No questions allowed.
Obey even if he doesn’t exist.
Mano Singham considers an essay from one of those people who say they were an atheist, but have now returned to their faith. Mano treats it thoughtfully and respectfully, and I can appreciate that, but nowadays my response to such a claim is “You’re full of crap, bye.”
I know, I’m a bad, rude person.
Unfortunately, it seems like even the most fervent, fanatical televangelist has a similar story about having been a heretical wastrel in their youth, but then they found Jesus and are now saved. It’s part of a redemption arc, and also part of a slur against atheists, that they only deny God because they are immature and hedonistic and haven’t thought seriously about faith.
I think Mano has it exactly right.
I left religion for purely logical reasons. not emotional ones. I found that however hard I tried, I just could not reconcile the scientific view that everything occurs according to natural laws with the traditional religious view that seemed to require an entity that could bypass those laws to act in the world to change the course of events. It took me a long time to overcome the emotional attachment to the religious beliefs that I had. So while I can understand how logical reasoning can make one leave religion, I cannot see how it can drive the reverse process, as Beha seems to desire.
Same here, except that my family faith tradition didn’t have much of an emotional attachment to Christianity, so shedding it was relatively trivial. I agree, though, that there are no good rational reasons to compel return to a faith, which is why I reject any attempts to rationalize it. It feels good to you, it connects you to friends and family, you have fond memories of your time in church…that’s fine. I believe you. Go ahead, I’m not going to deny your feelings. But if you try to tell me you have compelling, logical, scientific reasons to believe in a god, I’m going to tell you you’re full of shit.
This guy, Christopher Beha, has his own simple excuse.
To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.
That’s about as superficial a rationalization for becoming a Catholic as I can imagine. Why become a Catholic? Because you need someone to tell you what to do. Maybe Mr Beha should then ask, “Why should I trust this guy in a clerical collar or this holy book to know what I should do?” He’s not looking for an answer, he’s looking for an authority.
The more complete interpretation of the atheist view is that there is no one to tell you what to do with your life. And anyone who is telling you otherwise is lying to you.
There was no single moment or cause when I left Christianity behind. It was many small things, but one step was when I actually read the bible for myself and found it quite useless. It was the 1980s, daily life with my mentally ill mother was horrible, the cold war was still going on, we had acid rain and Chernobyl – what the hell do I care about whether we will still have marriage and sex in God’s kingdom?
I appreciate that Mano was acting civilized and treated it thoughtfully and respectfully. You say you are rude. I say
when they push this shovelful of superstitious crap at us, they don’t deserve respect.
I mean, not for everybody. “How should I be?” is only really distinct from “What should I do?” under a philosophy such as virtue ethics…which is a perfectly workable viewpoint, but hardly universal. I’m a radical behaviorist; what I am is what I do.
There isn’t a New Atheist view on that question. There are a number of New Atheist authors, and each of them has their own view on how one should live one’s life. Just like everyone else, they have a variety of ethical and aesthetic and political stances.
They don’t even agree on the “freedom to decide for themselves” bit. Remember Sam Harris? “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”
glances at the social sciences
glances at approximately 3,000 years of recorded human philosophy
And therefore Catholicism, as opposed to the eleventy-million other answers people have offered, or an answer of your own construction, or acceptance that there is no answer? Cool, I guess, but seems kinda arbitrary.
It’s much easier for me to understand people who are like “My family taught me about Jesus/Ganesh/whomever, and then I felt Their presence in the following ways, and I like the folks at my church/temple/whatever, so I believe in that guy.” At least their reasoning is straightforward and I get the appeal.
Jeez, the Cognitive Revolution happened over sixty years ago. Scientific materialism is perfectly cool with investigating consciousness. “Private” mental events don’t look the same from the outside, of course, but psychology can tell us all kinds of shit about how thoughts and emotions and memories and sensory perceptions work.
If I need to modify my consciousness in a way that works for me, I find therapy, medications and browsing the contemporary research literature to be far more useful than religious anything. Scientific materialism has saved my neurodivergent ass.
I really don’t get this need for someone else to order you around. In my slumps, I may ask someone I trust to give me some tasks to get me moving and thinking, but only as a means to reevaluate what I want to do.
… there is no one to tell you what to do with your life.
Au contraire, I see billions of people telling me (and even more billions) what to do (and think).
None of them seem to have any more knowledge than I do about life, and all have less than I do about my life.
“ Unfortunately, it seems like even the most fervent, fanatical televangelist has a similar story about having been a heretical wastrel in their youth, but then they found Jesus and are now saved.”
They aren’t even very original; St. Augustine (the Hippo one, not the Canterbury one) was saying “Lord make me pure, but not yet” some 1600 years ago.
They want to live in a universe governed by moral rules; rules that reward them and punish others. They want a dictator. They want a cosmic hanging judge who will perfectly dole out “justice.” If not in life, then in death.
It makes as much sense as starting to believe in Santa Claus again because there is no good and naughty list otherwise. Religion is basically the adult version of Santa Claus anyway.
Religion is partly driven by fear of death.
Ultimate solution: Create a high-tech hedonistic society like The Culture in the novels by Iain Banks, where death is optional.
Atheists are the raw material. A religious audience craves an atheist who says something like, “Even I, a philosophy egghead and a reprobate atheist, am forced to concede that the intellectual underpinnings of your religion are unassailable.”
Don’t have an atheist? Make one up.
And so it goes.
beholder, not all religions are theistic. Or even deistic.
So, no. It does not so go.
In my experience, all these “I found Jesus” stories are all alike. They all say that “I was horrible, I was an atheist,” but they never say why. There is a long history of anti-religion arguements, but they never mention them, not even to say what is wrong with them. Nor do they ever say what changed their minds. Such conversion stories are never told to skeptics. They are designed to be told only to the already converted. All the details are carefully left out to avoid upsetting.those converted.
Ted: Then there’s the ones who say “I used to be a rabid atheist, and I believed [something totally asinine that no real atheist has ever heard any other atheist actually say], until something or other happened and I prayed to Jesus for salvation and now I see how totally ridiculous atheism is!”
And let’s not forget the ones who claim they used to be Pagan priest(ess)s and presided over all manner of evil Satanic rituals and abuses that somehow never showed up in any police reports or lawsuits. As one Pagan said, “Damn, how many national-level high priests, warlocks and wizards does America have room for?! And how did any babies ever make to age five with all that child-sacrificing going on?!”