The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?
This is the part that matters most to me. In fact, I still recall the first time I really began to think about it. I was reading a book about Jean-Paul Sartre. I believe it was a printed companion to a film/documentary about him.
[No Exit by Harold Pinter perhaps?]
In it, the author spoke of a friend of Sartre’s who had traveled to the Soviet Union to experience first hand the so-called New Man that was being created by the Marxist Revolution. Only when the discussion got around to death – to oblivion – it turned out that the New Man was really no better off than the Old Man. Sure, one might manage to think him or herself into believing that they “lived on” after death through the Revolution. For some that worked.
But, for others, who was kidding whom?
No God? No religious path? Forget about it. You die and you’re just more dead meat ever and always disintegrating back to star stuff. Communist or capitalist.
What’s being “good enough” have to do with it? Seriously. It’s either that, the No God Eastern rendition or oblivion. You know, “for all practical purposes”.
Forget demonstrating it descriptively. That’s still just a world of words, right? The concept of God?
On the other hand, given a No God universe, Humanists are still no closer to transcending conceptual contraptions themselves of whatever reality might possibly be going back – infinitely? – to an understanding of Existence itself.
Then there are those who, in accepting this, abandon philosophy altogether. And then those like me who, in accepting it, still can’t quite bring themselves to go that far.
Yet as it were.