There's the the old saying: "Good people do good things; bad people do bad things; but, if you want good people to do really bad things: that takes RELIGION!!"
Ross Douthat deserves credit for leading the faithful and heretics to the culture war. There are millions of Americans capable of stringing words together in a coherent fashion equal or superior to Mr. Douthat. That there aren't millions of jobs allowing them the opportunity has little to do with one's belief system. The world would be better off if more people had jobs affording them the opportunity to live like a Time's columnist or even a factory worker from 1950's America that Mr. Douthat seems to recall as the best of times.
Perhaps the world would indeed be a better place for faith if the faithful were able to follow Christ's admonishment to live their faith instead of draw attention to it. I'm uncertain where the politician pretending to piety falls in the classification system offered by Mr. Douthat, but the reality of inflicting religious tenets on the true unbeliever seems not to be of great concern. Whether the pious justifies institutionalized religious bigotry or the heretic Randian objectivism someone loses on purpose. Even Paul Ryan recognizes the government shouldn't be in charge of picking winners and losers.
The problem isn't faith or a lack of faith. The problem is faith based culture warriors' demagoguery. When atheists institutionalize godlessness people will have reason to protest government intervention. The pity is culture warriors seem inclined to think their faith in god allows them the freedom to infringe on liberty.
As a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ I have found most religious institutions to be immoral. The worst sorts of immoral crimes have been committed in the service of institutional religion. Our nation has separation of church and state because our forefathers lived not too long after the ruinous religious wars in Europe, my ancestors being on several different sides. Calvin ordered disbelievers burned at the stake !!. Roman Catholic Priests believed in their own "special" status so much that they abused children and protected other priests who abused children. The institutional churches can't claim morality. Christ said: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there will I be also". I say: "watch out when there are four or five". Let each man and woman believe as each one wishes. Let us all treat each other with respect and honesty. Good enough for me.
Perhaps Ross can argue against Asmurfism - the refusal to believe that there are Smurfs. Remember, as with God, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!
It's hard to see how any of us, if we're truthful, can avoid finding ourselves on a spectrum with the churchgoing skeptic, who "practice[s] without assent, to speak the words without full belief." I regularly find myself saying, "This all resonates with me and my experience—well, except for THAT part." This thought often prompts a scriptural work-around for the self described literalist, satisfying the need to feel absolutely certain.
I'm content to feel reliably certain, comfortably certain, reasonably certain, and, when all else fails, calmly uncertain the more deeply my Christian spirituality and experience take me. Since my faith is not exclusively propositional, I increasingly find my certitude depends less on an unassailable theology and more from experiencing my life as guided and sustained in a vessel formed and borne by Jesus Christ, as he's become real for me.
Objective certainty is an idol, a false deity, a seduction. All my experience of Jesus Christ, however else I have it, cannot escape the workings of my subjective imagination (credit here to Garrett Green). I suspect believers will not reach an honest and coherent understanding of their faith until they embrace their subjectivity as part of the gift. And nonbelievers will have nothing valuable to say to us, or themselves, about faith until they both respect the role of the believer's subjective imagination and reckon with how much their own imagination is embedded is their supposed reality based convictions.
You are limiting your debate with atheists to those who are overthinking the whole issue, just as you are.
There are quite a few atheists who NEVER GIVE IT A THOUGHT AT ALL!!! They simply don't believe in God just as they don't believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. There is no need for such people to take the debate anywhere further than that.
As for me, I think the Golden Rule is a complete moral philosophy in and of itself. Behave the way you want the world you live in to actually be. That way you can look yourself in the mirror and feel good about what you see. Hypocrisy is bad and honesty is good! Even when invisible beings with superpowers aren't watching!
Every so often my wife and I have a discussion that goes something like the following.
Me. why do people believe in something so primitive that in this day and age is actually counter productive to the advancement of humankind? Religion was useful in binding primitive societies together by encoding pre-existing moral precepts that kept folks from killing each other, like not sleeping with your friend's wife. Now it's like a useless social appendage.
