Hero

During French revolution period, a very famous atheist asked a Christian apologist, " What can replace Christianity?". And the Christian answered," You have to die, and then resurrect 3 days later!"
At first, I consider his answer inrelevant and nonsense. But after thinking a while, I found there is some insight behind his answer. Why do religions exist in different cultures all among the world? It is because humanity face uncertainity of future day by day, no one knows what things would happen to him, when would he die, when would he get in trouble..... Disease, death, loss of relatives etc all haunt human beings so that human must find some sort of relieve, no matter whether it is spiritual or physical. So many ppl would turn to religion and want a forever life without fear, and most prominent religion is Christianity, which represents human's rebellion towards the nature [in which human denies he would have an ending someday and what he possesses will be lost someday]. Religion exists because there are demands on religion.
So even if we, as atheist, found concrete proof that shows the non-existence of God, what can we use to replace religion? How can we develop philosophical belief and value that can allow us to have a joyful life without fear? How can we face diaster around us without religion? How can we face the death of us and our friends and relatives without religion? If there is no religion, can we have meaningful life? We live for what? Especially when something terrible happens to us and living becomes a painful experience, do we need to live anymore? Too many things cannot be solved without religion. Maybe i should not use the word "solve", i should say reassure.......
I often face a dilemma that Christianity is absurd and cruel, but without Christianity, we may have little strength to face diaster and no solid foundation for our morality.
Christianity seems to be the most handy and easy stuff to help us to face our life [eg help us to regulate ourselves, to give us some meanings in our lives, to help us to face death and disease, to establish some kind of morality etc].
Sometimes I think whether we can have a joyful life is much more important than knowing what is true. If Christianity can give us joy and courage to live on, why not take a risk to believe even that it is obviously fake?
What can we use to replace Christianity?
Atheist friends! Plz help me to answer this question, i am confused......

Bill

Ahhh, a man after my own heart....

One answer is that you can try reading Pascal Boyer's book, Religion Explained, and then create a new religion which fulfills all of the various human needs for which humans create religions. There are other books of this type in our Bookstore.

I ran into this same problem about a decade ago, and I later sat down and wrote out my own Agnostic Bible for my Agnostic Church, but I discovered that I don't really possess the necessary charisma to found a long-living church.

But something along those lines ought to be incorporated into the answer to your question. If you wish to read (at length) my own thoughts on this process, please begin reading here: BOOK V . THE WEST STILL DECLINES (THIRD SUB-PART, REPLACING "WESTERN CIVILIZATION")

== Bill

Hero

Thanks!
I will reply u once i read through the material!

xoc

Death and rebirth(or resurrection) are fundamental elements of religion because they are fundamental elements of life. One of the strongest arguments for God (I believe) is the philosophical necessity of an Absolute principle, or the necessary principle that therre is an Absolute. I do not believe this Absolute is the "Bible" and believe that the strength and weakness of this claim are balanced together, in that 1. if we do not have an "inerrant word of God" the foundations of Faith are to be questioned leading us into an endless array of mazes where we seek to know "true physical and metaphysical history" and how they relate to "Gospel Truth"- 2. the obvious rational arguments against the Bible, that certain Biblical stories, doctrines, etc. maybe influenced by the captor nations that held the Israelites (Tower of Babel, Zoroastrian devil+ heaven/hell, etc.) For a long time I've suspected that Christians must assert the Bible is "God's Inerrant Word" because of it's practicle usefulness as a proposition (if the Bible is God's Word we have a strong epistemological basis for our philosophy) rather than it's "Metaphysical Truth." We don't even have any original manuscripts, language evolves through time so some cultural connotations are forever lost, etc. etc. Even so the proposition that the Bible is "God's Word" is powerful and useful in making rational sense of an irrational world, and can have an incredibly strong positive and negative influence on the world through it's application by individuals. The positive may be less noticed or understood than the negative, as evil is a loud and brash force, a clamouring and proud spirit, chaotic and active, deceptive and clever. The bible's power to transform the individual in a positive way must be based on the individuals desire to destroy self for the Crowd, to die for the Masses like Jesus did, which is realised spiritually of course("Crucify the flesh" as Paul puts it). Then he finds that having "lost his life, he truly finds it..." and can be free to be the person that has fulfillment. Few are willing to do this... and even after "doing" this we find that we did not succeed in destroying the "self", the flesh and devil still beckon, temptations continue to abound and confusion continues to put our heads in a reel. Without the Spirit, it is true what Sartre said about freedom: that we are doomed to the freedom of indecision, not knowing whether our actions are right or wrong and the course we chose is the ideal one (or if an ideal choice is possible in this world, rather than on occasion).

