If you haven’t already, check out the story of R. J. Stove, son of the late atheist philosopher David Stove, who killed himself when his life went south. R. J. converted to Roman Catholicism eight years later.
It’s clichéd to ask why more atheists don’t commit suicide. Like most clichés, the question gets near the heart of the issue without properly hitting it. After all, it’s not as if suicide is somehow logically consistent with atheism. For one thing, atheism isn’t a principle: it’s the negation of a principle. And you don’t get something from nothing.
That is the heart of the problem. Atheism doesn’t necessitate a reason to die, but it certainly doesn’t offer a reason to live. It doesn’t offer a reason for choosing between the two options and it couldn’t offer a methodology for choosing between them, anyway. It doesn’t offer anything.
Some atheists, especially of the belligerent leftist bent, like to argue that the mere asking of the question points to moral deficiency in the one asking it (“you’d kill yourself just because God doesn’t exist?!”), even as they themselves argue for the legalization of suicide due to suffering. Why should people be treated as morally suspect, though, just because the meaninglessness of Godless being is itself a source of pain for some? And why shouldn’t it be the case that the atheists’ refusal to accept this argument is evidence of moral deficiency on the part of his opponents and not simply a failure of imagination or understanding on his own part, a failure borne of his own investment in the claim that life can be made meaningful even when severed from the transcendent ground of all meaning?
I suspect this is why I hadn’t heard of David Stove until a few months ago. He makes clear the fact that atheism is not unambiguously compatible with recognition of the duty to live (or recognition of any duty, for that matter), and it’s this kind of recognition which fashionable modern atheism can’t permit. I’m sure my older colleagues had heard of him, but even in my heavily atheistic days, I never once encountered even a single reference to him that I can recall.
Nope it don’t offer nuthin. If you want sumthin, an atheist has to plagiarize a religion.
Atheism doesn’t offer any principles by which to live (just as not-working-as-a-bank-teller doesn’t offer any salary), but it hardly follows that atheists therefore have no such principles (or that non-tellers have no salary). A given atheist’s reason to live would obviously come from what he does believe, not from his atheism as such.
Yup. Plagiarize a religion. Uh huh.
Plagiarize a religion? I have a spouse; I have children; I have siblings; I have friends, interests, passions. I have the real world, for one life only; if you need more than this to live for, you are doing it wrong.
Well, that’s your plagiarism right there. Christianity tells us that justice means that “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4), but this would be disgusting and incomprehensible to many atheists past and present — Nietzsche, most obviously.
It’s far from obvious that peace and private life are “default values” for people. Rather, for most of the history of our race, man was constantly at war and a significant fraction of all male deaths were from human violence (with many others coming from natural violence.)
You’re also too quick to dismiss the logic of suicide as a response to atheism. Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus precisely to address this question. Life entails much pain and absurdity, so isn’t suicide a viable response? Camus’s answer, that “life must struggle fruitlessly against absurdity forever,” shows that his experience was quite different from yours.
Let’s imagine that Cioran, Camus, and Stove all formed a suicide pact and hanged themselves to escape the torments of their existence. What exactly would be wrong with that? Isn’t suicide better than a life of misery?
What is neglected in many of these responses is the necessary entailment of nihilism on atheism. This has been fairly extensively discussed in earlier postings at Boland’s and Proph’s blogs; the exchange at: http://bonald.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/hodson-and-busseri-2012-second-thoughts/, for instance, is a good place to start. As Kristor has observed there, “vanishingly few secular moderns truly grapple with the nihilism implicit in their ontology,” and as I have observed in company, “the secular modern lives suspended between despair and self-deception.” An atheist can certainly avoid despair and suicide in consequence of his atheism – plenty do – but has such an atheism really been thought through to its bitter end?
Atheism offers a reason to live – or at least, to avoid death. Namely, this is all there is. Why hasten eternal oblivion?
Secular atheists certainly don’t want to get in a fight with people who think they’re going to paradise in the afterlife. That’s “everything to lose” versus “nothing to lose”.
Maybe soon the secularists will be begging for Christians to ride out to the gates of Vienna again? Maybe soon the secularists will be begging for a theonomy to take on sharia? Eh- maybe they will just go quietly.
No, they will always hate and fear the Christians far more than the Muslims – even as they pay the jizya and their daughters go under the veil.
…and they themselves will lose their heads, literally.
