To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe. - Thomas Nagel

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

A feature of experience is subjective if it can in principle be understood only from one type of point of view: that of a being like the one having the experience, or at least like it in the relevant modality. The phenomenological qualities of our own experiences are subjective in this way. The physical events in our brains are not. Human physiologists may take a special interest in them; but they can, in principle, be understood just as well, or even better, by creatures totally unlike us in physical and mental structure. To understand them such creatures need not take up our point of view. Physical brain processes can be understood objectively, from the outside, because they are not subjective phenomena. And no description or analysis of the objective nervous system, however complete, will ever by itself imply anything which is not objective, i.e. which can be understood only from one kind of viewpoint, that of the being whose states are being described. One cannot derive a pour soi from an en soi.

Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.