Jul 042011
With a hat-tip for the concept to Michael Drake.
We cannot prove that our religion is true, but we nonetheless need it because without it life would not be worth living. And we know that life is worth living because our religion tell us that it is.
11 Responses to “A universal and mercifully short apologetic”
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This is actually the reason, I for one, would rather like to be religious. I can’t trick myself into believing though, with all my years of militant atheism behind me. While maybe the restrictions on what we can do are a little tight, I think religion could be a personally good thing for people – the sense of community, the belief in love, the lack of fear of death. Of course, when too many people follow a religion, it gets so big that it eventually causes some really major problems (unethical laws, wars, unethical treatment of children etc.), but even if I could become something less well-known, like joining the Viking revival movement or the Wiccan movement, I’d be a lot happier than I am now, I think.
I’ve met some of these neopagan folks and often found them to be charming people, if perhaps a little silly. But they still have beliefs that honesty compels me to reject (such as a background belief that “nature is good,” which is arrant nonsense).
And it strikes me as pretty damn likely that if they were 80% or more of the population they would find ways of being perfectly beastly to the remaining 20% or less, just as more traditional religions have.
We need the eggs…
Nice play!
I agree with estnihil. The concept of a happy atheist baffles me. There is happiness in truth-seeking, but not in the conclusions it leads one to. Who wouldn’t want a loving and benevolent god? Unfortunately that leap of faith is beyond me. Psychological studies show that those with religious beliefs are happier than those without, so a non-intrusive form of religion does appear to add to human well-being. Once one opens one’s eyes to the world, however….As T.S. Eliot wrote “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
I remember a good while ago (I can establish it as before 1997, because Carl Hempel was in the audience) I remember a lecture by Thomas Nagel in which he remarked that he was an atheist and that not only did he not believe there was a God, but that he did not want for there to be a God. I must confess to having something of a thrill of liberation at that moment.
“Who wouldn’t want to believe in a loving and benevolent god?” It is hard for me to say. I rather wonder what a world presided over by a loving and benevolent God would be like. (Like life in the hedonic machine, perhaps?) My own intuition is that such a world would in any event be very different from the world we can actually observe. Religious apologists, however, seem to be constantly insisting that the world we actually observe is exactly the world that a loving and benevolent god would preside over.
That makes me thing that believing in a loving and benevolent god is something I would not want to do.
Well, James, I’m obviously speaking of an absolutely ideal world where there was no suffering and never had been or would be. In short, an absolutely different and unrecognisable universe from the one we have the misfortune to inhabit. To quote Thomas Ligotti:
“Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear. We would still function as beings that needed the basics–food, shelter, and clothing–but life wouldn’t be any more than that. It wouldn’t need to be. We would be content just to exist. There’s only one problem in this world: none are content with what they have. We always want something else, something “more.” And then when we get it, we still want something else and something more. There is no place of satisfaction for us. We die with regrets for what we never did and will never have a chance to do. We die with regrets for what we never got and will never get. The perfect manner of existence that I’m imagining would be different than that of most mammals, who feed on one another and suffer fear due to this arrangement, much of it coming at the hands of human beings. We would naturally still have to feed, but we probably would not be the omnivorous gourmands and gourmets that we presently are. Of course, like any animal we would suffer from pain in one form or another–that’s the essence of existence–but there wouldn’t be any reason to take it personally, something that escalates natural pain to the level of nightmare. I know that this kind of world would seem terribly empty to most people–no competition, no art, no entertainment of any kind because both art and entertainment are based on conflict between people, and in my world that kind of conflict wouldn’t exist. There would be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than you need, no scientific activity because we wouldn’t be driven to improve the world or possess information unnecessary to living, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions from which we would no longer suffer, no relationships because those are based on difference and in the perfect world we’d all be the same person, as well as being integrated into the natural world. Everything we did would be for practical purposes in order to satisfy our natural needs. We wouldn’t be enlightened beings or sages because those ways of being are predicated on the existence of people who live at a lower epistemological stratum.”
Amen to that!
I like this.
My friend has a fish tank. His kids are theoretically responsible for the fish, but they often fail to feed them and clean up after them, so my friend ends up doing it. He feels bad for the fish in their often-squalid circumstances and says that he wishes that they were “programmed” to just die if they are uncomfortable enough.
The fact that this is not a general feature of the world – that things don’t just wink out of existence when they’re miserable – is a mark against the reality of justice.
I’ve read the quote before, but I still really like the appeal of it. I’ve often told my friends ‘I wish I could live as a pet’. They of course, think being a dog etc. would be a horrible thing, despite the living in the moment, the absence of unquenched desire and the inability to think of the horrors of the world. I think every Abrahamic religion has that as its premise, though: that we are God’s pets. The hypocrisy of my friends makes me laugh a bit (they’re muslim or christian).
You all remember, of course…
Should my mouldering shade ever encounter his down in Philosophers’ Hades, I am going to have some bad news to break to that John Stuart Mill character.
If I had to be anything , it would be a cat. They have the perfect attitude to life: sleep it off. Lovecraft felt the same. Check out his wonderful essay on the effortless superiority of the feline over the canine:
http://www.psy-q.ch/lovecraft/html/catsdogs.htm