Without God, what are our metaphysical foundations? Can any exist? If such is the case, where does rationality originate (as Matter is not rational in and of itself... is it)?, and what propels the universe in it's course... this would be a neccesary principle that must be singular to complete perfection, that is to perfect Reductionism by reducing All to One. Without such a God, I find that the response of Nietzsche to irrationality and insanity is in fact the most rational response. If the world is a madhouse, why not end your life in the madhouse? Rationality is the futile attempt of man to conquer nature, but the worms still win in the end.

Bill

The one inarguable metaphysical foundation for humans would seem to be Descartes' cogito, ergo sum. We think, which necessarily implies that we exist, but we get nothing else from that reality without venturing off into the danger zone of presumption (where we presume some conclusion that we intuitively feel is correct, but cannot prove). Godel's incompleteness theorum apparently seals the fate of human knowledge: any theory complex enough to include the rules of arithmetic must necessarily make at least one unproven assumption.

So, it would seem that humanity can never know an ultimate truth. We must content ourselves with making the best presumptions that we can, and living our lives in the best way that we can; at least, until such time as there is some sort of a breakthrough in this seeming stalemate.

But despair is the wrong response to this inability to grasp the essence of reality. There is incredible richness in the human experience, as any comprehensive study of history will certainly disclose. Faced with the need to summarize the richness they had described in all of their volumes of history, historians Will and Arial Durant penned these words: All of our intelligences tell us that humanity is merely an evolved primate species which has an unusual knack for rational thought. (We are The Symbolic Species, as Terrence W. Deacon asserts.) We have no right to expect perfection, either in ourselves or in the universe around ourselves.

Even morality, which is the last substantial claim of the God-believers asserting a need for God, yields up its secrets when viewed in the light provided by evolutionary psychology. Moral standards contribute to human survival by allowing us to work together and independently, simultaneously. Somehow, built into the essential components of our genes and memes, a human drive to provide for the greater good for a larger group ensures that most of us will act morally most of the time.

All of modern understanding is a consequence of applying scientific method to known or presumed facts. There is quite simply no alternative epistemological system with any kind of a proven track record.

So, this leaves us with three pillars of philosophical thinking in a modern godless world:

1. Existence (as opposed to non-existence) as a metaphysical foundation;
2. Scientific method (as opposed to "revealed truth") as an epistemological foundation; and
3. The survival and enhancement of the condition of the human species (as opposed to suicide, self-destruction, and many other alternative options) as our guiding moral foundation.

From those three pillars of philosophy, everything else important to human actions and human knowledge can (eventually) be derived. Thus, while this goes well beyond mere metaphysical foundations, I would assert that it is a better, more comprehensive answer to provide a foundation for all of philosophy.

== Bill

xoc

Hi Bill,

Thank you for your reasoned and coherent response.

