Even if theism is a failure, it's still superior to atheism

[R00tKiT]

Here, I hope I made the title as provocative as possible, I'll attempt to show that it's really more than a clickbait, it's true.

All religious people who work on defending their religion rationally are bound to face the difficult question : but why do you really believe ?

There are of course well-known reasons that motivate religious conviction : indoctrination, fear, sense of community, to name a few. But the thread won't be about those : there really are distinct reasons for preferring a theistic worldview over an atheistic one, even when all philosophical arguments fail. I'll cite just two for now, as I think the topics raised here are incendiary enough.

It's a horrible world out there:

Let's face it, the prospect of death wonderfully forces the mind to find pragmatic answers to all kinds of struggles. Firstly, it's important to see the difference between this fact and the simple emotion of fear : the awareness of the finitude of our lifetime is a stone cold fact that has nothing with our emotions. In other words, whether we fear death or not, we're still going to die. Secondly, it's common knowledge in philosophy that anything a man does is an attempt to "live in the moment" while they can do so, and that the full awareness of the finitude of our lives necessarily leads to a descent into absolute powerlessness, when the individual can longer find the inner momentum to move forward. Some psychologists speculated that all mental disorders are a form of weakness in one's character or mask of personality that makes them directly exposed to this awareness.

The late Ernest Becker in his award winning book The denial of death, brilliantly expressed this idea : "when the awareness dawns that has always been blotted out by frenetic, ready-made activity, we see the transmutation of repression redistilled, so to speak, and the fear of death emerges in pure essence. This is why people have psychotic breaks when repression no longer works".

But all people are also driven by the desire to stand out, to make a unique contribution to the world. An impossible dilemma : all your ready-made activity, everything you do, is the result of complex psychological mechanisms shielding you from the awareness of your own death, and at the same time, you want this same activity to be inherently valuable and cosmically important, you want it to transcend death.

Religion or theism offer a clear solution to the dilemma: there really is a Great being who guarantees that everything you do has cosmic justice, He created you so that you can accomplish it. All non-religious worldviews clearly fail or at best offer far less appealing alternatives to solve the problem.

The insoluble problem of sex and lust:

A woman constantly, and subconsciously, asks for assurance, that the man wants "me" and not "only my body", women are painfully conscious of the same dilemma above : they want to fully express their inner personality and, at the same time, are aware that all men ultimately only want the sexual act. And here it's important to note what I'll call a regress of symbolic lies to get sex : the evolving brain of the man managed to create a symbolic world of lies for the woman, he'll eventually convince her through an elaborate web of lies and sophisticated illusions that her beauty, or that the beauty of her personality, really transcends space and time, whereas his brain only aims the sexual act. What's commonly called love happens when this regress of lies becomes too sophisticated for the man, or the predator, himself : he starts to really believe that pursuing his loved one has some nobility and heroism in it, that his loved one is cosmically important, even with the full knowledge that, under naturalism, all her revered beauty is bound to decay and disappear irreversibly. The male predator eventually comes back to his senses and no longer feels the cosmic importance in his pursuit of lust, when the numbing feelings of arousal are gone.

This simple observation is enough to deal the blow to any prospect of feminism. Women can't be more than an object of lust and animal desire under naturalism. Religion, again, clearly has the upper hand here : the criterion for ultimate or other-worldly success has nothing to do with how dangerously seducing her body parts are, it's really her inner personality, the inner strength of her religious belief that ultimately determines her cosmic fate. Religion makes feminism possible as it inherently values women, whereas competing worldviews offer nothing in this regard.

[arewethereyet]

[url=]

[The Valkyrie]

No.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

It’s a horrible world out there.

Your analysis doesn’t explain why vast numbers of non-religious people are able to experience fulfilling, satisfying lives while being fully aware of their own mortality.

The insoluble problem of sex and lust.

Have you ever met a woman? I only ask because you don’t seem to know much about them.

Boru

[The Architect Of Fate]

It’s a horrible world out there.

No, it's not. It's a world that happens to contain some horrible things. But it also contains a lot of beautiful things as well.

The insoluble problem of sex and lust.

Do you mean that problem that doesn't exist ?.....

[Jehanne]

To the OP, it's like saying that being high on drugs is superior to a normal mental state. Yours is a mental fantasy as opposed to a chemical one.

[polymath257]

Have you ever met a woman? I only ask because you don’t seem to know much about them.

Boru

Nor men.

[Rev. Rye]

To the OP, it's like saying that being high on drugs is superior to a normal mental state. Yours is a mental fantasy as opposed to a chemical one.

Thomas Vinterberg just created a movie around that exact premise (specifically, the premise that people are born with a BAC .05 too low, which is based on a real [if quote-mined] paper by a real Norwegian psychiatrist)





And it doesn't take them long to decide "Why not go beyond that .05 BAC?" And, yes, experiment aside, this is apparently a realistic (if somewhat heightened) depiction of Danish drinking culture.

Also, your reading of Ernest Becker is shit. You argue this:

But all people are also driven by the desire to stand out, to make a unique contribution to the world. An impossible dilemma : all your ready-made activity, everything you do, is the result of complex psychological mechanisms shielding you from the awareness of your own death, and at the same time, you want this same activity to be inherently valuable and cosmically important, you want it to transcend death.

Not really much of a dilemma. All you have to do is create something that strikes such a chord with other people that they keep talking about it long after you're gone. You don't necessarily need a supreme being to help you do it.

And even that doesn't guarantee anything.



