Apropos of nothing: I’ve always like the saying:
Atheism is a religion just as “OFF” is a channel on your TV set.
[some religious folks do claim that atheism – at least for some or many – is, ipso facto, a religion]
But there is something a touch odd about ‘practicing’ atheists, to me. That’s mostly – but not entirely – tongue-in-cheek.
I think @Mijin made an excellent point about topics that can more easily be discussed among atheists/agnostics/people truly open-minded about the subject.
Oh, and to the OP, existentialism may be of interest. Nietszche was a lifeline for me when I first came to terms with my atheism, as well as stuff like Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. There are other ways to find meaning in life.
The meaning’s in the thing itself. It doesn’t have to mean something beyond itself, except in its relations to others that have meaning in themselves.
And putting that meaning off to some version of God seems to me to have the same problem as putting off ‘why is there anything?’ to ‘God made it.’ Just as the latter question isn’t solved because it doesn’t answer ‘why is there God’, the former question isn’t solved by ‘God means it’ because why would God have meaning if a human, or a tree, or a civilization, or a planetary ecology can’t have meaning?
I can’t tell if that’s a response to me, but what you are saying is consistent with existentialism. There are all kinds of spiritual or philosophical frameworks that don’t require a belief in a higher power and that don’t assert some objective meaning.
Here’s a quote you might find helpful:
“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon
(For the record, I am religious.)
Adding Buddhism to Taoism would simply add a very thick layer of ceremonial pageantry and a parasitic priesthood
Does existentialism put a lot of emphasis on the relations between beings?
It puts a lot of emphasis on creating meaning in an absurd and meaningless world.
Frankl heavily emphasized acts of compassion to create meaning, not sure if that’s what you mean.
I’ve seen other folks’ replies to this…
Look: suppose the atheist’s feelings at that point are along the lines of “There is no God; I recognize why folks of my species have felt it comforting to believe there was one, like a protective parent one could turn to and receive comfort and help. In fact that’s why religions do exist, give or take some emperor’s additional interest in brainwashing and controlling the populace. Well yeah, anyway, I sure as shit feel like that now”
That isn’t “turning to God” in the sense that the atheist now “believes in God”.
On the other hand, let’s explore the atheist’s musings further. If there is a felt need to reach out, as if to communicate with an exterior consciousness, we could designate that felt need as “meaningless, pathetic, maladaptive, and irrelevant to real life”. But what if we don’t and at the same time don’t posit that YES there’s a God out there?
What if the urge or inclination or whatever you want to call it isn’t purposeless and meaningless and is part of some healthy mental process?
You don’t. Sorry, the die is cast, so to speak. Having said that, however, I must say that most atheists take refuge in “Humanism”, the belief that we, ultimately, are our own gods, and we will continue to move forward to attain our destiny.
Having observed humanity for my 38 years, I can only wish you luck in that endeavor.
Yes.
I was thinking about a recent time I was in my own foxhole. I was in a profound state of depression in the immediate aftermath of my son’s birth - not quite psychosis but not rational by any stretch. My thoughts were just insane. I thought I was going to end up in some news headline for jumping off a bridge or worse. I could not see a way out of my self - created hell. And you can bet in my darkest hour I appealed to “God,” even knowing God does not exist. It was either that or die.
But “God” did not save me. My husband did.
I don’t consider myself a hard atheist, more like an agnostic, but I’ve been known to pray for other people in big trouble a time or two. It can’t hurt, I say.
I don’t feel I have a need to create meaning; I feel that the meaning is there.
But I suppose in another sense that creating meaning is a thing that humans do; so maybe in me that function’s working well enough on other levels of the mind that the conscious mind doesn’t have to worry about it.
Some people really don’t worry about it. I think it’s easier if you’ve never been a believer. Or maybe some of us just overthink things. How hard do you find it to exist, generally? I find it quite difficult. That may also be a factor.
In Frankl’s case, he was in a Nazi concentration camp, having lost all of his loved ones and witnessed death on an unprecedented scale. He was interested in the mechanisms of survival - how people endure trauma. It’s actually quite fascinating how abstractly he approached the issue even when he was right in the middle of it - but that I suppose is how he created his own meaning. He wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in his head while toiling in the labor camps. I think any of us would find it a challenge to make meaning out of such a horrific experience.
That’s true enough. And I certainly don’t mean to criticize Frankl.
But, maybe on a different level – what makes it horrific? If there were really no meaning, there’d also be nothing to make it horrific. The horror and the evil involved is exactly because people’s lives, and pain, and sanity, do matter.
It seems to me that, for people who believe that all meaning is derived from a benevolent God, that belief would make such foxholes worse, not better. To know that enough of your erstwhile neighbors think that you and all your relatives should be tortured to death to cause that to happen is utterly terrible. To in addition believe that an all-powerful God allows and so must want this to happen and so in some sense that God must think it’s right? The awfulness of that is nearly beyond comprehension.
It makes me think of that meme where the dog is sitting in a burning house and thinking “this is fine”. Replace “fine” with “the best of all possible worlds”.
To be sure. There’s a reason that many survivors of such atrocities lose their faith in God. I lost my faith in God when bad things happened to me. It wasn’t so much personal bitterness as it was the realization of just how much suffering is part of the human condition. Or as my husband put it, “I would only believe in a god at least as compassionate as myself.”
If God is omnipotent and omnipresent then He certainly isn’t omnibenevolent. I have quite a few religious friends who are always quoting Bible verses and sharing their own exultations and every day it reminds me more and more of an abusive relationship. God is so good to us except when He’s not but that’s all part of His plan because He holds the power and tells us all the time how unworthy we are. I work for an agency that helps domestic violence survivors and you could pull that right out of the abuser’s power and control playbook.
Church is largely a social venue. Believers attend for the ritual aspect, to center themselves, I guess, to feel better about being flawed, and then to develop relationships with others, around the common experience. The social bonding aspect of religion seems to be quite powerful, and is difficult to replicate without that shared focus.
Of course, the biggest problem with belief systems is they give the believer that loophole: as long as I make myself right with the all-powerful, those vile things I do during the rest of the week will be forgiven. Atheism leaves the unbeliever out on the ledge, answerable only to themself, with no superfiend trickster to blame for their own misbehavior. The deity and its evil foe are darn handy tools for justifying vileness.
Nitpick- Not all religions offer blanket absolution. I’d say a bigger draw is that they say ‘the good will somehow be punished and the righteous somehow rewarded’.
I’d say it’s more than a nitpick. The italicized part of eschereal’s quote is a specific belief, not a characteristic of belief systems in general.