She. But you don't understand, some people NEED to believe in a god. It fulfills some deep seated emotional or psychological imperative.
Me. They think they need a god because their parents and clergy convinced them that they do from day 1. Or should I say, scared the bejeebers into believing in a god.
She. And that's because parents et al. have that need.
Me. But that's a vicious cycle. If parents told their children to thoroughly enjoy their time on earth because it's limited, to do good by our neighbors and try to improve the world we live in, to be thankful that evolution brought us to a point where we are aware of time and our place in the cosmos, to appreciate and seek spirituality in the incredible abundance and beauty of life on a coral reef or marvel at the stars on a late autumn clear night sky, they wouldn't need the supernatural and they wouldn't pass religious hokum onto the next generation.
She. You don't understand. They'd still need god[s].
Wow, Ross you are really smart, or, at least, well read. Not necessarily right, but really well read. Something like David Brooks, who also reads a lot of books. But since nobody comes back from the beyond to tell us, we really can't know.
Fine column, Ross! I would put the Faith/coherent world-picture dynamic like this: First the would-be believer finds something in his or her life and heart which cries out for God. This could be Auden, confronting Naziism. Or say, a father whose deepest heart is unable to believe that his dead son is just utterly gone, annihilated by death. Next comes the critical part, where the religious searching comes in. Also, for believers, where the mystery of divine grace comes in. This critical step is where a deep decision has to be made, a saying yes or no to the yearning for a God to make some kind of sense of this. Following Sartre, we can decide the heart's longing for God is an aspiration vaine, an empty hope for a God who doesn't exist. This decision involves not just saying no to God, but also to something very deep in me--a decision that something deep in me is wrong, delusional, made to be frustrated. I'll give this to Sartre: at least he saw how tragic is the death of God, unlike those who can take the loss lightly!
Or the opposite decision can be made, in the mysterious dance of divine grace and the human condition: to choose God (or wasn't it first God who choose me?) in Faith, and at the same time also to say yes to my deepest self--that it is not an aspiration vaine. Pace some of Christianity's critics, I believe choosing God is not radically saying no to myself, but just the opposite.
BTW- if religion leads to morality I guess Crusaders slaughtering the citizens of the middle east and suicide bombers abiding by jihad are moral. Belief in God and religion do not go hand in hand, nor does being part of a religion and abiding by its teaching make you moral. The reality is that if you follow the rules of your religion you are essentially following orders. Just like the subjects of psych experiments that kept turning up the voltage on the subjects answering questions wrong did. Just following orders is NOT moral nor does it constitute morality. Morality can only exist when a person individually decides to do the right thing. Anything else is just rote learning showing no ethical or moral guidance. I would say that no one truly following a religion can ever truly say they are acting morally, unless they are acting solely out of their own heart and mind with no preacher, priest, rabbi, mullah, guru influencing them.
I am an old atheist who finds the new atheism very liberating. Now it is ok to say what I've always thought. Which is: I see no more evidence of or need for or value in Jesus/Jehovah than I do Zeus, Baal, Thor or the angel Moroni. Ross usually is trying to answer disbelief with an argument that things were so much better when most people believed. When that fails to convince, he retreats here to theology. As if the deep study of false beliefs renders them more plausible.
the ruins of a thousand temples of a thousand gods lie in the dust all around the world yet you believe the your god and your temples and your book are the truth?
There is no limit to what people might or might not believe. Some beliefs are said to be rational, others deeply irrational. But to believe or not to believe in God is totally irrational.
If God exists, he/she is infinitely greater than us, hence we are is an infinitely weak position to speculate regarding his/her existence.
If God does not exist, that is all very well, but exactly how does a mere mortal propose to prove that this is true?
Why not just accept that we are a deeply irrational species? We do our best to figure out which end is up, but we fail miserably and often. We should get over ourselves. It isn't all that long ago that Galileo got into all that trouble due to the inability of Roman society to accept that the Earth moved around the Sun.
