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

[The Architect Of Fate]

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.” 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?

Indeed I find nothing comforting in theism, by contrast, to not theism and indeed his regressive ideals are not objective nor all that valuable.

[Angrboda]

Boru beat me to the punch on the second, upon which I'll simply elaborate that your caricature of human nature and the value of women to men is simply erroneous. Evolution desires not just that men and women have sex but that they also conspire to create an environment where the long maturing animals that our children are may prosper. Evolution isn't about sex. It's about differential survival. You simply show yourself once again to babble profusely about things you lack the intelligence or education to speak competently about.

As to the first, even if your speculations are valid, and I don't think they are, then religion becomes nothing more than yet another inauthentic passtime which the religious use to frenetically avoid the fact of their own mortality. Why you think the illusions of religion are superior to any other illusion used to forestall this moment of crisis that you postulate you leave unanswered. As is well known, it doesn't appear to be working for a great many people, as evidenced by the growing body of 'nones' and the fact that religious population numbers seem to only highlight religion when the religious are outbreeding the nonreligious, rather than any success as a distractional strategy in and of itself. Where birth rates are controlled for, religion appears to be the inferior solution to this 'problem'.

[Jehanne]

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.

In all fairness to Saleri, his music is still performed and he has had a viable (yet small, as compared to Mozart) following long before Amadeus.  Most composers' music dies with them, and so, Saleri's compositions are, by any standard, still a "hit".  Even though they were only a one-hit wonder, Katrina & The Waves will be remembered long after their bodies have decomposed.

[Foxaèr]

The failure of theism is evident in its reliance on faith.

[Fake Messiah]

The truth is that theism is the superficial one and that leads to hate.

[Astreja]

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.

And if there is no such "Great being," you're just hoping for and wishing for cosmic justice but will not receive it. I prefer to find what justice I can in the real world.

A woman constantly, and subconsciously, asks for assurance, that the man wants "me" and not "only my body"...

Nope. My self-worth is independent of whether or not any other being (male or female) "wants" me. I haven't been in a relationship for years, and vastly prefer things this way.

[Deesse23]

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.

Bolding mine

I see only one single reason to prefer theism over athesm: The truth content of its proposition(s). In general i evaluate all my beliefs by trying to figure out if they are true.
In relation to this let me ask you: Do you care if any your beliefs are true?

I am never going to believe the bus will be there in 5min (instead of 30min, as written on the schedule), just because i think it will make me (or anyone else) feel better.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Indeed this whole line of reasoning is a borderline argument from consequence......

[Jehanne]

Do you care if any your beliefs are true?

This is why the anti-abortion folks lost in Kansas -- faith is a should v. ought, "pro-life" being a moral expression as opposed to the nitty-gritty of public policy, which costs money with real-world consequences.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

More on Root’s second point:

The notion that men ultimately want ONLY sex out of a relationship is as dead wrong as the idea that women ALWAYS want more than sex.

I’ve been in lot of relationships, some of which were based only on sex (the ‘fuck buddy’ paradigm) and others which were purely platonic. To this day, some of my best mates are women I have no desire to have sex with.

As described by Root, male-female relationships viewed through his theistic lens are demeaning to both men and women.

But theism is somehow ‘better’.

Boru