I wonder what your opinion is of the Eastern Zen-Buddhist type response to Descartes "Cogito Ergo Sum"- that is that the "I" is assumed a priori by saying that "I think" and therefore Descartes proves nothing here. As someone said(I forget who) Descartes should have said "Thought is, therefore thought exists"... obviously when denying the inherent reality of "Self" as is the zen viewpoint the "I" could not be used as a sound epistemological basis. While I don't particularly hold to this view myself, there seems to be something there, in that when we try to give a hard and fast definition of "who I am" we are left with many mysteries... the "I", rather than being a solidly defined thing is rather a flux of various processes(mental, physical, chemical). We can't define ourselves too definitively because of our nature to change, what "I am now" I will not neccesarily be tommorrow. While there is a kind of continuum of consciousness this may rely much on memory. Take the movie Momento: the lead charactor forgets all that went before in around 5-10 minutes; without memory he is not aware of the fact that he has been used by an apparent "friend" (although all people are strangers to him as he forgets who they are in a mature of minutes) to murder drug dealers for the "friend's" personal gain. Without a long-term memory, the foundations of "self" (I) as a basis for epistemology seems to be questionable. "I exist, but what am I?" To the lead in Momento, he is a damaged hero on a quest to avenge his wife's rape; but in reality he is a tool being used by everyone else for their own evil aims. At the end, when confronted by this fact he choses the delusion over the truth, as the illusion is far more pleasent and because he can(not everybody has the luxury of being able to deceive themselves so completely).


In many ways, I am more convinced that when it comes to judging philosophy it is less of a question of "right/wrong" than better/best on many issues. For example I prefer existentialism in general over rationalism, but how can I be certain that this is not mere prejudice? I prefer Art to Math; by this fact I must prefer the philosophers who make good room for Art in their philosophy then logicians like Hume or Russell. (an unfair prejudice since I've never even tried to read either, just going on what I've heard from others.
A reasonable assertion, but I always have to wonder, "where does this principle come from?" I always get the feeling that this assumption is asserted a priori into evolutionary philosophy; and while the old argument of "evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics" may be imperfect, I still feel there is something of significance in it. That is, if things by nature tend towards entropy and homogeneity, and "laziness" even(a stretch I suppose), where does the "drive of species" come from? If it is not found in matter itself, it must come from an outside source... I just don't see something as fundamental as consciousness just popping up out of the blue. There is always an intelligence presupposed in the process, that is given to an unintelligent process; the drive to survive is rational, but if there is no Mind behind it where does this rational purpose come from? I think consciousness, intelligence, what ev seems to be a more likely fundamental characteristic of "Existence" then mere material energy.

John Page

Some are experimenting and finding ways....
atheist church

Bill

I don't claim to understand Eastern philosophy (or theology) well enough to have a reasoned opinion on that basis. My opinions thus come with my own inherent biases, which are the biases inherent in being largely grounded in Western Civilization.

On the Western view, self-awareness is inherent in the human condition (even to the point of itself being definitional). Entities that are not self-aware are thus not human (and their lives are thus safely terminated, through the mere removal of life support or perhaps by more active means).

Descartes' view was entwined with mind/body dualism, a concept that is also fundamental to Eastern thinking. And on both views, the "real I" is the soul, rather than either the body or the mind. On the Eastern view, the mind is a vehicle for the instruction of the soul, with the goal of causing it to ultimately reach a state of "enlightenment," which implies, in reality, that the soul ultimately disappears as a distinct entity upon its re-integration into the All Soul mass. This idea at least illuminates an Eastern thought that the soul may well not be an "I" in the first place.

The Western view is substantially distinct, in that the soul is the essence of "I", bearing (as it does) the eternal consequences of the life lived by the body and mind. And on the Western view, the soul perpetuates at least the essential essences of the mind, if not the totality. In my view, this justifies Descartes' assumption of the "I"; but of course, only on the Western view.

I think that this exchange clearly illustrates the necessity of Durant's view: that religion is necessarily one of the branches of Philosophy, in spite of the animosity that exists between Philosophy and Religion throughout Western Culture. In this case, the very concept of what "I" means is controlled by the respective religious beliefs of Easterner and Westerner.

