You can feel it in the spaces between Dawkins' lines: the ache for coherence, the pulse of myth, the strange comfort of metaphor wrapped in ritual. Even as he dismantles the scaffolding of faith, he seems to reach for its gravity—for the communal awe, the moral architecture, the poetry of meaning.
Maybe the question isn’t “What replaces religion?”
Maybe it’s “What remains sacred, once the myths have burned?”
It's his quest for meaning. Now, you are implying that there is something religious about this. And in that case you have a different understanding of religion than he has.
Alta, thank you for sharpening the lens here. When I said “something religious,” I wasn’t pointing to dogma or creeds but to the deeper human circuitry that seeks coherence and shared wonder. Dawkins parses religion as organized belief; I’m tracing the pulse beneath—our reflex to ritualize meaning, to turn experience into moral architecture.
Maybe “religious” is the wrong flag. Let’s try “existential gravity.” We still circle campfires—now they glow in particle accelerators and hospital wards—but we gather for the same primal reasons: to name the unknown, to bind our stories, to aim our ethics beyond the self.
So I’m curious: if myth-making is optional and institutions are suspect, what forms do you see rising to hold that gravity? Where do we anchor communal awe without slipping back into empty certainty—or hollow cynicism?
Grateful for the dialogue. Let’s keep carving new language for the sacred impulse that refuses extinction.
You are making some very good points, which are food for thought. (I apologize, right now I don't have the time to continue this discussion, but I entirely support a way of thinking that tries to find a place for the sacred in our lives).
We don't need to "hold that gravity" or "anchor communal awe" or posit a "sacred impulse." The wonder, the poetry of reality is sufficient. To experience is sufficient and is everything.
Oh, there's more for sure. I know and understand Richard's point of view and beliefs, and non-beliefs, but for a deaf person, music is just a simple vibration felt through the body or, even more often, ignored. Everyone has their path. Mr Dawkins is not an exception, even though he is an exceptional human "specimen".
Yes, lovely invitation. To dig a little deeper - the roots of 'religion' (and 'yoga', by the way) are to yoke, to bind, to unite, and leads me to say that Dawkins is merely reacting to a superficial use of the word whilst longing for and even prescribing its underlying meaning. To make connections. I would also not disdain as he does the response of the imagination. Check out Corbin and the ontological realm of the imaginal. We are all connected (whether we like it or not) and there are so many thresholds to explore in honouring those connections. Come one, come all.
What must remain “sacred” after ALL the myths have been burned, is their ashes as a poignant reminder that myths MUST be burned at the flame of reason if humanity is ever to escape the crippling hold of their delusional entrapment.
A very good short book on this subject is “Religion for atheists” by Alain de Botton, where he says that atheists threw away the water with the baby, and details what the baby is and why it is necessary.
Science reinforces the shared wonder and communal awe you speak of. But what can it mean to "anchor" that awe in something other than to gain control over it?
Religion has a way of hijacking certain human needs to the point where we’ve become convinced that *only* religion can provide these things. It may be true that religions are good at providing those things, but religion also includes a lot of unnecessary things along the way. Finding a non-religious solution means extracting the genuine need from the religious window dressing, and building on that need.
This nails it. The vast majority of the world’s population needs religion because they’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, where the most immediate concerns are safety, shelter, and basic survival; food, water, security.
As people begin to climb that ladder, the need for God diminishes as those needs are met.
But then there are those higher up who cling to religion not out of necessity, but as a prop for identity; a way to mark “us” from “them.”
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." K. Marx 1844.
I need spiritual anchoring and belief now, in later life when I am financially out of precariously, more than I did before. The energy and initiative required to survive in my younger years, — the fuel of ambition and scarcity— were a Jetpack of meaning and belief in and of themselves. There is enormous, spiritual malaise, and psychic illness in those who are well off and secure. Pure class analysis doesn’t solve this riddle.l
It seems that it's exactly a change in class status that triggered your soul aches though, so maybe Marx's interpretation idea is more confirmed than disproved by your experience.
There are other reasons why people become religious again, or continue to believe in faith even after their lives have changed; still, it’s about psychological needs, not about any inherent truth or revelation about a God.
Yup. I don’t either. I mean great writers, musicians, artists? Sure. Worship away. But imaginary and violent omniscient overlords need our worship? How bizarre is that? It’s like a terrible mind virus that keeps replicating and replicating itself. Ick.