This article and, with only a few exceptions, the comments leave me almost bedazzled at the quality of reflection on these ontological questions. I have been depressed for years by the specter of Jay Leno's street interviews ("Jay Walking") which reveal America as populated by clueless and indifferent organisms wandering through their conceptual vacuum, from one appetite to the next. This exchange gives me great cheer.
Ross, an internally consistent ideology does NOT necessarily equal congruence with reality. Your slinging of "isms" against my mind does not guarantee that ANY of them will stick.
Since I am rude enough to disagree even when we're mostly in agreement (to preempt end-runs based on those barely-accepted isms) I'll continue to pigeonhole you as Jesuitical.
Here is a quote from the Great Atheist Philosopher Bertrand Russell:
"There are many questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true."
Russell realized that science could not answer these questions decisively--that NONE of these answers, including his own Atheist answers, could be accepted as demonstrably true. Such humility is rarely present in today's militant atheism. Dawkins once said in this newspaper that he believed but could not prove atheism was true. Would that he had remembered that, before he titled his book "the God Delusion".
If belief in God led to a positive moral world view, the world would look a whole lot different. I'll just pick on the morality of European Christianity which gave us, among other things, the Crusades, the Inquisition, endless wars between different sects, the Irish laundries, the eradication of Native Americans throughout North and South America, religious justifications for slavery and segregation, multiple other forms of racism, anti-semitism and Adolph Hitler. The list goes on and on and is nowhere close to ending.
Believe it or not (sorry for the pun) I do believe that religion can impart some good values but you can't responsibly claim that good without acknowledging the centrality of the evil that has come with Christianity and many other religions. Religion has a lot to answer for. Morality needs no connection to religion to be valid.
Morality comes from the same place in the human heart as God. It comes from the impulse to survive and propagate--that which is good is that which aids in survival and propagation; that which impedes it, is evil. And the inquiry is subjective, from the point of view of the creature striving to survive and propagate. This is as true for a human being as it is for a chimpanzee, a dog, a bee, or a flower. God arises because humans have the unique capacity to see past the immediate and temporal and can intentionally choose that which they know impairs their own survival and propagation imperatives (e.g., humans can commit suicide). The idea of God was created by humans to aid in wrestling the demons in our soul to ensure we do what is in our enlightened self-interest to do.
Man is an animal with the unique ability to see outside his temporal and spatial immediacies. But still, he is an animal. His ideas of morality and God and meaning and purpose arose from his material being, and his material being is innately devoted to its continuation in space and time so far as it is able, just like any other animal.
Any other way of looking at things just yields a confused mess, like these two articles of Douthat attest.
It is interesting to watch the evolution of those who have invested so much time, energy and intellect for their specific mythology, to watch the begginings of them letting it all go; evolving. They do seem to pass through predictable steps. I've been reading Ross for a while, and just an armchair analysis, I have thought for a while now that Ross, like many who are starting to lose their faith, must publically protest and defend the undefensible. Then, one day, they finally just let it all go and admit that they no longer are among the faithful.
To ponder the meaning life would make necessary some higher entity creating and placing you here. So, like it or not, many of us contend that their is no meaning of life; a purpose yes, to forward our genes on to the next. But, no real meaning. As so many others here have said very well, it doesn't make our lives empty or devoid of morality.
And 'new atheist', pretty much the same as the old. If I may correct you and others, it is not a belief that there is no God. It is a lack of belief in a God. Big difference. One still requires a type of faith, the other, intellect. It is that the 'new atheists' are more likely to require the faithful to defend their faith. Quite often, when they do try, they suddenly realize the absurdity of it all.
