Hey Terry, welcome back.
Are there only costs to Christianity? Are there NO benefits?
Do you think ALL minds are capable of coming up with an athiestic system of ethics?
Beyond the individual level, what about the macro level. How does the belief in meaning beyond what we can arrive with ourselves as a starting point, effect societies as a whole. Without a higher purpose for our existence, we have only our existence. We only have our life. The funny thing is how wretched, nihilistic, and cowardly a man with nothing he can care about beyond his own skin can become. We see it now in the post-modern Western world, as it can't even muster enough energy to defend itself from a mindless, backward, 12th century caliphate. It's only weapon, and the only one it needs is that it believes in something and it's enemy does not.
This is an excerpt from Wretchard the cat at http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/
He discusses the issue from the perspective of modern liberalism, but you could replace athiesm with liberalism and the excerpt would hold (since athiesm is a tenet of modern liberalism)
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Kimball and Steyn on the end of the West
Two essays in the New Criterion talk about the West almost in the past tense. Roger Kimball's After the suicide of the West pronounces his post-mortem: a civilization suicided from despair; death from want of a reason to live. The contradiction within liberalism -- within multiculturalism -- Kimball argues, is that it unwilling to believe in anything definite, even in itself.
... an essay called “The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society,” ... dilates on this basic antinomy of liberalism. Liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even ... those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. But tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. ... As Robert Frost once put it, a liberal is someone who refuses to take his own part in an argument.
And having emptied life of belief, liberalism has not coincidentally also emptied it of meaning. Kimball quotes Douglas Murray to evoke the atmosphere of a civilization partying frenetically on the brink of black nothingness.
It may be no sin -- may indeed be one of our society’s most appealing traits -- that we love life. But the scales, as in so many things, have tipped to an extreme. From seeing so much for which we would live, people in our society now see fewer and fewer causes for which they would die. We have passed to a point where prolongation is all. We have become like the parents of Admetos in Euripides’ Alcestis -- "walking cadavers," unwilling to give up the few remaining days (in Europe’s case, of its peace dividend) even if only by doing so can any generational future be assured.
Liberalism's first step is to render the past, with its ties to memory and tradition, despicable and valueless. From there it inevitably proceeds to make the future futile. The "me" generation is liberated not only from its myths but also from its dreams. Kimball cites James Burnham. Modern liberalism, Burnham writes:
does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history… . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions—pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.
From Kimball's perspective the contest between Islam and liberal civilization is not simply between East and West, but between the living and the dying.
How then should we live? Why do we keep bumping into this wall of needing meaning in our life if it is in fact reality that our life has no meaning? Have we yet to evolve to where we accept the meaningless of our existence?
Again, Terry, welcome back.
CYP