside the quantifiable.
People who stop at ‘lack of belief’ and people who only have ‘faith’ bore me. They are tiring in their closemindedness. Of course, you can thrill in knowing scientifically how music causes a reaction in the orbitofrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus. And we can stand in awe at the PET machine that can measure it. But this exhilaration should extend also into the numinous faculty that makes you lose yourself in the chills and tears that arise in your body as you listen to a beautiful piece of music or get enthralled by the juxtaposition of ideas in an art piece by an artist!
My evolution as a human gets to be an ever-enriching experience and I am thankful. Case in point, thankfulness. Gratitude is a feeling, among many, we feel instinctively as a response to our social environment rather than the physical. But sometimes this emotion is more a celebration of a happy event that benefitted us rather than a reaction to an agent – real or imagined. This is a naturally selected meme, useful for our social health. And because it normally denotes agency, it is begging an object in our perception rather than just be by itself.
Just like the philosophical tree that falls in the forest silently, if I feel gratitude for a good thing that happened to me through no one’s help, do I still say thanks?
My 2 cents 