patiodog wrote-
Quote:Oh how do I disagree with that.
Did you omit either a "?" or a "!" ? Is it a straightforward guileless question or a raised eyebrow. Should it read-
Quote:Oh how I disagree with that ! or Oh how I do disagree with that.!!
which is the more likely to me. but it could mean-
Quote:Oh-I feel like disagreeing with that but how do I go about it because as an atheist I don't like someone saying I'm anti science, anti art and anti progress because I'm for those things.
.
But patiodog is one in 300 million and may well be able to deal with the meaninglessness of everything which atheism necessarily entails. It goes way beyond finding out there is no Father Christmas. It goes to finding out there is no anything. No State, no Church and no Family. Just the self face to face with the other and only the pleasure/pain principle for guidance. La Mettrie's position and more emphatically De Sade's. Minderbinder's too. And Jokerman. Which have been mentioned on here but well steered clear of by the critical thinkers.
Evolution does imply that anything which gives pleasure is right. Ordained even. Sanctified by scientific truth. Mailer has it somewhere. If it feels right it is right or if you're balling a different chick every night you are superior scientifically and God must approve of you. That sort of thing. You could turn it round of course.
I have known a number of atheistic scientists and as they get older they get more and more couldn't care less. Two drank themselves to death in their fifties. Dylan has it- "Nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts." Which is from before SAVED. Joyce has it in Stephen Dedalus. Flaubert is acidic. He scoffs at every known religious belief on one page of Salammbo but not at the gap.
He gets poetic on the gap. Warhol has it in the late self portraits. He's a beast. Or you the viewer are to be precise.
What I think you are ignoring pd is the emotional need to fill the gap. You will notice that in Sci-Fi movies the scientific atheist is always portrayed as emotionless. The need exists. It isn't scientific to deny it.
The need will be catered for.
Wouldn't a capitalist society approve of the need being catered for? Like with food and other things that satisfy a need.
Because it is an unknowable gap whatever fills it is necessarily a fairy story. It's a question of selling the fairy stories. Plausibility, coherence and most important of all the service of the secular agenda of running a society. Science has undermined plenty of the first two but how does it undermine the last one without offering policies. As TV may well be a more important educational medium than schools isn't the argument going to have to take TV in as well and other sources. You are into Orwell in one step. And how does it undermine the gap however small it gets.
Or you can deny this need in the mass of the population which is tantamount to rendering them emotionless. Simply strategists. But most cynical strategies depend on the emotional need in the other.
Two strategists are a different matter. Both knowing each other. There's a book on that- Dangerous Liasons by Choderos de Laclos.
Quote:The way I see the past tells me that filling the gap with the silly putty of received religion does more harm than good, and in preparing folks for the future I'd rather they catch a glimpse of the gap, regardless of whether it makes them curious or vertiginous.
That's a pretty big statement. The question of what caused the "harm", if such it was from our point of view; it has got us here, has been gone into up the thread and was left unresolved as it had to be. The use of "silly putty" is no use to your own case.
And you haven't thought of the possible numbers of the "vertiginous".
"The carpet too is moving under you."
Or the social effects if it was a significant number.
But the vertigo comes from the nihilism not the gap. The gap can be rendered smooth by emollient rhetoricians. Tailored religions. A class, status and economic suiting like clothes shops. One can see an argument for Genesis there for a time when life for the masses was nasty, brutish and short and before science arrived.
Your second paragraph is phrased in a way which gives it little meaning except a restatement that you can take it and you don't see why others can't irrespective of how they have been brought up and the living structures of their communities.
But it is that emotional need you need to address. First I mean. It came first historically. There are other things.