Over time, the temporary experience of that infinite field of consciousness that a meditator has during meditation becomes permanent. When that is achieved, the individual experiences that within their individual consciousness 24 hours a day, regardless of whether they are awake, asleep or dreaming. It is a field of bliss that is within them all day and all night long. This field of consciousness happens to be the home of the Laws of Nature and one gains access to them because they are within them. This allows the individual to command or use the Laws to do things that one not in that state can do. This state is called Unity Consciousness, moksha, yoga and Enlightenment. One in that state is a yogi and they have the ability to do things that are called miracles. The abilities that yogis have are listed in the book The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. They include all of the things Jesus did and more. Jesus was a yogi. He lived in India for about 15 years as a student of a Vedic master. The complete knowledge of life in in the Vedas, which are thousands of years older than any religion.
Intelligence is always a characteristic of consciousness. It is this consciousness that is the cause of the universe and the fact that humans have consciousness. If this consciousness didn't exist, humans would not have consciousness because the human brain does not create or generate consciousness. If that was true the brains of bees, flies, mosquitoes, etc., all of which are very tiny, would have to do the same thing. That's absurd. So how is it that humans have consciousness? Because nothing exists except consciousness and the brain is partaking of this infinite field of universal consciousness. Is there any way to prove this? Yes. There are many published studies that prove that when someone practices the Transcendental Meditation technique, which the brain is designed to do, the individual experiences that infinite field of consciousness within their own and is the basis for their own consciousness. There are 7 states of consciousness, 4 more beyond waking, dreaming and sleeping and they are developed by meditating.
I am going to provide knowledge to readers that will help them realize that there is a deity or being that is responsible for the existence of the universe and everything about humans including our consciousness. Everything here can be verified by doing the necessary research. I realize that there are some people who will deny any proof by saying they don't believe any proof and some of them won't even look at it and some can't think logically or understand science and some just reject science for some reason, even though they use cars, telephones, computers, TVs, etc., all of which are the result of science The argument starts by recognizing that there is order in the universe. Order requires intelligence. Order is not accidental or inconsistent, sometimes on and sometimes off.
A writer wannabe. I am interested in writing short stories. I regard myself primarily as a poet. I love the arts. I am passionate about preserving the territorial integrity of Vietnam against the current Chinese quiet take-over.
There's the the old saying: "Good people do good things; bad people do bad things; but, if you want good people to do really bad things: that takes RELIGION!!"
Ross Douthat deserves credit for leading the faithful and heretics to the culture war. There are millions of Americans capable of stringing words together in a coherent fashion equal or superior to Mr. Douthat. That there aren't millions of jobs allowing them the opportunity has little to do with one's belief system. The world would be better off if more people had jobs affording them the opportunity to live like a Time's columnist or even a factory worker from 1950's America that Mr. Douthat seems to recall as the best of times.
Perhaps the world would indeed be a better place for faith if the faithful were able to follow Christ's admonishment to live their faith instead of draw attention to it. I'm uncertain where the politician pretending to piety falls in the classification system offered by Mr. Douthat, but the reality of inflicting religious tenets on the true unbeliever seems not to be of great concern. Whether the pious justifies institutionalized religious bigotry or the heretic Randian objectivism someone loses on purpose. Even Paul Ryan recognizes the government shouldn't be in charge of picking winners and losers.
The problem isn't faith or a lack of faith. The problem is faith based culture warriors' demagoguery. When atheists institutionalize godlessness people will have reason to protest government intervention. The pity is culture warriors seem inclined to think their faith in god allows them the freedom to infringe on liberty.
As a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ I have found most religious institutions to be immoral. The worst sorts of immoral crimes have been committed in the service of institutional religion. Our nation has separation of church and state because our forefathers lived not too long after the ruinous religious wars in Europe, my ancestors being on several different sides. Calvin ordered disbelievers burned at the stake !!. Roman Catholic Priests believed in their own "special" status so much that they abused children and protected other priests who abused children. The institutional churches can't claim morality. Christ said: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there will I be also". I say: "watch out when there are four or five". Let each man and woman believe as each one wishes. Let us all treat each other with respect and honesty. Good enough for me.
Perhaps Ross can argue against Asmurfism - the refusal to believe that there are Smurfs. Remember, as with God, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!
