None of this captures the experience of love, or explains why people love the people they love, against all reason.
I’m sure I could come up with other examples but the crux of my argument is that believing irrational things is the stuff of daily life whether you’re religious or not. I do think there are matters of degree, though. Your average Trumper evangelical is several layers deep removed from reality, as opposed to most people, and I imagine many Dopers are probably separated only by a pretty thin layer. For a human.
And speaking of that, I’d consider a Christian Democrat closer to reality than an atheist Trumper.
Yes, you could do that, but the last two or three episodes of the first season and all of the second season of Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It was terrible.
Coming home from a cesspit of militant Satanic atheism*, I saw a new homily posted on the sign outside one of our local churches. It read “If Life Isn’t A Bed Of Roses, Remember Who Had To Wear The Thorns”.
If such a sentiment figures in sermons around the country in the wake of the Christian camp disaster, one hopes the message is a bit more sensitive.
Well, science isn’t great at handling qualia like “What does love feel like,” but it certainly can explain (at least in some part) why people are attracted to the people they’re attracted to - especially when it appears irrational or against their own interests. Quite a lot of papers have been written, for example, on the topic of why women stay in relationships with abusive men. Or why some people are attracted to the same gender, and so on.
Sufficiently advanced science could precisely explain “why people love the people they love”, just as it could explain explicitly why input x causes output y in any computing system. It is all in the layout of the circuits.
I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, 'wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? ’ So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.
Yeah. I think the StarTrek(V?) movie, the one where Spocks brother shows up and does some Vulcan mysticism on everyone, steals the Enterprise looking for his vision of God, covered it pretty well.
Once, I was trying to explain my atheist outlook (basically you live, you die, nothing afterwards) to my devout sister-in-law and her response was “But why would you want to believe something like that?”
I knew then that explaining the difference between wanting to believe vs. objective reality was futile.
It’s so hard not to want to believe a divine power controls things. When your close to your demise, especially.
I knew no saintly Jesus or angels would come save me at age 4 and I realized I would have to poke my fingers and take shots the rest of my days.
At 4 I never realized the great strides in tech, to where I now have a CGM.
But, no sky fairy did that. Science did that. And lots and lots of money.
I get it. I’d love to think an afterlife awaits me. Alas, this tiny speck of a life we have is all there is.
Of course faith has utility. My belief that this life is it also does. This being all I got means I really have to do my best with it. How I live my life and what impact it has on others now and the n the future means more because this is it. Also I don’t need to live in fear of some arbitrary judgement; I can instead just focus on making the best choices I can and not worry that my many mistakes and failings will tip some scale the wrong way.
Gee, wish I could relate to that last bit (religious trauma makes it difficult to shake the fear of Judgment), but the first bit for sure.
I’ve met some Christians with kind of a laissez-faire attitude to life, in essence, who cares if everything’s going to shit, I’m going to heaven!
Meanwhile I think I’m just kind of amazed to be here and breathing. I think meditation on death, and its finality, is important. I have a book called Japanese Death Poems which shows people processing their own mortality in a way that is radically different from Western ideas about it.
But probably one of my favorite stories was that of an old, wisened Zen monk.
