Post by lunalelle on Mar 30, 2009 23:33:58 GMT -5
This ended up a long-ass post, but I feel like I got through everything I needed to on this topic. For now.
I have said before that I do not like the argument from comfort in support of religion. My last post detailed how religion was never about comfort for me (and if you were too comfortable, you were probably doing it wrong), but about being right. This post dwells more into why I don’t understand the argument in context of other people.
At the most basic level, this argument is simply weak. It sounds like the only reason someone believes in a religion and follows the teachings is because of the comfort it brings in spite of knowing that it is all wrong. I know that most people who use this argument do not actually mean that they go through the motions in spite of inaccuracy, using religion like a security blanket even though one is an adult and has outgrown the raggedy, faded blanket. And that the argument is as weak as a child’s security blanket should teach people who have other reasons to simply not use it.
One of the arguments against atheism I've heard is that it is a privilege. Most of the atheist blogosphere is safe from the elements and has the means for an Internet connection, which presumes enough financial security to feed and clothe yourself as well. Sure, on our thrones of gold (ahem) we can look down upon those needing hope and say that religion is a dangerous or irrational thing and that faith, even if it is comfortable, is simply wrong. A blanket may be raggedy and worn, but even the thinnest blanket helps a little against the cold. Okay, I’ll stop with that metaphor. The point made is that it is easy for atheists, perhaps, to live without the comfort of God because we live in a comfortable situation, in comfortable countries.
However, the same can be said of all incarnations of the prosperity gospel, even the mildest ones common within many Protestant churches in prosperous countries. It is one thing to say that God will bless you if you believe in him when you live in a country in which it is much easier to be “blessed.” But it is hard to believe that you are prone to blessing because of your belief when you literally live in a house of corrugated tin on top of a trash heap. Even those who decry the prosperity gospel praise God when something good happens to them but curse the devil when something bad happens to them, although they love to say at other times that God is control of everything. When a bridge goes out, they say that someone above was looking out for them and that they are blessed … when 17 people died (were they cursed?). It’s a very complicated system of selective comfort. Most people in privilege are subject to that kind of perception – I’m blessed rather than cursed like them – from Christians to atheists to whatever.
But it is silly to think that all atheists are affluent any more than to think that all Christians are affluent. We know that both are not true. There are people in dire straits who do not believe in God just as there are people in dire straits who believe in God – they have ups and downs in their lives, despair and loss as well as joy. People are people are people, and to generalize too much on one group or another is only a disservice to the rest.
So, back to the argument for religion based on comfort. Even when I try to understand why believing in God is comforting, I have a great deal of trouble. People say that they find peace in the idea that God is in control of everything, but honestly, that idea sometimes scares me to death. Everything is a very encompassing term, from the darkness to the light, from the hurricane to the cool summer day, from the fire to the flood to the sparrows and the lilies of the field. By believing that everything happens for a reason, that God is in control … that means that your SIDS baby died for a reason. Your child got terminal cancer for a reason. Your wife was paralyzed from the neck down for a reason. Your husband is dying a slow death from emphysema and pneumonia and lung cancer after smoking all his life for a reason. Actually, telling a surviving family member that the death or disease of a loved one happens for a reason tends to make that person angry – don’t do it. At the deepest despair, how can someone find comfort in the fact that something they cherish was literally taken away, purposefully taken away? You can say that something good will come out of it, but it may take years for that “something good” to happen, and if it does, it’s just as likely to be the result of time and distance and the eventual ability to find joy at all.
This is not an argument against religion based on evil in the world. Evil, as we humans understand and create the concepts of good and evil, is in the world. Period. Whether God exists or not, bad things are going to happen to good and bad people. And people are going to struggle to find meaning in it because humans don’t like loose ends. We like patterns. We create patterns and interpret cause and effect. We associate and generalize – it’s actually a survival skill. It’s why we know that knives are sharp, stoves are hot, to duck when we come across a low-hanging tree branch, to work when we want food, to run when someone’s chasing us. It’s why we make shapes from the stars. It’s why we can see meaning in abstract art. We’re incredibly good at it – so good that we sometimes make patterns when they aren’t even there. Take, for example, the saying that all bad things come in threes. I can guarantee you that if something bad happens to you, you can find two other bad things that come along prior to or just after the original bad thing. If I said that all bad things come in threes plus a good thing to grow on, you’d be able to find that additional one thing. If the saying were that all bad things come in fives, we’d see five bad things. We create these patterns, so if you expect that something good will come out of something bad, I can guarantee you that something will … because good and bad things happen at random. It is we who ascribe these random acts with patterned significance.