And maybe there’s a point at which we deal with the need to worship at all. Maybe those who come after us will figure that out. Or maybe A.I. will. Wouldn’t it be awful if it learned how to worship?
Having been raised to believe that I was going to hell if I didn't have faith in nonsense beliefs, letting go of Christianity is one of the most liberating things that I have done in my life.
Love this, no modifications. It seems like every time someone articulates an a-theistic, reality based understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe (and few articulate it as well as Dawkins), others are quick to say "yes but ... spirituality", etc. Yes, we are humans and therefore we are conscious, we experience awe, and we take meaning (with a small "m") from human company, culture, our relationship to other living organisms and systems, but those experiences do not need defending. No one is attacking them. What needs defending is the clarity and profound recognition of our own nature that comes with reference to reality, which provides all the awe and joy we need. There is a lot of hew and cry by religious people that they are under attack from atheists. I haven't done research, but it has always seemed to me the signs are reversed; it is atheists who are constantly criticized as missing something vital. I always appreciate reading Dawkins on these subjects.
“…the joy of curiosity, of constructive wonder, the buccaneering adventure of the restless mind.” Absolutely! Similar thoughts echoed in me the other day when I read this and I was just speaking last evening with my father-in-law about this article…
I can’t help lately that I’m increasingly annoyed by this sentiment that because non-religiosity has been on the rise for the last 30 years and people have been leaving the churches, that must explain why people are so lonely and there’s so much anomie in society. All of a sudden, there’s a penchant to blame the atheists, humanists, or secularists for all the ills of society. Give me a break! We’ve had Christianity for two thousand years. Might the proper comparative analysis be to wait and see what two thousand years of secular forces might conjure up for humanity? Are we to believe that prior to Christianity, humans were pitiful dopes just spending their days groveling in the mud lacking no sense of meaning and purpose? Also, might the numerous sex scandals of the Church and corruption of high ranking pastors just maybe have something to do with people going “wait a minute, maybe these religious folks don’t have a monopoly on morality and meaning after all.”
Also, they referenced the Harvard Study of Adult Development in the NYT piece and if you haven’t read ‘The Good Life’ by Robert Waldinger and checked out his work, I highly recommend it. As an anthropologist, it makes complete sense that what creates a flurry of healthy, self-reinforcing mechanisms in one’s life is constructing and sustaining good relationships. Kinship and strong group dynamics have been the crux of human solidarity, well-being, and meaning-making for millennia and there are many modern factors that have splintered those connections unfortunately but community and belonging, it must be said, are also not something exclusive to the religious.
I find it just a bit insulting if people are placing the onus on the non-religious because they can’t figure out why they lack meaning and propose. As someone like Dawkins or Carl Sagan, have eloquently put it time and again, it’s all about being curious, inquisitive, being filled by wonder in the realities of nature and the cosmos. I still haven’t figured out why some people haven’t found awe and inspiration in the here and now but I could write a book about all the ways this singular life I’m living has tons of meaning without religion or god. It isn’t that hard and I don’t know why so many seem to struggle with it.
There is no end to finding meaning in this life when you remain curious. The supply of things to do and ponder is infinite. Interesting enough, a close friend of mine who was once an atheist and turned to whatever brand of Christianity Jordan Peterson is selling, said it well years ago: The purpose of life, is to assign life a purpose. What could be more liberating for your conscience than that?
" We’ve had Christianity for two thousand years. "
Who is we? Christianity didn't become the state religion of Rome until 381 AD and didn't come to the UK until 597AD.
"I find it just a bit insulting if people are placing the onus on the non-religious because they can’t figure out why they lack meaning and propose."
Who said they did? Maybe the lack of meaning and purpose is in the atheist?
"As someone like Dawkins or Carl Sagan, have eloquently put it time and again, it’s all about being curious, inquisitive, being filled by wonder in the realities of nature and the cosmos. "
No "it", by which you mean "life", isn't all about that.
"The supply of things to do and ponder is infinite. Interesting enough, a close friend of mine who was once an atheist and turned to whatever brand of Christianity Jordan Peterson is selling, said it well years ago: The purpose of life, is to assign life a purpose. "
Peterson isn't a Christian of any kind, more research needed there my friend.
Stephen Jay Gould famously described science and religion as two "nonoverlapping magisteria." I used to take a hard atheist line, for the same reasons that most atheists do: the world seems fucked up and unfair, humans are clearly just hairless apes, and humans are clearly desperate for a get-out-of-jail free card for their own mortality. It was the last bit--the terror of ego extinction--that seemed most convincing to me when I lost of vestiges of faith in my early teens.
