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

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I wish you lot would leave my new boyfriend alone (if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it’s pretty clear that he wuvs me).

Boru

[Objectivist]

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.

OMG, how is this so hard to understand?  Atheism is not a worldview.  It is a concept that identifies those people who hold no god belief.  There's nothing for it to fail at.  It's like saying that the concept 'ham'  or 'tennis' is a failure.  Failure at what?  Blank out.  

Why would answering why you "really believe"  be difficult at all?  It could only be difficult if you don't know why you believe or you are afraid to say why you really believe.  I have no trouble at all stating why I don't believe in detail.  If your reasons for believing are really rational then what's the fuss?

[LinuxGal]

My point is that the argument from design is incapable of proving its conclusion. You are, in essence, arguing the contrapositive

[quote pid='2124156' dateline='1667753370']

And your definition is plainly ridiculous. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. That something is undetectable just means we can't detect it, and that empirical observation isn't enough to justify the assertion that it exists.

But there are times when absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence. For example, if I fail to detect an adult african elephant in my room, I can conclude that there is no adult african elephant in my room. Why? Because if such an elephant existed in my room, I would be guaranteed to detect it. So, in that case, absence of evidence *is* indeed evidence of absence.

But going deeper, if the detection is impossible even in principle, what does it even mean to say that something exists? I could then equally well argue that undetectable unicorns exist in my room. Who is to say otherwise?

if it is silly to say that there are undetectable unicorns in my room, then it is equally silly to say that anything else that it truly undetectable can be said to exist.
[/quote]

[LinuxGal]

My point is that the argument from design is incapable of proving its conclusion. You are, in essence, arguing the contrapositive.

[The Grand Nudger]

There isn't actually any dispute over whether absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It is. The maxim, is that absence of evidence is not proof of absence.

Things which are not in evidence, are evidently non-present, it's a tautology.

[UniversesBoss]

Fatalism slicing your thread.

[Anomalocaris]

My point is that the argument from design is incapable of proving its conclusion. You are, in essence, arguing the contrapositive

[quote pid='2124156' dateline='1667753370']

And your definition is plainly ridiculous. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. That something is undetectable just means we can't detect it, and that empirical observation isn't enough to justify the assertion that it exists.

But there are times when absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence. For example, if I fail to detect an adult african elephant in my room, I can conclude that there is no adult african elephant in my room. Why? Because if such an elephant existed in my room, I would be guaranteed to detect it. So, in that case, absence of evidence *is* indeed evidence of absence.

But going deeper, if the detection is impossible even in principle, what does it even mean to say that something exists? I could then equally well argue that undetectable unicorns exist in my room. Who is to say otherwise?

if it is silly to say that there are undetectable unicorns in my room, then it is equally silly to say that anything else that it truly undetectable can be said to exist.

[/quote]




Whether absence of evidence constitutes evidence of absence depends entirely on whether the thing in question is sufficiently well defined such that it would be possible to establish what unambiguous and detectable evidence its presence must inescapably leave.

[LinuxGal]

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".

[LinuxGal]

As a biological male and as a transgender female, I like modest tees with a full, midcalf skirt and sandals.  I also wear "boob pads" so that my tits do not show through my tee, along with modest concealer makeup.  Am I being immodest?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

As a biological male and as a transgender female, I like modest tees with a full, midcalf skirt and sandals.  I also wear "boob pads" so that my tits do not show through my tee, along with modest concealer makeup.  Am I being immodest?

Hate when that happens.

Boru