Would love to see your certainty backed by a theory as to why!
If a commenter over at VFR is correct, in a few more decades Britain will no longer be a haven for militant atheism: it will be transformed into an Islamic theocracy. Should that scenario come to pass, then Joseph’s prophecy that atheists will lose their heads, literally, isn’t the mere hyperbole that it seems right now.
I’m not sure that it is true to say that atheists will always fear Christians more than Muslims. They are currently using Muslims as a designated victim group to continue the process of removing Christianity completely from public life, but I don’t think it is hard to imagine them turning against Islam once Christianity is no longer a threat.
James, what if their calculations do not work out? Islam has its own agenda… If it comes to atheists versus Islam, I will put my betting dollar on Islam..
Most of these militant atheists are deep down inside ninnies. They attack Christianity because they know most Christians will not literally come after them and chop their heads off. Mohammedans will…
Yes, it is possible that liberalism will turn out to have underestimated Islam, but I think in the future they will end up being just as hostile toward Islam as they currently are toward Christianity. I guess we will have to wait and see if they are able to convert Muslim children to liberalism like they have Christian children before being able to decide who will win, though.
Of course in that void of atheism. Mainstream atheism at least is the philosophy of secular humanism and naturalism.
David Stove was an academic philosopher who attacked almost all philosophy as diseased thought. The former means that practically no one outside the academy was likely to hear about him; the latter made him persona non grata within the academy. This is probably sufficient to explain why you hadn’t heard of him.
Was he even cited during his productive years, before he retired (let alone committed suicide)? My impression is no, not really, but I’m an outsider to professional philosophy.
Stove was a kind of iconoclastic philosophic contrarian, just as happy to attack Darwinism as Platonism. An archived obituary may be found at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080113102500/http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/aahpsss/news48/a48_stov.htm. Additional references and a collection of many of his writings may be found at: http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/davidstove.html. His iconoclasm was such that he could indulge in the most astonishing acts of political incorrectness, as in his essay “The Intellectual Capacity of Women”, guaranteed to result in the self-combustion of any radical feminist who so much as glances at its opening paragraph (alas, Charles Murray, in “Human Accomplishment” finds the same conclusion, albeit with far greater tact and rigor). In short, he has something to challenge, insult – and certainly amuse – all comers.
As I recall it, Stove’s exposé of the “postmodern cult” that formed around Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn is a fun read: Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult
Attacking almost all philosophy as diseased thought is hardly unique in 20th Century Anglo-American philosophy. That’s the influence of Wittgenstein, who was at the center of yet another cult…
As always, you have to separate:
A: Atheism (not believing in God)
and
B: The various ‘ersatzreligionen’ that most atheists embrace in order to maintain some kind of “ground” to stand on (in modern times generally of the escathon-immanentizing utopian-egalitarian variety).
If one is merely an atheist, without running with, say, Communism or Libertarianism, well, then things can really look bleak. Which kind of explains why most atheists are strongly drawn towards (B).
While pure atheism in itself does not provide a reason for killing oneself (on the contrary, the most straightforward response is a heightened fear of the oblivion of death), the knock-on effect of the depressing implications of an atheism unclouded by an ‘ersatzreligion’ will probably drive more than a few souls into depression, and ultimately suicide.
To follow on the critical insight above, it should be observed that the term ‘ersatzreligion’ or ‘ersatz-religion’ (sing.), otherwise relatively unfamiliar, is a very productive one that deserves wider use:
From the German ‘Ersatz’: (adj.) Being an imitation or a substitute, usually an inferior one; artificial.
Thus ‘Ersatzreligion’: an inferior, artificial substitute for religion.
(e.g. Communism, Liberalism, Freudianism, scientism, …)
Richard J. Neuhaus is perhaps most widely cited for his use of the term, as follows:
“Such a religious evacuation of the public square cannot be sustained either in concept or in practice. When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked. When recognizable religion is excluded, the vacuum will be filled by ‘ersatz religion’, by religion bootlegged into public space under other names. Again, to paraphrase Spinoza: transcendence abhors a vacuum. The reason why the naked public square cannot, in fact, remain naked is in the very nature of law and laws. If law and laws are not seen to be coherently related to basic presuppositions about right and wrong, good and evil, they will be condemned as illegitimate. After having excluded traditional religion, then, the legal and political trick is to address questions of right and wrong in a way that is not ‘contaminated by the label ‘religious’. This relatively new sleight-of-hand results in what many have called ‘civil religion’.”