But as I have gotten older, some doubt has crept into my doubt. The fact is, no one has every gotten past the problem of the need for a prime mover, as Aristotle put it--an initial cause that kicked off all subsequent causality. Just as human logic is impotent when trying to prove the existence of God, it is just as impotent when it comes to the task of disproving it. The basic fact is that the question is simply above the pay grade of humans, whose grasp of reality is limited--as Immanuel Kant observed--only to what they perceive and the mental byproducts of those perceptions.
We see time and space, and assume that these phenomena represent the fundamental nature of reality, though physicists have long suggested that time may, in fact, be an emergent characteristic. The more deeply physicists delve into nature of physical reality, the weirder the answers that they dig up. The human mind, of course, has evolved within this reality and simply can't imagine any other. But, perhaps, we are like sims in Sim City struggling to comprehend the work of the game designers. In our reality, events unfold in only one direction, while the game player can revert to previous moments or pause at will--and the game designer sees it as a code consisting of variables and numbers.
Fuck if I know. I will never know, because we are hairless apes who vastly overestimate our own intelligence. To state that any human has pure insight into the fundamental nature of reality is sheer pride, and the more honest and humble position to take is, "Who knows?"
I guess that is why years ago I decided that I prefer to think of myself as agnostic rather than atheist. I see zero proof of a God, yet my limited brain thinks in terms of a starting point. I can not fathom how all matter came out of no where prior to the big bang....if an expanding universe had this massive explosion. So I just basically say screw it and deal with my reality.
Beautiful piece. I use myself as an example you don’t need religion to live a meaningful and joyful life. Amazing wife and kids, a large, loving family, wonderful friends, a job you love and you’re passionate about, continued learning, travel, music, sports, and the list goes on. Perhaps I’m a simple man but I feel for others who don’t find meaning in all that life has to offer - it just requires effort and some good fortune.
I think the issue is the fellowship that exists in church communities and the accompanying caring. You become a member and are welcome just by declaring your faith. Ceremony and prayer provide glue. Humanism has attempted to fill this need but has failed
I was raised in my mom's mainline Protestant church, but rejected patriarchal Theism in my teens, in favor of a more Spinozan, i.e. all-but-atheist worldview. I've never felt the tribal buzz of communal deity-worship, although the "all-but" part is one reason why I've always enjoyed sharing measures of joy with other self-confessed "nature lovers". Nonetheless, it sure looks to me like some people do obtain reinforcing social and psychological benefits specifically from church membership, including explicitly shared faith.
After retiring a while back, I moved to a small rural community. My nearest neighbor is a non-denominational Christian church. I've more than once declined to join the congregation, as politely as I can without explaining that I think their faith is epistemically a vessel of figurative feces. When I've been with groups of church members for neighborly purposes, we don't discuss politics or religion! I have nevertheless been the repeated recipient of their collective benevolence and caring. Their mutual commitment to reciprocal support and encouragement seems to go beyond what I enjoy with my fellow nature lovers. While holding them at arm's length from my own inner life, I'd be the last person to insist the church members abandon their shared faith and go their separate existential ways. Acknowledging that each of them possesses agency, I don't imagine they'd pay any attention to me if I did! Nor can I imagine why I'd wish them to: that would be uncaring.
The "glue" you refer to: "ceremony and prayer" doesn't do a thing for me as the prayer part in particular, is just pretence of communicating to someone who isn't there. That gives me no joy, but does reflect my childish "lets pretend" bent. Perhaps, the author need to grow up........ And ceremony unless based on reality, means nothing to me.
David, it moves you because you emotionally associated it with a loving father type god figure indoctrinated into you in your youth, and nothing since has replaced that comfort. BUT is it a real comfort, or a pretend one? The song I associate with my childhood religion is "this world is not my home; I'm just a passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue......."
Think of how thinking this debilitates one from living fully HERE and NOW.....rather than just putting in time for an after death experience. Robs one of one's life here, for a guess about after death. We have been hoodwinked......
by our religious upbringing and it has ruined our awe of nature as it IS.
I think one thing organized religion provides is a community that's apparently hard to replace outside organized religion, at least in modern America. I went to a church recently at the invitation of friends, and there obviously was a nice community there of people who bonded not only over religion but also over other shared interests. I would like to be part of that community, but I'm not willing to accept the requirement of attending church services.
