Gregory has made the connection more than once between atheism and despair. But he wasn’t the first.
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
– Bertrand Russell. A Free Man’s Worship
I’m thankful that my foundation is not one of unyielding despair.
The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with with a problem of pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.
– Aldous Huxley. Ends and Means
I am also thankful that I do not believe that there is no valid reason why I personally should not do as I want to do, and that my friends have no desire to seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.
Thought you all might like an opportunity to discuss something without having to run back and forth between TSZ and UD to keep up with the conversation.
Mung,
If you are interested in unyielding despair, then talk to Gregory. You might also want to ask why Christianity has failed to relieve his great bitterness and melancholy.
I don’t have a foundation of unyielding despair. And I have no interest in seizing power. So I guess I’m not a disciple of either of the people that you quoted.
I would place a small bet that these are quote mines.
Would you like to know what would be even better than your small bet?
Actual evidence.
Do you have any?
petrushka,
I know the Russell isn’t. Don’t know about Huxley.
Huxley, just a couple of sentences later in the same essay:
Mung:
Yes, because unlike Russell, you aren’t intelligent or resourceful enough to build a meaningful life on top of such a foundation.
Here’s Russell:
And:
*when you see the thread name and you know it’s Mung*.
Argument to consequences / red pill or blue?
Odd how that only troubles you sometimes.
Another pointless post where someone who doesn’t understand atheism asks some atheists why they do or don’t agree with claims made by other atheists.
Sure to be followed up by another pointless post about how atheists can’t have morals, only those who believe in his Christian God can.
I don’t think existential despair means what mung thinks it means.
My own untutored take is it means something like submission to reality.
More like serenity than depression.
I don’t believe atheists live in existential despair. But I also don’t believe unyielding despair is a firm foundation for anything meaningful.
I believe that refusing to submit to reality undermines meaning.
Reality in the sense that kicking a stone really hard hurts. The voices in the heads of presuppositionists are real phenomena, but not reliable describers of reality.
Science investigates reality, which is not the same thing as meaning. I wold say that denial of science and reality is incompatible with meaning.
Mung,
Depends on who’s meaning. Freedom to author yourself might be the greatest meaning.
Are you a marionette, or a real boy?
It would be cruel of me to pit the faux atheists here at TSZ against a real atheist. But not necessarily pointless.
How does one come to “understand” atheism KN? From what I have observed during my time here at TSZ it [atheism] lacks any coherent content.
Perhaps you could host a thread on the content of atheism.
I think that’s a beautiful idea. I can see how a Christian view of the world can give rise to such an idea. I can’t see how the firm foundation of unyielding despair provides any foundation for such an idea.
Mung,
As I said:
Meanwhile, I reject the idea that believing in God, Santa, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy somehow provides a “firm foundation” for a meaningful life.
I don’t see how you sustain that claim, given your belief that God has preordained the fate and purpose of all His creatures. As in petrushka’s allusion, Il signore Geppetto is God to Pinocchio.
Russell was being hyperbolic, using shock language to drive home his point. Context is everything. Read the whole blooming essay.
Mung,
And I can see how a Christian perspective kills it.
I don’t see why lack of belief in an afterlife should lead to despair.
As the cliche goes: thinking about the time before I/we were here isn’t depressing, why should thinking about the time after it be?
I hope that the end of humanity is gentle enough that it’s not too horrible for those who have to go through it, but I have more pressing concerns to worry about on humanity’s behalf right now.
As for this:
Well, I’m thankful for the same thing. I don’t see what it’s got to do with atheism.
What does it mean for anything to be meaningful? I suppose you could answer something along the lines of “being consistent with the nature of god” or “consistent with god’s plans for you/us”.
But then your statement about what you don’t believe is a firm foundation for something meaningful, becomes totally irrelevant to someone who has an entirely different view of what it means for something to be meaningful, or what should qualify as a foundation. Or even what it means for that foundation to be “firm”.
In all likelihood, we don’t see eye to eye on any of these concepts.