– from Richard J. Neuhaus, “The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America”, p.80.
The implications of de facto ‘ersatzreligionen’ are not restricted to America alone, as per the above, but extend widely, as per the following:
“The early Turkish Republic was influenced not only by the legacy of Ottoman reforms but more so by the French Enlightenment and its radically secularist worldview. Early Republican elites asserted that religion is an ‘obstacle to progress’. To deal with it, they incorporated ‘laïcité’, the French notion of secularism, which allowed no role whatsoever for faith in public life.
This stance drove Turkey into an acute version of the problem that Richard John Neuhaus identified in his book ‘The Naked Public Square’: The vacuum created by absent religion was filled by ‘ersatz religion’. In just a decade, Islam was replaced by a new public faith based on Turkishness and the cult of personality created around its hero, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. ‘Let the Ka’aba be for the Arabs,’ wrote poet Kemalettin Kamu, ‘for us, çankaya is enough.’ That new shrine was Atatürk’s residence.
The cult of Mustafa Kemal continues in Turkey, along with the official illiberal secularism, both of which ensure not separation of mosque and state but the domination of the mosque by the state and the suppression of religious believers. Women wearing the Muslim headscarf, for example, are not allowed admission to any school or campus in the country. Unfortunately, the Muslim world has never experienced a secular government that grants religious freedom.”
– from Mustafa Akyol, “Render Unto Atatürk”, in “First Things” Magazine
(www.firstthings.com/article/2007/02/render-unto-atatuumlrk-48)
“The cult of Mustafa Kemal continues in Turkey, along with the official illiberal secularism………”
Mmmh, things are changing in Turkey…. and NOT for the better.
The honest atheism of Moldbug (or, come to think of it, John C. Wright) is closer to the Kingdom than the dimwitted theism of… well… most of mainstream Christianity.
John C. Wright’s blog is one that should be in your daily feed.
(Don’t be put off by Steve’s description of him as an atheist. If you follow that link, you find the story of his conversion.)
Here for example, is Wright’s recent post explaining what’s wrong with PC:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/03/thought-police-and-the-poets/
Along with the critiques we’ve all seen before, Wright adds one from the perspective of a writer: PC lacks drama!
There are some insightful commenters on Wright’s blog too. Here’s one on the article I linked to above:
Indeed Corky. I see in John C. Wright’s conversion an overwhelming danger that likely confronts all honest atheists (i.e., ones that haven’t substituted some dorky pseudo-religion in place of the real one): viz., that in order for everything to make sense, everything ought to make sense. Once you admit that, then it seems only a thin tissue separates you from convinced belief in the Self-Existent One. I would not be surprised to read of a similar story coming from Moldbug in the coming years. And Foseti is in the same boat.
Wright is close to the Orthosphere, imo, even if he’s never heard of it–a bit too free-market economics for my tastes, but nevertheless a fellow traveler.
Or one could simply reject the above spaghetti thelogy. The former option is so very much better and simpler than the latter whining. Unfortunately, Abrahamists will not simply step aside and acquiesece, as they ought to do.
Anyone familiar with my namesake will perhaps acknowledge that, in some cases, atheism *does* necessitate a reason to die.
Ah, Alexei Nilych Kirillov…
R.J. Stove has a site at http://rjstove.net/ that may be of interest to the Orthosphere.
“That is the heart of the problem. Atheism doesn’t necessitate a reason to die, but it certainly doesn’t offer a reason to live. It doesn’t offer a reason for choosing between the two options and it couldn’t offer a methodology for choosing between them, anyway. It doesn’t offer anything.”
I don’t think you can hope to understand reality by continuously asking the question of every discovery, “But what does it offer me?” It’s not really in line with truth-seeking, and this is where I think most atheists trump religious folk. They’re more dedicated to accepting reality as it is.
However, I cannot deny that I’ve yet to meet a happy, well-adjusted atheist. I’ve met lots of them who claim they’re happy and well-adjusted, but I ain’t seen the proof in the pudding.
It may be that reality is not conducive to human happiness. If that’s true, is it better to understand reality as it is or bury our heads in the sand in favor of religious dreams?
It’s disturbing to see how intellectually feminine men can become through an earnest Christianity. I’ve seen it at work and used it to my advantage.