guitarstring87 Posted March 15, 2015 Share Posted March 15, 2015 Mormon here. Also trying to reconcile the same issues brought up in the recent podcast "An atheist Apologizes to Christians". I mean this to be an honest and heartfelt discussion. Please think deeply about your responses before posting. In my experience the pain felt by so many to leave religion is from the loss of hope. Religion offers hope that there is more after death... That you can see your family again. If the superstitions aren't real, the people who are dead are dead and there is no more hope in seeing them again so letting go of religion is like letting go of the people you have loved all over again, but permanently.I used to think that living in a pretend reality is a small price to pay for hope. On the other hand, I think the pain of loss and the finality of death pushes me to live my life more fully. If there isn't more after i die, I had better make the most of my life. But how can you cope with the pain of death and injustice? I imagine this is exactly why impoverished or repressed populations are also usually deeply religious.As a parent I have not had to deal with the death of a child, or another person that is so close to my heart. I cant even imagine the pain. I am sure I would trade all of my "reason" for just a shred of hope should I have to deal with something so terrible. Really. How can a person deal with a loss like that without hope?Life is a hard place. I am having a difficult time giving up hope too. It is definitely a painful process and giving up religion has far reaching ramifications, not just for hope, but justice.Is it worth it? Honestly? Would you sacrifice reason for hope? It seems as though the two cannot coexist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neeeel Posted March 15, 2015 Share Posted March 15, 2015 If you give me £1000 now, I will give you £10,000,000 in 1 years time. So why arent you going to give me £1000? You are sacrificing hope. As a parent I have not had to deal with the death of a child, or another person that is so close to my heart. I cant even imagine the pain. I am sure I would trade all of my "reason" for just a shred of hope should I have to deal with something so terrible. Really. How can a person deal with a loss like that without hope? This doesnt make sense. Either you believe, in which case you already have that "hope", or you dont believe , in which case you cant just pretend to believe. It doesnt work like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProfessionalTeabagger Posted March 16, 2015 Share Posted March 16, 2015 Remember in that conversation it was pointed out that despair often arises from an acceptance of a false dichotomy. The very title of this post is a dichotomy. Hope or reason. What could be a third option? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guitarstring87 Posted March 16, 2015 Author Share Posted March 16, 2015 Remember in that conversation it was pointed out that despair often arises from an acceptance of a false dichotomy. The very title of this post is a dichotomy. Hope or reason. What could be a third option? The callers main issue was that he didn't want to give up his community. So the 3rd option for the caller Scott, was to take god out of it and use religion for the moral principles. That way he can still keep his family and community. There is no false dichotomy in my post. Either there is something more when you die and superstition is real or there is not. I would also like to point out that the absence of hope does not equal dispair. What i am saying is that Atheism and Religion cant both be the truth. Logic and reason lead me directly to atheism, hope for life after death leads me to religion. An atheist cannot have hope that there is more when they are dead or that there will be some form of eternal justice or he would not be an atheist. There is no 3rd option. So what I am saying, is when the terrible things in life happen... Atheism can offer no hope in regards to death or justice. So to accept atheism (reason) means to deny religion (hope) in regards to death and in regard to justice. The first objective of the post was to point out that the loss of hope is painful. Either there is an afterlife and religion is right or there is no afterlife and religion is wrong. You can't have both. The implications that there is no afterlife hurts deeply. The second objective of the post was to ask the question... When the worst things in life happen to you,would you give up reason in order to have hope? And to get introspective responses from atheists on how they deal with extreme emotional pain and loss. Not hypothetical pain and loss, but personal experiences. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProfessionalTeabagger Posted March 16, 2015 Share Posted March 16, 2015 Fair enough. You should stop saying "hope" and just say "afterlife" then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guitarstring87 Posted March 16, 2015 Author Share Posted March 16, 2015 Fair enough. You should stop saying "hope" and just say "afterlife" then. Yeah I should have made it more clear. Thanks for the feed back. Are you an atheist? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt D Posted March 16, 2015 Share Posted March 16, 2015 In my experience the pain felt by so many to leave religion is from the loss of hope. Religion offers hope that there is more after death... That you can see your family again. If the superstitions aren't real, the people who are dead are dead and there is no more hope in seeing them again so letting go of religion is like letting go of the people you have loved all over again, but permanently. Do you think that you can't see your deceased family members again if there is no afterlife? That you can't talk to them? I would challenge you there. I'm an atheist, and although my family is not dead I have separated or defooed from them. But I talk to them regularly in my head and I see them in my dreams and in my memories. You see, if you have dig into yourself with affection and deep understanding, you don't actually have to wait until death to see your family. Could it be that hoping for an afterlife is a way of avoiding talking to your family right now? Here's a video I made responding to the call-in show you referenced. I think you might find it intriguing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU5-oh-ZbZg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J. D. Stembal Posted March 16, 2015 Share Posted March 16, 2015 Since it is impossible to die and then spontaneously come back to life, why do you have so much interest in the afterlife? That is the province of the dead, and not the living. If you are posting in the thread, you are not dead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheRobin Posted March 17, 2015 Share Posted March 17, 2015 You ask how can people deal with loss if they have no hope. I'd say the premises aren't really true. You don't deal with anything if you still have hope, cause you got the imaginary idea of "the person's not dead", so there's nothing to deal with, except a longer pause in the relationship.The only way to deal with it is to actually face the reality and the emotions it brings. Hope is like an anestethic, it doesn't help people deal with anything it just makes you numb towards your own feelings of sadness (and as a result also numbs down everything else that is connected to that).So to me it's a bit similar to asking "How can you deal with loss if you got no drugs?" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Madman Person Guy Posted March 17, 2015 Share Posted March 17, 2015 It's always this appeal to higher morality that gets me wound up about religious people; not the belief in actual miracles or fables or dei in machina intervention, because that you can take or leave. Those aren't the important bits. But the idea that "godlessness" is always equivalent to immorality. As though mutualism, reciprocal altruism and deferral of gratification are just so many scribbled lines on a paper. Reason is hope. Morality is perfectly explainable through reason, possibly even mathematics, and the only reason that people in general do not see this is because they are sentimentalists. They're at such an intensely low level of perspective and buried in their own impressions and/or so affected by mere chemical triggers that they have a hard time looking at things from the outset. But if people can tie up such immoral concepts as democracy and the false assumption of human practicable egality with the justification for things like freedom of speech, choice and the pursuit of happiness as though they need some kind of physical validation for these things... well, then I'll just argue that tying up God with morality to the same extent is at least equally dangerous and likely to twist people's actual morality into knots, or produce such cognitive dissonance as to ultimately dissociate them from any morality with an actual logical basis, see; suicide bombers, "pro-lifers", luddites, etc. So no, I would never choose "hope" before reason. On a more personal level, it would also be because try as I might I think I'd still be aware of the choice and thus that the hope in question was fundamentally false on that account. And from one stance it could actually be argued that to be aware of this dissonance or one's refusal to accept morality, i.e. doing evil for evil's sake, is still morally superior to not realizing it and doing horrible things out of a misguided will to do good, even if the end product of either line of thought was an equal amount of theft, murder, cruelty to kittens, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sal9000 Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Sam Harris on how to deal with death as an atheist. Cannot recommend the lecture high enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shirgall Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 I would sacrifice reason for survival. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt.prince19 Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Sal9000, thanks for posting that video. I would definitely recommend that for everyone to give it a watch when they have the time. I did the meditation exercise and it was extremely soothing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guitarstring87 Posted March 18, 2015 Author Share Posted March 18, 2015 Yes it was a very good video! Thank you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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