"What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal?  The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous.  It means to know that one is food for worms.  This is the terror:  to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruiating inner yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to die."
     So said anthropologist Ernest Becker.  In so many words, Becker captures the heart of naturalism, observing, with tremendous insight and honesty, the inevitable outcome of concluding that we are utterly alone in an accidental universe.  We are born, we live, consciously, deliberately, and often with exquisite joy and delight, then we die.  And we never return.
     Maybe there isn't, as any number of commentators insist, no transcendent purpose in this cosmos.  Maybe there isn't a grand and overarching point to reality as we understand it.  And maybe the urge to think otherwise is illusory, a product of incessant cultural conditioning.
     Maybe.  If so, why are you reading this?