That's a bit like saying you want community without any responsibility or commitment for maintaining the community. However, there are a lot of churches where you can do exactly that. But you'll get out of it what you put into it.
Not at all. I am happy to take responsibility for my share of maintaining the community. I just don't want that responsibility (or role) to be religious. But there isn't an obvious alternative to the communities organized religion promoted, which led to my original comment.
There have been quite a few experiments of humanist/secular groups trying to organize and simulate "church" without religious beliefs. A few of them persist in various places, but they generally struggle and don't endure very long.
Also, there is the Universalist Unitarian "church" which may be what you're looking for. They are mostly agnostics and atheists who profess openness and respect to any sort of world view out there. Most of them are ex-Christians who would prefer learning about Haitian voudou spirits over a sermon about Jesus Christ. Think very homogenous, middle and upper class white retirees who have a common belief in recycling. No disposable cups and plates!
Richard, your eloquent defense of reality as the ultimate source of awe and meaning is profoundly inspiring. The 'poetry of reality' captures the beauty and improbability of existence so vividly—it's a reminder to celebrate our shared humanity and the wonder of the universe.
I admire your call to revel in knowledge and curiosity as a remedy to existential insecurity. It's a powerful counterpoint to the illusionary comforts often sought elsewhere. The joy of understanding, as you describe it, feels like an invitation to engage deeply with life rather than seeking escape from it.
Your reflections on the improbability of life—and the cosmic sequence of events that led to our existence—underscore just how precious this journey is. Thank you for sharing your insights with such passion. They resonate deeply.
Something ancient stirs beneath the logic—
not in spite of science, but alongside it.
You can feel it in the spaces between Dawkins' lines: the ache for coherence, the pulse of myth, the strange comfort of metaphor wrapped in ritual. Even as he dismantles the scaffolding of faith, he seems to reach for its gravity—for the communal awe, the moral architecture, the poetry of meaning.
Maybe the question isn’t “What replaces religion?”
Maybe it’s “What remains sacred, once the myths have burned?”
There’s more. Say it if you feel it.
It's his quest for meaning. Now, you are implying that there is something religious about this. And in that case you have a different understanding of religion than he has.
Alta, thank you for sharpening the lens here. When I said “something religious,” I wasn’t pointing to dogma or creeds but to the deeper human circuitry that seeks coherence and shared wonder. Dawkins parses religion as organized belief; I’m tracing the pulse beneath—our reflex to ritualize meaning, to turn experience into moral architecture.
Maybe “religious” is the wrong flag. Let’s try “existential gravity.” We still circle campfires—now they glow in particle accelerators and hospital wards—but we gather for the same primal reasons: to name the unknown, to bind our stories, to aim our ethics beyond the self.
So I’m curious: if myth-making is optional and institutions are suspect, what forms do you see rising to hold that gravity? Where do we anchor communal awe without slipping back into empty certainty—or hollow cynicism?
Grateful for the dialogue. Let’s keep carving new language for the sacred impulse that refuses extinction.
You are making some very good points, which are food for thought. (I apologize, right now I don't have the time to continue this discussion, but I entirely support a way of thinking that tries to find a place for the sacred in our lives).
We don't need to "hold that gravity" or "anchor communal awe" or posit a "sacred impulse." The wonder, the poetry of reality is sufficient. To experience is sufficient and is everything.
Oh, there's more for sure. I know and understand Richard's point of view and beliefs, and non-beliefs, but for a deaf person, music is just a simple vibration felt through the body or, even more often, ignored. Everyone has their path. Mr Dawkins is not an exception, even though he is an exceptional human "specimen".
Yes, lovely invitation. To dig a little deeper - the roots of 'religion' (and 'yoga', by the way) are to yoke, to bind, to unite, and leads me to say that Dawkins is merely reacting to a superficial use of the word whilst longing for and even prescribing its underlying meaning. To make connections. I would also not disdain as he does the response of the imagination. Check out Corbin and the ontological realm of the imaginal. We are all connected (whether we like it or not) and there are so many thresholds to explore in honouring those connections. Come one, come all.
What must remain “sacred” after ALL the myths have been burned, is their ashes as a poignant reminder that myths MUST be burned at the flame of reason if humanity is ever to escape the crippling hold of their delusional entrapment.
A very good short book on this subject is “Religion for atheists” by Alain de Botton, where he says that atheists threw away the water with the baby, and details what the baby is and why it is necessary.