So you want your terrible thing in your life to mean something through God, because God controls everything, and he must have some good reason for tearing your life apart (I’m not even going to get into all things good are God and all things evil are man’s fallen nature … free will and predestination is an endless tangle). Everything being random, subject to the whimsy of chance and not subject to any sort of all-encompassing will, can be comforting.
Instead of someone choosing to kill or hurt someone close to you, there is comfort that it just happened. That it could have happened to anyone – it was not deserved, everything that could have been done was done. When a plague strikes your city or when you are one of millions living in the projects, you can take comfort knowing that whatever happens, you can do something about it rather than the conclusion being chosen for you. You can take comfort knowing that, if things go belly up, it was not because someone chose for it to happen. That things do not happen because of some all-encompassing will does not remove the significance of any event. I’ve often used this quote from the TV series Angel as a good atheist position that keeps everything from being all nihilistic doom-and-gloom: to paraphrase, if nothing we do ultimately matters (or if nothing that happens matters in the grand scheme of things), then all that matters is what happens and what we do.
Ironically, things don’t change much between comfort from believing in God and comforting in not believe in him. That's one thing that has struck me in my transition between Christianity and atheism - things don't change as much as you think they will. You ask different questions, and you may have a slightly different perspective (think of it as taking off and putting on different kinds of glasses). But it doesn't really change; you don't even change that much. The world is as it is no matter what you believe. Bad things still happen. We still mourn. Sometimes we feel in control of these bad things, and some things will be out of control. There will still be depression. There will still be the search for significance. That significance, though, will simply come from a different perception. Rather than believing that your loved one’s death had significance, you may take more significance from the life lived. You may take significance from the strength developed over the weeks, months, years of pain. There are any number of ways to interpret and find significance, often the same interpretations that would have been found and attributed to God’s will.
If the comfort from not believing in God is no less and possibly no more than the alternative, then the argument from comfort cannot fully rationalize a belief in God. If you believe that without God, you could not find comfort, you underestimate the human ability to persevere (based on the stigma of “failure”), to create the necessary patterns to preserve life and to find significance. You overestimate the difference between the life of an atheist and the life of a Christian, regardless of perspective.
One of the main things that the New Atheist movement strives to do is to provide alternatives, not to just tear down established security blankets (yeah, it's back). And in this case, the new security blanket is that atheism isn’t bleak – there is comfort on the other side.
sowingseedsinwinter.blogspot.com/2009/03/finding-comfort-in-random.html
I have said before that I do not like the argument from comfort in support of religion. My last post detailed how religion was never about comfort for me (and if you were too comfortable, you were probably doing it wrong), but about being right. This post dwells more into why I don’t understand the argument in context of other people.
At the most basic level, this argument is simply weak. It sounds like the only reason someone believes in a religion and follows the teachings is because of the comfort it brings in spite of knowing that it is all wrong. I know that most people who use this argument do not actually mean that they go through the motions in spite of inaccuracy, using religion like a security blanket even though one is an adult and has outgrown the raggedy, faded blanket. And that the argument is as weak as a child’s security blanket should teach people who have other reasons to simply not use it.
One of the arguments against atheism I've heard is that it is a privilege. Most of the atheist blogosphere is safe from the elements and has the means for an Internet connection, which presumes enough financial security to feed and clothe yourself as well. Sure, on our thrones of gold (ahem) we can look down upon those needing hope and say that religion is a dangerous or irrational thing and that faith, even if it is comfortable, is simply wrong. A blanket may be raggedy and worn, but even the thinnest blanket helps a little against the cold. Okay, I’ll stop with that metaphor. The point made is that it is easy for atheists, perhaps, to live without the comfort of God because we live in a comfortable situation, in comfortable countries.
However, the same can be said of all incarnations of the prosperity gospel, even the mildest ones common within many Protestant churches in prosperous countries. It is one thing to say that God will bless you if you believe in him when you live in a country in which it is much easier to be “blessed.” But it is hard to believe that you are prone to blessing because of your belief when you literally live in a house of corrugated tin on top of a trash heap. Even those who decry the prosperity gospel praise God when something good happens to them but curse the devil when something bad happens to them, although they love to say at other times that God is control of everything. When a bridge goes out, they say that someone above was looking out for them and that they are blessed … when 17 people died (were they cursed?). It’s a very complicated system of selective comfort. Most people in privilege are subject to that kind of perception – I’m blessed rather than cursed like them – from Christians to atheists to whatever.
But it is silly to think that all atheists are affluent any more than to think that all Christians are affluent. We know that both are not true. There are people in dire straits who do not believe in God just as there are people in dire straits who believe in God – they have ups and downs in their lives, despair and loss as well as joy. People are people are people, and to generalize too much on one group or another is only a disservice to the rest.
