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

[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.