An untimely meditation.

Learning there is no Santa Claus is always a disappointment in the life of a child, not least because it means so many adults have conspired so long and extensively to tell you a silly lie, and still conspire to foist it on other innocents.

And realizing your invitation to a great and wonderful feast was exactly just such another practical joke is yet another disappointment.

And that is how believers in God, Allah, Jahweh, the gods, the eternal Buddha-mind, or whatever commonly react when disabused.

Well, believers in kind and loving powers, anyway.

Those who thought life, the universe, and everything under the sway of malevolence are, of course, relieved to have realized their error.

And it is much the same for disabused believers in human immortality.

Believers in a happy immortality, anyway, are at first dismayed.

One in which, for example, the circle will be unbroken, bye and bye, in the sky.

Or at least one with good prospects.

Those who thought the prospects rather dim, of course, are relieved to stop believing – and fearing.

Again, it is much the same for believers in the illusions of right and wrong, of values inscribed on the face of the universe - whether or not by God, Allah, Jahweh, or whomever - with authority over us and over others in contrast to our own so impotent and insignificant wills.

The collapse of faith in such great things as justice, natural right, and the moral law is no easy thing to endure.

Only the more stupid immediately respond, "What luck! Everything is permitted!"

For the generality of believers, probably, in human immortality, in morality, or in any of the better known and currently more popular religions, these lost illusions are all at least to begin with actually felt as genuine losses.

And the people who suffer such losses of faith may remain full of sadness and regret for a long time.

But some eventually get over all that.

And then they see in retrospect that what for so long seemed like the whole world plunging into darkness was instead an enlightenment, an awakening, a genuine dawn.