Deep
Science reinforces the shared wonder and communal awe you speak of. But what can it mean to "anchor" that awe in something other than to gain control over it?
Religion has a way of hijacking certain human needs to the point where we’ve become convinced that *only* religion can provide these things. It may be true that religions are good at providing those things, but religion also includes a lot of unnecessary things along the way. Finding a non-religious solution means extracting the genuine need from the religious window dressing, and building on that need.
This nails it. The vast majority of the world’s population needs religion because they’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, where the most immediate concerns are safety, shelter, and basic survival; food, water, security.
As people begin to climb that ladder, the need for God diminishes as those needs are met.
But then there are those higher up who cling to religion not out of necessity, but as a prop for identity; a way to mark “us” from “them.”
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." K. Marx 1844.
I need spiritual anchoring and belief now, in later life when I am financially out of precariously, more than I did before. The energy and initiative required to survive in my younger years, — the fuel of ambition and scarcity— were a Jetpack of meaning and belief in and of themselves. There is enormous, spiritual malaise, and psychic illness in those who are well off and secure. Pure class analysis doesn’t solve this riddle.l
It seems that it's exactly a change in class status that triggered your soul aches though, so maybe Marx's interpretation idea is more confirmed than disproved by your experience.
There are other reasons why people become religious again, or continue to believe in faith even after their lives have changed; still, it’s about psychological needs, not about any inherent truth or revelation about a God.
Yup. I don’t either. I mean great writers, musicians, artists? Sure. Worship away. But imaginary and violent omniscient overlords need our worship? How bizarre is that? It’s like a terrible mind virus that keeps replicating and replicating itself. Ick.
Extracting the genuine need unquote is self serving?
And maybe there’s a point at which we deal with the need to worship at all. Maybe those who come after us will figure that out. Or maybe A.I. will. Wouldn’t it be awful if it learned how to worship?
I don’t get this “need” to worship. 🤷🏻♀️ It truly eludes me.
Having been raised to believe that I was going to hell if I didn't have faith in nonsense beliefs, letting go of Christianity is one of the most liberating things that I have done in my life.
Same for me, it's been the single best gift I've been able to journey into the good-fortune of realizing.
Nah
Love this, no modifications. It seems like every time someone articulates an a-theistic, reality based understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe (and few articulate it as well as Dawkins), others are quick to say "yes but ... spirituality", etc. Yes, we are humans and therefore we are conscious, we experience awe, and we take meaning (with a small "m") from human company, culture, our relationship to other living organisms and systems, but those experiences do not need defending. No one is attacking them. What needs defending is the clarity and profound recognition of our own nature that comes with reference to reality, which provides all the awe and joy we need. There is a lot of hew and cry by religious people that they are under attack from atheists. I haven't done research, but it has always seemed to me the signs are reversed; it is atheists who are constantly criticized as missing something vital. I always appreciate reading Dawkins on these subjects.
“…the joy of curiosity, of constructive wonder, the buccaneering adventure of the restless mind.” Absolutely! Similar thoughts echoed in me the other day when I read this and I was just speaking last evening with my father-in-law about this article…
I can’t help lately that I’m increasingly annoyed by this sentiment that because non-religiosity has been on the rise for the last 30 years and people have been leaving the churches, that must explain why people are so lonely and there’s so much anomie in society. All of a sudden, there’s a penchant to blame the atheists, humanists, or secularists for all the ills of society. Give me a break! We’ve had Christianity for two thousand years. Might the proper comparative analysis be to wait and see what two thousand years of secular forces might conjure up for humanity? Are we to believe that prior to Christianity, humans were pitiful dopes just spending their days groveling in the mud lacking no sense of meaning and purpose? Also, might the numerous sex scandals of the Church and corruption of high ranking pastors just maybe have something to do with people going “wait a minute, maybe these religious folks don’t have a monopoly on morality and meaning after all.”
Also, they referenced the Harvard Study of Adult Development in the NYT piece and if you haven’t read ‘The Good Life’ by Robert Waldinger and checked out his work, I highly recommend it. As an anthropologist, it makes complete sense that what creates a flurry of healthy, self-reinforcing mechanisms in one’s life is constructing and sustaining good relationships. Kinship and strong group dynamics have been the crux of human solidarity, well-being, and meaning-making for millennia and there are many modern factors that have splintered those connections unfortunately but community and belonging, it must be said, are also not something exclusive to the religious.