It's hard to see how any of us, if we're truthful, can avoid finding ourselves on a spectrum with the churchgoing skeptic, who "practice[s] without assent, to speak the words without full belief." I regularly find myself saying, "This all resonates with me and my experience—well, except for THAT part." This thought often prompts a scriptural work-around for the self described literalist, satisfying the need to feel absolutely certain.
I'm content to feel reliably certain, comfortably certain, reasonably certain, and, when all else fails, calmly uncertain the more deeply my Christian spirituality and experience take me. Since my faith is not exclusively propositional, I increasingly find my certitude depends less on an unassailable theology and more from experiencing my life as guided and sustained in a vessel formed and borne by Jesus Christ, as he's become real for me.
Objective certainty is an idol, a false deity, a seduction. All my experience of Jesus Christ, however else I have it, cannot escape the workings of my subjective imagination (credit here to Garrett Green). I suspect believers will not reach an honest and coherent understanding of their faith until they embrace their subjectivity as part of the gift. And nonbelievers will have nothing valuable to say to us, or themselves, about faith until they both respect the role of the believer's subjective imagination and reckon with how much their own imagination is embedded is their supposed reality based convictions.
You are limiting your debate with atheists to those who are overthinking the whole issue, just as you are.
There are quite a few atheists who NEVER GIVE IT A THOUGHT AT ALL!!! They simply don't believe in God just as they don't believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. There is no need for such people to take the debate anywhere further than that.
As for me, I think the Golden Rule is a complete moral philosophy in and of itself. Behave the way you want the world you live in to actually be. That way you can look yourself in the mirror and feel good about what you see. Hypocrisy is bad and honesty is good! Even when invisible beings with superpowers aren't watching!
Every so often my wife and I have a discussion that goes something like the following.
Me. why do people believe in something so primitive that in this day and age is actually counter productive to the advancement of humankind? Religion was useful in binding primitive societies together by encoding pre-existing moral precepts that kept folks from killing each other, like not sleeping with your friend's wife. Now it's like a useless social appendage.
She. But you don't understand, some people NEED to believe in a god. It fulfills some deep seated emotional or psychological imperative.
Me. They think they need a god because their parents and clergy convinced them that they do from day 1. Or should I say, scared the bejeebers into believing in a god.
She. And that's because parents et al. have that need.
Me. But that's a vicious cycle. If parents told their children to thoroughly enjoy their time on earth because it's limited, to do good by our neighbors and try to improve the world we live in, to be thankful that evolution brought us to a point where we are aware of time and our place in the cosmos, to appreciate and seek spirituality in the incredible abundance and beauty of life on a coral reef or marvel at the stars on a late autumn clear night sky, they wouldn't need the supernatural and they wouldn't pass religious hokum onto the next generation.
She. You don't understand. They'd still need god[s].
End of discussion.
Wow, Ross you are really smart, or, at least, well read. Not necessarily right, but really well read. Something like David Brooks, who also reads a lot of books. But since nobody comes back from the beyond to tell us, we really can't know.
Fine column, Ross! I would put the Faith/coherent world-picture dynamic like this: First the would-be believer finds something in his or her life and heart which cries out for God. This could be Auden, confronting Naziism. Or say, a father whose deepest heart is unable to believe that his dead son is just utterly gone, annihilated by death. Next comes the critical part, where the religious searching comes in. Also, for believers, where the mystery of divine grace comes in. This critical step is where a deep decision has to be made, a saying yes or no to the yearning for a God to make some kind of sense of this. Following Sartre, we can decide the heart's longing for God is an aspiration vaine, an empty hope for a God who doesn't exist. This decision involves not just saying no to God, but also to something very deep in me--a decision that something deep in me is wrong, delusional, made to be frustrated. I'll give this to Sartre: at least he saw how tragic is the death of God, unlike those who can take the loss lightly!
Or the opposite decision can be made, in the mysterious dance of divine grace and the human condition: to choose God (or wasn't it first God who choose me?) in Faith, and at the same time also to say yes to my deepest self--that it is not an aspiration vaine. Pace some of Christianity's critics, I believe choosing God is not radically saying no to myself, but just the opposite.