Accordingly, I feel that I can explain this dichotomy, although I would not even attempt to resolve it, as I personally adhere to neither of the two religious viewpoints at issue herein. To me, this seems to illustrate more about the foundations of solipsism (the denial of objective reality) than it does about the lack of a "self" (or "I"). To illustrate, the protagonist in the fiction you reference never confuses himself with those he is sent to kill, thus he can clearly (even with this limited sense of memory) maintain the distinction between "I" and "you." This is all that seems necessary to me to satisfy the question of "what am I?" Philosophy has always been more personal than (say) religion. So-called "schools" of philosophy have never been very large, again as compared with the average size of religious sects.

Those who study Philosophy deeply almost always end up with a distinct personal "take" that becomes their own personal "signature." While I like art, I would not prefer it to math or logic in my own view of philosophy. And of course, I prefer rationalism over existentialism (by a heck of a lot).

There probably isn't a real distinction between "right/wrong" versus "bad/good/better/best." In both cases, a value judgment is being asserted, and the only real source of any value judgment of this sort would seem to be whatever moral standards we have adopted. No modern thinker would contest the idea that morality isn't all black and white, but rather exhibits frequent shades of gray, in spite of our cultural tendencies to define morality in black and white (bad/good) terms. In some sense, I do know what you mean. But you are far too narrow in your analysis.

If I take a block of iron, and I pull out a blowtorch and play it over the iron, I expect lots of increases in entropy, but I don't expect to witness any sort of self-organization of matter. And yet, when our local star (Sun) provides energy to the Earth, something unique appears to happen: matter does tend to self-organize into what I've called "anti-entropic" entities.

Now, these entities aren't truly anti-entropic, because they have a wealth of energy from the Sun to draw upon for fuel. But it is, in any case, at least surprising that they self-organize rather than self-destruct. And it is even more surprising that they would do so in a manner that almost appears to be a directed process, over a period of time in excess of several billion years.

The findings of science are fairly obvious: there is a continuum of entities from chemical compounds on up through the simplest forms of life. In fact, the very dividing line between non-life and life is rather arbitrarily defined (based upon the presence or absence of any sort of a metabolic process; thus, a virus is not alive because it lacks any metabolic process of its own, while the virus-infected cell most certainly is alive, because it supplies the metabolism that the virus "hijacks" in order to self-replicate.

Another line exists between creatures without brains and creatures with brains. (An anecdote: there is a sea creature that begins life with a rudimentary brain, which it uses to navigate itself while seeking to find a good spot to "put down roots," but once it attaches itself to a rock, where it will remain for the rest of its life, it literally eats its own brain. The joke among marine biologists is that this is sort-of like getting tenure. ) But brains themselves run the entire spectrum of complexity, and it isn't entirely clear that humans have the most complex physical brains (some might argue for dolphins).

It is entirely a species bias which causes humans to frequently claim to be the only animals with a "mind." The more we understand about our near relatives, the more it becomes clear that humans have merely mastered a particularly valuable mode of thinking (which Deacon calls "symbolic thinking"), but that in all other respects, human brains and minds are very similar to the brains and minds of most other mammals. Certainly, humans cannot claim to be the only "self-aware" animals! What humans do have is the ability of symbolic thought, which allows us to contemplate the entirely symbolic realms of philosophy, but that does not mean that other creatures lack any other mental capacities we see within ourselves!

And this is the argument raised by animal rights activists: just because humans have this special mode of thinking, does that really give humanity the right to proclaim our species to be "the top dog" and "in charge" of the destiny of all other creatures here on Earth? Is humanity's "good trick" really that valuable to life as a whole? And are humans being good custodians of the responsibility that comes with such a broadly-claimed right?