After all is said and done, Salieri put his trust in the Justice of a supreme being to help create beautiful music, and his name survives only as a mediocrity with a non-existent rivalry against a much more gifted composer. And whether or not God is real, or whether or not Mozart was all that devout, his immortality project has succeeded wildly.

[LadyForCamus]

Here, I hope I made the title as provocative as possible, I'll attempt to show that it's really more than a clickbait, it's true.

All religious people who work on defending their religion rationally are bound to face the difficult question : but why do you really believe ?

There are of course well-known reasons that motivate religious conviction : indoctrination, fear, sense of community, to name a few. But the thread won't be about those : there really are distinct reasons for preferring a theistic worldview over an atheistic one, even when all philosophical arguments fail. I'll cite just two for now, as I think the topics raised here are incendiary enough.

It's a horrible world out there:

Let's face it, the prospect of death wonderfully forces the mind to find pragmatic answers to all kinds of struggles. Firstly, it's important to see the difference between this fact and the simple emotion of fear : the awareness of the finitude of our lifetime is a stone cold fact that has nothing with our emotions. In other words, whether we fear death or not, we're still going to die. Secondly, it's common knowledge in philosophy that anything a man does is an attempt to "live in the moment" while they can do so, and that the full awareness of the finitude of our lives necessarily leads to a descent into absolute powerlessness, when the individual can longer find the inner momentum to move forward. Some psychologists speculated that all mental disorders are a form of weakness in one's character or mask of personality that makes them directly exposed to this awareness.

The late Ernest Becker in his award winning book The denial of death, brilliantly expressed this idea : "when the awareness dawns that has always been blotted out by frenetic, ready-made activity, we see the transmutation of repression redistilled, so to speak, and the fear of death emerges in pure essence. This is why people have psychotic breaks when repression no longer works".

But all people are also driven by the desire to stand out, to make a unique contribution to the world. An impossible dilemma : all your ready-made activity, everything you do, is the result of complex psychological mechanisms shielding you from the awareness of your own death, and at the same time, you want this same activity to be inherently valuable and cosmically important, you want it to transcend death.

Religion or theism offer a clear solution to the dilemma: there really is a Great being who guarantees that everything you do has cosmic justice, He created you so that you can accomplish it. All non-religious worldviews clearly fail or at best offer far less appealing alternatives to solve the problem.

The insoluble problem of sex and lust:

A woman constantly, and subconsciously, asks for assurance, that the man wants "me" and not "only my body", women are painfully conscious of the same dilemma above : they want to fully express their inner personality and, at the same time, are aware that all men ultimately only want the sexual act. And here it's important to note what I'll call a regress of symbolic lies to get sex : the evolving brain of the man managed to create a symbolic world of lies for the woman, he'll eventually convince her through an elaborate web of lies and sophisticated illusions that her beauty, or that the beauty of her personality, really transcends space and time, whereas his brain only aims the sexual act. What's commonly called love happens when this regress of lies becomes too sophisticated for the man, or the predator, himself : he starts to really believe that pursuing his loved one has some nobility and heroism in it, that his loved one is cosmically important, even with the full knowledge that, under naturalism, all her revered beauty is bound to decay and disappear irreversibly. The male predator eventually comes back to his senses and no longer feels the cosmic importance in his pursuit of lust, when the numbing feelings of arousal are gone.

This simple observation is enough to deal the blow to any prospect of feminism. Women can't be more than an object of lust and animal desire under naturalism. Religion, again, clearly has the upper hand here : the criterion for ultimate or other-worldly success has nothing to do with how dangerously seducing her body parts are, it's really her inner personality, the inner strength of her religious belief that ultimately determines her cosmic fate. Religion makes feminism possible as it inherently values women, whereas competing worldviews offer nothing in this regard.

Number 1. in a nutshell: ““theistic world views are better because they can be more psychologically comfortable for some people.” That’s a value judgement which is subjective, not an argument.

Number 2. is also a value judgement that has nothing to do with objective reality. Women can, and are more than just objects of lust all the time, every day. Your personal beliefs on the matter are, frankly, irrelevant. 



Got anything else?

[The Architect Of Fate]

To the OP, it's like saying that being high on drugs is superior to a normal mental state.  Yours is a mental fantasy as opposed to a chemical one.

Thomas Vinterberg just created a movie around that exact premise (specifically, the premise that people are born with a BAC .05 too low, which is based on a real [if quote-mined] paper by a real Norwegian psychiatrist)





And it doesn't take them long to decide "Why not go beyond that .05 BAC?" And, yes, experiment aside, this is apparently a realistic (if somewhat heightened) depiction of Danish drinking culture.

Also, your reading of Ernest Becker is shit. You argue this:

But all people are also driven by the desire to stand out, to make a unique contribution to the world. An impossible dilemma : all your ready-made activity, everything you do, is the result of complex psychological mechanisms shielding you from the awareness of your own death, and at the same time, you want this same activity to be inherently valuable and cosmically important, you want it to transcend death.

Not really much of a dilemma. All you have to do is create something that strikes such a chord with other people that they keep talking about it long after you're gone. You don't necessarily need a supreme being to help you do it.

And even that doesn't guarantee anything.



After all is said and done, Salieri put his trust in the Justice of a supreme being to help create beautiful music, and his name survives only as a mediocrity with a non-existent rivalry against a much more gifted composer. And whether or not God is real, or whether or not Mozart was all that devout, his immortality project has succeeded wildly.

“What we do now echoes in eternity.”

Marcus Aurelius