I find it just a bit insulting if people are placing the onus on the non-religious because they can’t figure out why they lack meaning and propose. As someone like Dawkins or Carl Sagan, have eloquently put it time and again, it’s all about being curious, inquisitive, being filled by wonder in the realities of nature and the cosmos. I still haven’t figured out why some people haven’t found awe and inspiration in the here and now but I could write a book about all the ways this singular life I’m living has tons of meaning without religion or god. It isn’t that hard and I don’t know why so many seem to struggle with it.
There is no end to finding meaning in this life when you remain curious. The supply of things to do and ponder is infinite. Interesting enough, a close friend of mine who was once an atheist and turned to whatever brand of Christianity Jordan Peterson is selling, said it well years ago: The purpose of life, is to assign life a purpose. What could be more liberating for your conscience than that?
I can be curious, inquisitive, full of wonder and religious. Secularism doesn't own curiosity. I'm in awe, inspired and religious.
Absolutely. Didn’t mean to imply that was the case if I did.
" We’ve had Christianity for two thousand years. "
Who is we? Christianity didn't become the state religion of Rome until 381 AD and didn't come to the UK until 597AD.
"I find it just a bit insulting if people are placing the onus on the non-religious because they can’t figure out why they lack meaning and propose."
Who said they did? Maybe the lack of meaning and purpose is in the atheist?
"As someone like Dawkins or Carl Sagan, have eloquently put it time and again, it’s all about being curious, inquisitive, being filled by wonder in the realities of nature and the cosmos. "
No "it", by which you mean "life", isn't all about that.
"The supply of things to do and ponder is infinite. Interesting enough, a close friend of mine who was once an atheist and turned to whatever brand of Christianity Jordan Peterson is selling, said it well years ago: The purpose of life, is to assign life a purpose. "
Peterson isn't a Christian of any kind, more research needed there my friend.
I’d take understanding the behaviour of photons any day over how the ‘Holy Ghost’ manifests.
Stephen Jay Gould famously described science and religion as two "nonoverlapping magisteria." I used to take a hard atheist line, for the same reasons that most atheists do: the world seems fucked up and unfair, humans are clearly just hairless apes, and humans are clearly desperate for a get-out-of-jail free card for their own mortality. It was the last bit--the terror of ego extinction--that seemed most convincing to me when I lost of vestiges of faith in my early teens.
But as I have gotten older, some doubt has crept into my doubt. The fact is, no one has every gotten past the problem of the need for a prime mover, as Aristotle put it--an initial cause that kicked off all subsequent causality. Just as human logic is impotent when trying to prove the existence of God, it is just as impotent when it comes to the task of disproving it. The basic fact is that the question is simply above the pay grade of humans, whose grasp of reality is limited--as Immanuel Kant observed--only to what they perceive and the mental byproducts of those perceptions.
We see time and space, and assume that these phenomena represent the fundamental nature of reality, though physicists have long suggested that time may, in fact, be an emergent characteristic. The more deeply physicists delve into nature of physical reality, the weirder the answers that they dig up. The human mind, of course, has evolved within this reality and simply can't imagine any other. But, perhaps, we are like sims in Sim City struggling to comprehend the work of the game designers. In our reality, events unfold in only one direction, while the game player can revert to previous moments or pause at will--and the game designer sees it as a code consisting of variables and numbers.
Fuck if I know. I will never know, because we are hairless apes who vastly overestimate our own intelligence. To state that any human has pure insight into the fundamental nature of reality is sheer pride, and the more honest and humble position to take is, "Who knows?"
I guess that is why years ago I decided that I prefer to think of myself as agnostic rather than atheist. I see zero proof of a God, yet my limited brain thinks in terms of a starting point. I can not fathom how all matter came out of no where prior to the big bang....if an expanding universe had this massive explosion. So I just basically say screw it and deal with my reality.
There you go. I concur with every word.
https://biffogram.substack.com/p/death-takes-no-holiday-chapter-4
This is like my point of view that as we spin wildly through the void we ought to simply hold one another's hands.
Thank you, Richard. In my view, spirituality is precisely what you described: to return to the poetry of reality.
I love love love this and it’s true true true!!!
Beautiful piece. I use myself as an example you don’t need religion to live a meaningful and joyful life. Amazing wife and kids, a large, loving family, wonderful friends, a job you love and you’re passionate about, continued learning, travel, music, sports, and the list goes on. Perhaps I’m a simple man but I feel for others who don’t find meaning in all that life has to offer - it just requires effort and some good fortune.