I don’t either. One thing is to feel despair at some given moment, due to having undergone a despairing experience (such as the loss of a loved one). But that’s not the same thing as saying atheism “leads to” despair, as if it is somehow and unavoidable logical entailment. It just isn’t. It simply doesn’t follow.
The only negative emotion I can associate with a finite life is a sorrowing thought at the knowledge that at some point the people I care about will no longer exist. There are already people in my life that have ceased to exist, that I miss very much and would like to enjoy the company of at least one more time.
But there’s a far cry from that realization to despair. Perhaps you can despair at that particular thought, at some given moment, in the sense that you know you can’t change the fact of it and can as such feel powerless to prevent it, but it isn’t one that you’re bound to dwell upon and let permeate all aspects of your life. What a waste of life that would be.
I can understand the comfort religion provides on that question certainly. I have experienced it myself, I was a christian until some time in my mid twenties. But ultimately I failed to convince myself it was true, because it didn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Christianity or not, I would welcome a convincing case for an afterlife. I just have never seen one.
Heh, I was unsure of the exact and literal meaning of the word despair (I’m from Denmark), so I looked it up. I’m happy to report that as the word is defined in internet dictionaries, e.g. “complete loss of hope”, I have never in my life felt that feeling. I’ve always had hopes for something.
The only result of true despair I can even imagine is suicide. Why would somebody even bother living if they had truly lost all hope? It would seem that, if atheism leads to despair, most atheists aren’t aware of it. Which would mean that it cannot be true that atheism leads to despair, otherwise most atheists should be despairing shouldn’t they?
What good is it to say that atheism leads to despair, if in actual reality, the vast majority of atheists aren’t despairing? It seems to be then both a statement without consequences, and diametrically opposite to demonstrable fact.
Which makes me wonder about the people who keep bringing up absurd statements like that. It’s almost like they WANT atheism to lead to despair and are sort of complaining, or even confused, that atheists don’t seem to be acting as they’ve been lead to believe “they should”.
Hope is a beautiful thing. It’s something you can build on.
Yay! hoping for 72 virgins.
It is. But you don’t need to believe in an afterlife to have hope. For instance, I hope for a healthy life and a not too painful death, and that my son will outlive me.
I don’t mind contemplating a future that I’m not part of. I hope my life contributes a little to making present and future lives a better than they would otherwise be. It’s what I aim for any way.
Because being an atheist doesn’t stop you thinking that making life better for other people is better than making life worse.
Virgins? What Virgins?: And Other Essays
Sorry.
No need to apologize. Just apply that same reasoning to your own mythology.
If you dare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri
I’ve been thinking of this very topic a lot lately. Last Saturday I was out hiking in the desert and I came across skeletal human remains. They were in a small cliff grotto, and they were obviously not ancient.
Monday I reported the find to the local authorities, and Tuesday I met them to lead them out to the site. They recovered a passport and a wallet with a driver’s license, allowing them to identify the remains. His name was Bruce, he was a year older than me, a resident of Colorado. The investigators estimated that he’d been there for two to five years. Judging from the context of the remains and a pill bottle among them, they made a preliminary determination of suicide. I was incredulous that somebody would go to the trouble of hiking for miles away from civilization, into one of the most desolate barren places on Earth (the Funeral Mountains adjacent to Death Valley — irony or meaningful?) simply to purposefully end their own life.
The detective assured me that people do such things “all the time”. Death Valley gets about 4 or 5 suicides a year, people come from all over the world to die there. He pointed back at the carefully constructed rock shelter and said “that guy did not want to be found.”
I don’t know what, if any, religious beliefs Bruce had, but he obviously suffered from unyielding despair. As an atheist, that feeling is incomprehensible to me. If anything, I feel fortunate indeed not to be weighed down by the tyranny of sectarian dogma. I’ve been able to either create or discover meaning and purpose for my life rather than having had it assigned to me — rather than despair, the deeper understanding of nature and the experience of it is awe-inspiring and a cause for deep joy.