So, back to the argument for religion based on comfort. Even when I try to understand why believing in God is comforting, I have a great deal of trouble. People say that they find peace in the idea that God is in control of everything, but honestly, that idea sometimes scares me to death. Everything is a very encompassing term, from the darkness to the light, from the hurricane to the cool summer day, from the fire to the flood to the sparrows and the lilies of the field. By believing that everything happens for a reason, that God is in control … that means that your SIDS baby died for a reason. Your child got terminal cancer for a reason. Your wife was paralyzed from the neck down for a reason. Your husband is dying a slow death from emphysema and pneumonia and lung cancer after smoking all his life for a reason. Actually, telling a surviving family member that the death or disease of a loved one happens for a reason tends to make that person angry – don’t do it. At the deepest despair, how can someone find comfort in the fact that something they cherish was literally taken away, purposefully taken away? You can say that something good will come out of it, but it may take years for that “something good” to happen, and if it does, it’s just as likely to be the result of time and distance and the eventual ability to find joy at all.
This is not an argument against religion based on evil in the world. Evil, as we humans understand and create the concepts of good and evil, is in the world. Period. Whether God exists or not, bad things are going to happen to good and bad people. And people are going to struggle to find meaning in it because humans don’t like loose ends. We like patterns. We create patterns and interpret cause and effect. We associate and generalize – it’s actually a survival skill. It’s why we know that knives are sharp, stoves are hot, to duck when we come across a low-hanging tree branch, to work when we want food, to run when someone’s chasing us. It’s why we make shapes from the stars. It’s why we can see meaning in abstract art. We’re incredibly good at it – so good that we sometimes make patterns when they aren’t even there. Take, for example, the saying that all bad things come in threes. I can guarantee you that if something bad happens to you, you can find two other bad things that come along prior to or just after the original bad thing. If I said that all bad things come in threes plus a good thing to grow on, you’d be able to find that additional one thing. If the saying were that all bad things come in fives, we’d see five bad things. We create these patterns, so if you expect that something good will come out of something bad, I can guarantee you that something will … because good and bad things happen at random. It is we who ascribe these random acts with patterned significance.
So you want your terrible thing in your life to mean something through God, because God controls everything, and he must have some good reason for tearing your life apart (I’m not even going to get into all things good are God and all things evil are man’s fallen nature … free will and predestination is an endless tangle). Everything being random, subject to the whimsy of chance and not subject to any sort of all-encompassing will, can be comforting.
Instead of someone choosing to kill or hurt someone close to you, there is comfort that it just happened. That it could have happened to anyone – it was not deserved, everything that could have been done was done. When a plague strikes your city or when you are one of millions living in the projects, you can take comfort knowing that whatever happens, you can do something about it rather than the conclusion being chosen for you. You can take comfort knowing that, if things go belly up, it was not because someone chose for it to happen. That things do not happen because of some all-encompassing will does not remove the significance of any event. I’ve often used this quote from the TV series Angel as a good atheist position that keeps everything from being all nihilistic doom-and-gloom: to paraphrase, if nothing we do ultimately matters (or if nothing that happens matters in the grand scheme of things), then all that matters is what happens and what we do.
Ironically, things don’t change much between comfort from believing in God and comforting in not believe in him. That's one thing that has struck me in my transition between Christianity and atheism - things don't change as much as you think they will. You ask different questions, and you may have a slightly different perspective (think of it as taking off and putting on different kinds of glasses). But it doesn't really change; you don't even change that much. The world is as it is no matter what you believe. Bad things still happen. We still mourn. Sometimes we feel in control of these bad things, and some things will be out of control. There will still be depression. There will still be the search for significance. That significance, though, will simply come from a different perception. Rather than believing that your loved one’s death had significance, you may take more significance from the life lived. You may take significance from the strength developed over the weeks, months, years of pain. There are any number of ways to interpret and find significance, often the same interpretations that would have been found and attributed to God’s will.
If the comfort from not believing in God is no less and possibly no more than the alternative, then the argument from comfort cannot fully rationalize a belief in God. If you believe that without God, you could not find comfort, you underestimate the human ability to persevere (based on the stigma of “failure”), to create the necessary patterns to preserve life and to find significance. You overestimate the difference between the life of an atheist and the life of a Christian, regardless of perspective.
One of the main things that the New Atheist movement strives to do is to provide alternatives, not to just tear down established security blankets (yeah, it's back). And in this case, the new security blanket is that atheism isn’t bleak – there is comfort on the other side.
sowingseedsinwinter.blogspot.com/2009/03/finding-comfort-in-random.html
