You don't believe in God, but you believe in man? There is even less justification for believing in the latter than for believing in the former.
Admittedly, the fact of natural and moral evil makes belief in a providential power difficult. But it also makes belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also that of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?
And isn’t it more difficult to believe in Man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God. Man appears impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way. We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.
There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only men at war with one another and with themselves. But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively.
There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.
"Admittedly, the fact of natural and moral evil makes belief in a providential power difficult." No, I don't admit that. No, I don't act as if these are subjects that have never been examined, and are so scary that I immediately cower into agnosticism the instant they are mentioned. Furthermore, without natural and moral evil, there'd be no need for providential power, now would there? Study theodicy.
A key player in the Atheist Presumption Fraud is Pascal Boyer's book 'Religion Explained', a learned attempt to deligetimize religion. Page 119 discusses "Contagion Inference Systems", our instinctive thought-channels that expressly deal with an unknown and invisible reality, that of bacteria and viruses. Note that this microscopic realm is totally unknown to the bearers of this instinct (i.e., ourselves, without science).
But when Boyer and his ilk get to the fact that people tend to believe in Higher Beings, they hastily jump in to say how amusingly delusional this God-instinct is, how primitive and deserving of being squelched. They jump at every chance to explain away our sense of God, our ability to have direct contact with Him, and our ability to take actions that help God more than ourselves (i.e., virtue). After all, the God-instinct is obviously nothing but a congeries of rank superstitions, and disgusting ones at that, when everybody knows there's no God and religion is a total waste of time.
I say that just as our contagion-instincts has selection-value because of the brute fact of the invisible realm of dangerous microbes, so too did our God-instincts evolve, because of the reality of God and of the invisible spirit-realm of Death and Rebirth. That reality is just as brute a fact as the rapid proliferability of microbes.
So can we please drop the pretense that atheism is the presumptive heir to science? This is the height of historical ignorance, since it was solely Catholicism's insistence on the rationality of Creation that allowed science to be born in the first place. In all the atheistic cultures (Confucianism, Shintoism, animism), science never happened, nor in all non-Christian cultures (classical, Islamic, Mayan, Indian). They all firmly believed in Man's pitiful inferiority and the fundamental unknowability of the world.
Cheer up, Bill. Turn those mournful presumptions around 180 degrees: "There may be no source of the help we need." No there may not be no Source, and that's That.
Stop drinking the Left's atheistic Kool-Aid.
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Why don't you take a hike? This site is not for you. I've honestly had enough of your ranting.
Let me mitigate your annoyance with Bill B by telling you that I thoroughly enjoyed this pithy piece of yours when it first appeared (indeed, it prompted me to pen this essay), and I am delighted to see it again.
Regards, Bill T
You've caught me in the act of recycling an old post under a new name. Think of it as a re-run. You say, in your piece, "Not just the communist and fascist projects of the collectivists, but also the anarcho-capitalist and secularist projects of the individualists." I see we have come to some similar conclusions. I toyed with libertarianism once, but now I hold that they are as bad as many on the Left, with their elevation of the economic above all else. The true political philosophy is some brand of conservatism. But adjusting the paleo and neo elements is the tricky part.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.