Reply
Mon 26 May, 2014 03:45 am
Context:
Your own books, your prestige in Oxford, everything you
love in life, and have ever achieved, are an exercise in
total futility . . . Camus' question-challenge becomes
inescapable: Why don't we all commit suicide? Indeed,
your world view has that sort of effect on students and
many others . . . that we all evolved by blind chance, from
nothing, and return to nothing. Even if religion were not
More context:
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking
after himself. Bear in mind, through all this, that the Editor being
abused and threatened so viciously is a gentle and charming young
woman.
Perhaps because I don't live in America, most of my hate mail
is not quite in the same league, but nor does it display to
advantage the charity for which the founder of Christianity was
notable. The following, dated May 2005, from a British medical
doctor, while it is certainly hateful, strikes me as more tormented
than nasty, and reveals how the whole issue of morality is a deep
wellspring of hostility towards atheism. After some preliminary
paragraphs excoriating evolution (and sarcastically asking
whether a 'Negro' is 'still in the process of evolving'), insulting
Darwin personally, misquoting Huxley as an anti-evolutionist, and
encouraging me to read a book (I have read it) which argues that
the world is only eight thousand years old (can he really be a
doctor?) he concludes:
Your own books, your prestige in Oxford, everything you
love in life, and have ever achieved, are an exercise in
total futility . . . Camus' question-challenge becomes
inescapable: Why don't we all commit suicide? Indeed,
your world view has that sort of effect on students and
many others . . . that we all evolved by blind chance, from
nothing, and return to nothing. Even if religion were not
true, it is better, much, much better, to believe a noble
myth, like Plato's, if it leads to peace of mind while we
live. But your world view leads to anxiety, drug addiction,
violence, nihilism, hedonism, Frankenstein science, and
hell on earth, and World War III... I wonder how happy
you are in your personal relationships? Divorced?
Widowed? Gay? Those like you are never happy, or they
would not try so hard to prove there is no happiness nor
meaning in anything.
@oristarA,
He dares you to keep on living.
@contrex,
contrex wrote:
From your own post:
Quote:Context:
Your own books, your prestige in Oxford, everything you
love in life, and have ever achieved, are an exercise in
total futility . . . Camus' question-challenge becomes
inescapable: Why don't we all commit suicide? Indeed,
your world view has that sort of effect on students and
many others . . . that we all evolved by blind chance, from
nothing, and return to nothing. Even if religion were not
Thanks.
Can we just reduce Camus' question-challenge to Camus' challenge?
@oristarA,
oristarA wrote:
Can we just reduce Camus' question-challenge to Camus' challenge?
Why? It has a compound nature, being both a question and a challenge, thus wholly deserving of the hyphenated form used.