I felt very sad for Bruce, but whatever horrors his life might have been presenting him with, I doubt that religion would have saved him. Unyielding despair is certainly a tragedy that some experience, but laying the burden of religious guilt upon its sufferers is not going to be the liberation that they need.
llanitedave,
Moving post.
I don’t believe that either. And ‘unyielding despair’ accords in no way with my outlook on life. So …
Rumraket,
Yes, I often get the feeling that theists feel I’m not doing it right.
It’s sometimes explicit. We are only saved from despair and moral nihilism by “stealing” precepts from theism.
I suggest the reverse – that theism is humanity’s reification of the concepts of hope and virtue.
Gregory has only done that for values of “made the connection” which are wide enough to include “stated an evidence-free assertion that such a connection does indeed exist”.
There is a belief system which holds that every human being is intrinsically evil. According to this belief system, every human is born evil; there is nothing any human can do to stop being evil; and all humans ought to be tortured forever, on the grounds of their intrinsic, irremediable evil. Does atheism have a stronger “connection” to despair than does this belief system?
Elizabeth,
You’ve apparently become an egoist, Lizzie, in your post-Catholic life (although, it doesn’t seem you’ve officially ‘left’ the Catholic church, probably just keeping your buffet options open for a possible return). Your ‘reversal’ suggestion is simply anthropomorphism of religious hope and virtue. At the end of the day, you either believe the Creator of the universe and you are communicatively connectible or not. If you don’t, then you won’t acknowledge the Creator as the ultimate source of hope and virtue. If you do, then you will acknowledge hope and virtue above simply ‘Society’ and individual death. So simple a child (including your son) could understand it! 😉
Ultimate hope yes; proximate hope no. If you really believe there is no ultimate meaning in the universe and in human existence, including yours, then trying to gloss that over like you are doing is still ‘ultimately’ meaningless. Yours has become a simple proximate ‘sociological’ hope, Lizzie, which has little ultimate significance on the scale of Big History.
This is why KN’s philosophistry is so despairing in the end; his worldview is as horizontal, disenchanting and shallow as yours seems to have become, Lizzie. It’s not about being ‘skeptical’, as most people are. It is about becoming an ideological ‘skeptic’ filled with a self-centredness based on scientism or materialism (e.g. Dawkins’ selfish gene idiocy) that denies the possibility of a Creator who loves you … and that has lost the human decency to even want to consider that love beyond life and death.
Well put, Gregory! How to be able to communicate with the creator of the universe? How can we do that?
I don’t see where you are getting that from what I said, Gregory. Where is the “ego” located in my post?
Have no clue what this is supposed to mean or on what it is based.
Yes. I’m saying that we anthropomorphise hope and virtue, and call it “God”. But the hope and virtue are intrinsic to human nature whether we anthropomorphise it or not. They arise from our extraordinary mental capacities.
Quite. And I don’t.
Precisely.
“Above” in what sense?
I don’t know what “ultimate meaning in the universe and in human existence” means. If you can explain what you mean, then I’ll tell you whether I believe that it exists or not.
I believe it is good to make life better for people and other things, and it is bad to make life worse for them. I think that’s important. Whether it is an “ultimate meaning” or not, I don’t know, or really care.
Alan Fox,
Somehow, I don’t imagine that your question is genuine, Alan. But in the chance that it is, perhaps you can help. What are some possibilities, at least what you might have already heard about, that may/would/could enable us to communicate with our Creator (if such Creator exists)?
As you can imagine, it is a waste of time to ‘argue’ or ‘try to convince’ someone who simply does not want to learn, no matter what options are given. Please prove yourself different if you want to be taken seriously. Militant atheists and anti-theists at TAMSZ are a boring waste of time. What makes you different?
Gregory, if would be much easier to hold a conversation with you if you would not pepper your posts with parenthetical inferences about the motivations and attitudes of the people you are responding to. They are rarely either accurate or relevant.