I’ve always thought a religion
not consistent with reality is not much use and that the greatest evil is often human certainty.
I think the issue is the fellowship that exists in church communities and the accompanying caring. You become a member and are welcome just by declaring your faith. Ceremony and prayer provide glue. Humanism has attempted to fill this need but has failed
.
I was raised in my mom's mainline Protestant church, but rejected patriarchal Theism in my teens, in favor of a more Spinozan, i.e. all-but-atheist worldview. I've never felt the tribal buzz of communal deity-worship, although the "all-but" part is one reason why I've always enjoyed sharing measures of joy with other self-confessed "nature lovers". Nonetheless, it sure looks to me like some people do obtain reinforcing social and psychological benefits specifically from church membership, including explicitly shared faith.
After retiring a while back, I moved to a small rural community. My nearest neighbor is a non-denominational Christian church. I've more than once declined to join the congregation, as politely as I can without explaining that I think their faith is epistemically a vessel of figurative feces. When I've been with groups of church members for neighborly purposes, we don't discuss politics or religion! I have nevertheless been the repeated recipient of their collective benevolence and caring. Their mutual commitment to reciprocal support and encouragement seems to go beyond what I enjoy with my fellow nature lovers. While holding them at arm's length from my own inner life, I'd be the last person to insist the church members abandon their shared faith and go their separate existential ways. Acknowledging that each of them possesses agency, I don't imagine they'd pay any attention to me if I did! Nor can I imagine why I'd wish them to: that would be uncaring.
The "glue" you refer to: "ceremony and prayer" doesn't do a thing for me as the prayer part in particular, is just pretence of communicating to someone who isn't there. That gives me no joy, but does reflect my childish "lets pretend" bent. Perhaps, the author need to grow up........ And ceremony unless based on reality, means nothing to me.
An atheist (secular humanist)
since i was 17 i grew up in the Anglican faith - hymns like “abide with me fast falls the evening tide … ‘ still move me deeply …
David, it moves you because you emotionally associated it with a loving father type god figure indoctrinated into you in your youth, and nothing since has replaced that comfort. BUT is it a real comfort, or a pretend one? The song I associate with my childhood religion is "this world is not my home; I'm just a passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue......."
Think of how thinking this debilitates one from living fully HERE and NOW.....rather than just putting in time for an after death experience. Robs one of one's life here, for a guess about after death. We have been hoodwinked......
by our religious upbringing and it has ruined our awe of nature as it IS.
Beautiful. Thank you.
I think one thing organized religion provides is a community that's apparently hard to replace outside organized religion, at least in modern America. I went to a church recently at the invitation of friends, and there obviously was a nice community there of people who bonded not only over religion but also over other shared interests. I would like to be part of that community, but I'm not willing to accept the requirement of attending church services.
That's a bit like saying you want community without any responsibility or commitment for maintaining the community. However, there are a lot of churches where you can do exactly that. But you'll get out of it what you put into it.
Not at all. I am happy to take responsibility for my share of maintaining the community. I just don't want that responsibility (or role) to be religious. But there isn't an obvious alternative to the communities organized religion promoted, which led to my original comment.
There have been quite a few experiments of humanist/secular groups trying to organize and simulate "church" without religious beliefs. A few of them persist in various places, but they generally struggle and don't endure very long.
Also, there is the Universalist Unitarian "church" which may be what you're looking for. They are mostly agnostics and atheists who profess openness and respect to any sort of world view out there. Most of them are ex-Christians who would prefer learning about Haitian voudou spirits over a sermon about Jesus Christ. Think very homogenous, middle and upper class white retirees who have a common belief in recycling. No disposable cups and plates!
Richard, your eloquent defense of reality as the ultimate source of awe and meaning is profoundly inspiring. The 'poetry of reality' captures the beauty and improbability of existence so vividly—it's a reminder to celebrate our shared humanity and the wonder of the universe.
I admire your call to revel in knowledge and curiosity as a remedy to existential insecurity. It's a powerful counterpoint to the illusionary comforts often sought elsewhere. The joy of understanding, as you describe it, feels like an invitation to engage deeply with life rather than seeking escape from it.
Your reflections on the improbability of life—and the cosmic sequence of events that led to our existence—underscore just how precious this journey is. Thank you for sharing your insights with such passion. They resonate deeply.