Appofishpi wrote:What are the logical consequences in your opinion of remaining atheist?
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I chose a brief title for this thread, inspired by Appofishpi's comment, and because this question/statement had come up in other threads. But in fact the question needs to be: What happens when we break connection with 'God' as metaphysical principle (that is, a living and real divine spirit that can and does interact with man), but also what happens when we break connection with our IDEA of God as real metaphysical principle that we imagine or assume interacts with man.
The second aspect of the question is specifically for 'atheists' I suppose, and is not inconsiderable because even an 'atheist' might recognise, as Nietzsche wrote, that men seem to need and even to require their fictions, and the destruction of fictions is destruction of man, and can produce nihilism. (Willey wrote the sections above in 1952, right after the Second World War).
Another aspect of the question is what happens when we break connection to the entire Occidental traditions which is, and has been, overall one of religious concern (I mean when one considers 'antiquity').
As I have said at least a few times, I have no doubt at all that 'the idea of God' (I stick with capitals for tradition's sake) is being completely renovated, but also that in a very real sense there is no language available to us to speak of God, or if there is it is mystical language and is opposed to the rational, positivist language of scientism. It seems to me that the modern revolutions in thinking and seeing have so shattered any traditional means of speaking about God or divinity that we have, against our will or willingly, been pulled into a brave new world in which the notion of God is almost an absurdity. I mean essentially 'the public declaration'.
I reflect on the fact that when one reads the Gospels now it is not at all impossible to imagine and to believe in (as in a novel) the figure of Christ (if one is inclined, yet some might not be). But with any representation of Jesus - in film for example, or in any of the cheap and shallow faith-videos which attempt to represent Jesus in our modern world (the ur-Nice Guy, a bearded neo-hippy running around doing good and then disappearing before one knows who it was), the representations simply do not function. In fact they ruin the possibility of imagination. I am not completely sure what this means except that Christ is more an idea than a reality. If one encounters a divine figure, one will do so in a private, interior world of relationship. I do not in any sense discount this relationship and, quite truthfully, I regard the inner relationship to the world, to meaning, to oneself, and to one's imagination of one's self in this world as having in numerous senses (but not all) as much realness and sometimes much more than one's being in 'real life'. Our inner life is of tremendous consequence.
I cannot conceal, nor would I, that what I notice very strongly is what Willey refers to here as 'the moral and spiritual nihilism of the modern world'. I am sure that one reason I see things in this way is because I live in Latin America and I am witnessing (present tense) the destruction of a culture's relationship to its traditional forms, upon which the ethics and morality of that culture had been constructed. New influences, mostly political and mercantile, are reaching in with formative power and rewriting the script of being for people who have no decisive power, no capacity to make choices. And as Willey writes, when the traditional family, linked to humble but also narrow and even provincial traditionalism, is dragged into modernity, it is inevitable that ersatz-religion shows itself. (I tend to agree with Inglorious about the 'hardwired' aspect of religiousness).
Could be the religion of consumerism and acquisitiveness, or a life constructed around consuming entertainment-products, or it could be more obsessive substitutes like pornography, radical sensuality, sport mania and other manifestations of 'social madness' or disequilibrium in any case. Yet there is a definite trend toward obsession-laden cultural forms which can certainly be questioned. What in general can be referred to as 'nihilism' and the result of nihilism.
I am somewhat surprised that the atheist-camp here on this forum does not address nihilism nor the state forms of ersatz-religion: totalitarianism in both its mild form (consumerism) and severe form (state-sponsored atheism). But then that crowd seems largely unencumbered by a need for a structured and coherant discourse. We are not at all immune to these trends and they are present among us.
The problem is that there are consequences both to atheism as a modern trend, and just as much to unexamined religiousness and religious obsessiveness.
I don't really expect the 'atheist' camp here to read the pages attached but the other camp will find it interesting indeed.