Make your case, or rebut the argument presented. And if you find TSZ boring, don’t post.
Imagination is an interesting concept. Sort of contributes to us being human. Anyway, I am curious as to what your answer would be.
Was my question unclear or ambiguous?
The communication must be between the mind of the person claiming to communicate with the universal creator and the creator. The carrier wave or whatever is not so interesting as the content, especially that supplied by the universal creator.
Forgive me if I read that as “No matter what response from you, I’m not replying to your question”.
I claim no special importance. Why so evasive when asked simple questions?
No, Lizzie, ‘you,’ not ‘we’, anthropomorphise hope and virtue. You, meaning atheists. The vast majority of human beings doesn’t fall into your ‘we.’ Jews, Christians, Indigenous (Native Peoples), Muslims, Hindus, Bahai’s, et al. do not do that. We see life as a divine creation given to us by our Creator and we live our lives with that belief and connection.
Daniel Dennett has really messed with your ‘brain’, ‘mind’, ‘cognition,’ Lizzie. 🙁 What a sad situation! 🙁 🙁 He’s apparently made you think that ‘atheism’ is ‘normal’ for any ‘scientist’, like what you now call yourself (after having studied music and architecture in your earlier life). But there’s a much greater life in science, philosophy, theology/worldview discourse you don’t seem to see (and possibly have convinced yourself not to even question!).
Lizzie, if you want to have an actual conversation with a person, with a scholar on this blog, other than your little atheist-skeptic minions, try to understand that ‘person’ is not a blasphemous thing. And responding to, even directly addressing what a person believes about human life and existence, is not something to exclude from ‘healthy’ conversation.
This is exactly what you don’t understand and/or avoid in becoming the ‘post-Catholic’ egoist who tries to find meaning and purpose in no one other than herself; not accountable nor in fellowship with any God (in whose witness she was supposedly wedded) or Kingdom of Heaven. Personally outcast and forsaken from within.
The reduced ‘sociological’ meaning, a far cry from ‘ultimate meaning’ is all that you are left with in your apostasy, Lizzie. What hope do you have left for more than that?
p.s. your admin, Alan, one of your 3 atheists, has proven himself unworthy of an answer; he shows himself as mistrustful and phony. If he can’t provide even ‘possibilities’, he is ‘as ignorant as dirt’ and not worth the time of conversation.
It’s probably because you don’t see straight! 🙁
Guano. “Post, not poster” 😉
Too late, Gregory. It’s already there.
Alan Fox,
That’s fine, Alan, while you comfort yourself of your eventual oblivion.
Well, I’m a person of faith, welcoming all others of faith, across religions, into an engaging science, philosophy and theology/worldview conversation. Hopefully we can collaborate, even if the ‘soul’ of this site (and many of its militant members) is against it. 🙂
Atheist, ignorant, despairing, empty-souled, anti-theists and angry anti-religious sub- or low-level human beings are not allowed. We have a right to defend ourselves from the empty relativistic lifestyle you people wish to promote. Like in the recent thread with TAMSZ admin Patrick, the guy can barely dribble and can’t make a free throw to save his life, yet not only does he think he should be ‘starting’, he thinks (egoistically) that he should be the ‘captain’! 🙁
Talk about Dunning-Kruger for atheists!!
You folks need to rise, sincerely in your hearts, to be included in this global conversation. This is the bottom of the bottom, though you may appear ‘nice’ and even ‘clever’ to each other.
Mere ‘skepticism’ is no excuse for being antagonistic or falsely arrogant ‘scientistic’ human assholes. You need to go beyond Lizzie’s apostate ‘brain’ to something much, much greater, full of grace and mercy and community. That door is not closed to persons who actually care, unlike Lizzie.
Oh, YAY! You are welcoming to all who agree with you! And I bet you don’t even care how stupid these people must be! What a sweetheart! All others (i.e., those who can think) can step away from your (no doubt strongly sought) grace?
Um, nobody with any sense wants to join your whack team, Gregory.