BTW- if religion leads to morality I guess Crusaders slaughtering the citizens of the middle east and suicide bombers abiding by jihad are moral.
Belief in God and religion do not go hand in hand, nor does being part of a religion and abiding by its teaching make you moral.
The reality is that if you follow the rules of your religion you are essentially following orders. Just like the subjects of psych experiments that kept turning up the voltage on the subjects answering questions wrong did.
Just following orders is NOT moral nor does it constitute morality.
Morality can only exist when a person individually decides to do the right thing. Anything else is just rote learning showing no ethical or moral guidance.
I would say that no one truly following a religion can ever truly say they are acting morally, unless they are acting solely out of their own heart and mind with no preacher, priest, rabbi, mullah, guru influencing them.
I am an old atheist who finds the new atheism very liberating. Now it is ok to say what I've always thought.
Which is: I see no more evidence of or need for or value in Jesus/Jehovah than I do Zeus, Baal, Thor or the angel Moroni.
Ross usually is trying to answer disbelief with an argument that things were so much better when most people believed. When that fails to convince, he retreats here to theology. As if the deep study of false beliefs renders them more plausible.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”-C.H.
the ruins of a thousand temples of a thousand gods lie in the dust all around the world yet you believe the your god and your temples and your book are the truth?
There is no limit to what people might or might not believe. Some beliefs are said to be rational, others deeply irrational. But to believe or not to believe in God is totally irrational.
If God exists, he/she is infinitely greater than us, hence we are is an infinitely weak position to speculate regarding his/her existence.
If God does not exist, that is all very well, but exactly how does a mere mortal propose to prove that this is true?
Why not just accept that we are a deeply irrational species? We do our best to figure out which end is up, but we fail miserably and often. We should get over ourselves. It isn't all that long ago that Galileo got into all that trouble due to the inability of Roman society to accept that the Earth moved around the Sun.
This article and, with only a few exceptions, the comments leave me almost bedazzled at the quality of reflection on these ontological questions. I have been depressed for years by the specter of Jay Leno's street interviews ("Jay Walking") which reveal America as populated by clueless and indifferent organisms wandering through their conceptual vacuum, from one appetite to the next. This exchange gives me great cheer.
Ross, an internally consistent ideology does NOT necessarily equal congruence with reality. Your slinging of "isms" against my mind does not guarantee that ANY of them will stick.
Since I am rude enough to disagree even when we're mostly in agreement (to preempt end-runs based on those barely-accepted isms) I'll continue to pigeonhole you as Jesuitical.
Here is a quote from the Great Atheist Philosopher Bertrand Russell:
"There are many questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true."
Russell realized that science could not answer these questions decisively--that NONE of these answers, including his own Atheist answers, could be accepted as demonstrably true. Such humility is rarely present in today's militant atheism. Dawkins once said in this newspaper that he believed but could not prove atheism was true. Would that he had remembered that, before he titled his book "the God Delusion".
Don't listen to them, Ross. Better to continue praising the empty cosmos than to assault us with your pro-Republican political strategies and rants.
If belief in God led to a positive moral world view, the world would look a whole lot different. I'll just pick on the morality of European Christianity which gave us, among other things, the Crusades, the Inquisition, endless wars between different sects, the Irish laundries, the eradication of Native Americans throughout North and South America, religious justifications for slavery and segregation, multiple other forms of racism, anti-semitism and Adolph Hitler. The list goes on and on and is nowhere close to ending.
Believe it or not (sorry for the pun) I do believe that religion can impart some good values but you can't responsibly claim that good without acknowledging the centrality of the evil that has come with Christianity and many other religions. Religion has a lot to answer for. Morality needs no connection to religion to be valid.