=====

In any case, what I meant to point out here is that it isn't so much of a "drive to species" that is the issue, but rather an inherent bias of material things to self-organize that ought to raise serious philosophical questions for us. Unless you believe in a magical origin for life (and frankly, most people do), you must then recognize that the surprising thing is that individual atoms not only got together into small molecules, but then those small molecules promoted the creation of ever larger molecules, and that process kept going and going for billions of years until it created all of the diverse forms of organic life (and non-life) that we see around us today. Humans are the current end-product of billions of years of matter and energy self-organizing itself into increasingly complex and diverse units, and that is what is (and ought to be) surprising about what we humans see in terms of our own existence.

And out of the billions of years of records that we can access in terms of a history of our universe (space/time continuum), there seems to be only one basic commandment: survive! And there is one primary method of survival, which leads to a secondary commandment: diversify! it is quite literally built into our very genes that we have the basic instinct to survive and the basic mechanisms to diversify as we reproduce. It is thus a fundamental part of the biochemistry of life that these two commandments are given to humanity, and from those biochemical commandments, it isn't hard to derive the foundational moral law I first gave, earlier: That foundational moral law quite literally derives from the biochemical commandments engraved within the genome of every surviving creature. And, it can be argued, if the genetic material ever lacked such commandments, the creatures would most likely not survive in competition with creatures who possessed such biochemical commandments within their own genomes. And survival, as a moral value, is what one of my friends calls "a forced move," because any creature who does not value its own survival most likely will not survive for very long. The examples are numerous, aren't they?

Well, I started this sometime last night, and only finished it up this morning, so I think its time to stop.....

== Bill

Frotiw

As for the original question I suggest reading Nietzsche(Xoc already mentioned him). Alternatively Litterature about Nietzsche. However certain conditions should be noted. First of all if reading Nietzsche's original works read them with a open attitude e.g. he should not be "grinded through the machine of analytic philosophy". He doesn't concern himself much with argumentation in the traditional sence(He would be inconsequent of his own philosophy if he did) however he might have great value anyhow. Also another note. In my humble opinion not all opinions about Nietzsche(e.g. from authors on Nietzsche books) are equally corespondant to the original view of Nietzsche. Nietzsche pretty much said anything including contradicting himself, that lead to the easy misuse and misunderstand of him(many have heard of nazi misuse of Nietzsche, greatly aided by his sister's false letters). Anyway there is a "red thread" in the works of Nietzsche but it is not as clearly defined as many with others and it is easy to be lead astray by his aforic style and weak argumentative structure.

I sometimes find it odd that he is not mentioned more often in a forum like this. I find him(along with other e.g. Spinoza and Schopenhauer) to be great intellectual teachers. By teachers I mean that certain critical attitude and intellectual honesty can be learned quite independant of the philosophical views. Sometimes for an instance I think that the atheists and scientifical positivists attitude seem to lean more against the one of theist and dogmatics if you dig a little deeper than the superficial differences. The atheist* are not wrong in stating "there is no god" however they haven't really understood the meaning of this. Still holding on to old values seemingly treating them as objective and equally often replacing the role of chrisianity with science and new "belief systems". However what(again in my humble opinion) not all Nietzsche readers have understood is that REALLY grasping the death of god in the grand sence is not an easy step and not at all one Nietzsche himself lived by. "The death of god" is not merely about the death of the "guy with a white beard in heaven" but values all together. According to Nietzsche values are pretty much everywhere including in the stance of atheists, contempotrary science, art, even end traditional nihilism.. The question is whereither it is possible at all to escape values at all. Also at the same time the ecape of value should obviosly not be understood as a chartarsis or new "paradisemyth" Nietzsche does not intend to become a priest of the secular age.
Ok, its exam time I got carried away. I hope I didn't write utter crap.

Cheers Frotiw.

*Obviosly not all

John Page

Bill:

I don't think they're genomic commandments. Humans can change their morals vary rapidly within their own lifespan and, while I grant there needs to be genetic disposition for this to happen, the wide variety of moral behaviors in humans indicates there is a great environmental influence.

BTW, considering "every surviving creature" on earth we see some startlingly different moral behaviors - the Praying Mantis is always a bad example.

Cheers, john