Morality comes from the same place in the human heart as God. It comes from the impulse to survive and propagate--that which is good is that which aids in survival and propagation; that which impedes it, is evil. And the inquiry is subjective, from the point of view of the creature striving to survive and propagate. This is as true for a human being as it is for a chimpanzee, a dog, a bee, or a flower. God arises because humans have the unique capacity to see past the immediate and temporal and can intentionally choose that which they know impairs their own survival and propagation imperatives (e.g., humans can commit suicide). The idea of God was created by humans to aid in wrestling the demons in our soul to ensure we do what is in our enlightened self-interest to do.
Man is an animal with the unique ability to see outside his temporal and spatial immediacies. But still, he is an animal. His ideas of morality and God and meaning and purpose arose from his material being, and his material being is innately devoted to its continuation in space and time so far as it is able, just like any other animal.
Any other way of looking at things just yields a confused mess, like these two articles of Douthat attest.
It is interesting to watch the evolution of those who have invested so much time, energy and intellect for their specific mythology, to watch the begginings of them letting it all go; evolving. They do seem to pass through predictable steps. I've been reading Ross for a while, and just an armchair analysis, I have thought for a while now that Ross, like many who are starting to lose their faith, must publically protest and defend the undefensible. Then, one day, they finally just let it all go and admit that they no longer are among the faithful.
To ponder the meaning life would make necessary some higher entity creating and placing you here. So, like it or not, many of us contend that their is no meaning of life; a purpose yes, to forward our genes on to the next. But, no real meaning. As so many others here have said very well, it doesn't make our lives empty or devoid of morality.
And 'new atheist', pretty much the same as the old. If I may correct you and others, it is not a belief that there is no God. It is a lack of belief in a God. Big difference. One still requires a type of faith, the other, intellect. It is that the 'new atheists' are more likely to require the faithful to defend their faith. Quite often, when they do try, they suddenly realize the absurdity of it all.
Here's wishing you a soft landing Ross.
Coherence is overrated, and valued much more highly as an attribute of systems of thought theoretically than it is in practice.
Over time, the temporary experience of that infinite field of consciousness that a meditator has during meditation becomes permanent. When that is achieved, the individual experiences that within their individual consciousness 24 hours a day, regardless of whether they are awake, asleep or dreaming. It is a field of bliss that is within them all day and all night long. This field of consciousness happens to be the home of the Laws of Nature and one gains access to them because they are within them. This allows the individual to command or use the Laws to do things that one not in that state can do. This state is called Unity Consciousness, moksha, yoga and Enlightenment. One in that state is a yogi and they have the ability to do things that are called miracles. The abilities that yogis have are listed in the book The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. They include all of the things Jesus did and more. Jesus was a yogi. He lived in India for about 15 years as a student of a Vedic master. The complete knowledge of life in in the Vedas, which are thousands of years older than any religion.
Intelligence is always a characteristic of consciousness. It is this consciousness that is the cause of the universe and the fact that humans have consciousness. If this consciousness didn't exist, humans would not have consciousness because the human brain does not create or generate consciousness. If that was true the brains of bees, flies, mosquitoes, etc., all of which are very tiny, would have to do the same thing. That's absurd. So how is it that humans have consciousness? Because nothing exists except consciousness and the brain is partaking of this infinite field of universal consciousness. Is there any way to prove this? Yes. There are many published studies that prove that when someone practices the Transcendental Meditation technique, which the brain is designed to do, the individual experiences that infinite field of consciousness within their own and is the basis for their own consciousness. There are 7 states of consciousness, 4 more beyond waking, dreaming and sleeping and they are developed by meditating.
I am going to provide knowledge to readers that will help them realize that there is a deity or being that is responsible for the existence of the universe and everything about humans including our consciousness. Everything here can be verified by doing the necessary research. I realize that there are some people who will deny any proof by saying they don't believe any proof and some of them won't even look at it and some can't think logically or understand science and some just reject science for some reason, even though they use cars, telephones, computers, TVs, etc., all of which are the result of science The argument starts by recognizing that there is order in the universe. Order requires intelligence. Order is not accidental or inconsistent, sometimes on and sometimes off.