The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?
Instead, I turn it around. It’s not what makes sense to someone [about God or anything] but how what they believe makes sense to them allows them to feel more or less anchored to something – anything – in the way of a meaning of and a purpose to their existence. It all becomes entangled in the complex interactions of the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious mind trying to make sense of the lives that are lived from day to day. But here such lives can become so vastly different there is simply no “one size fits all” narrative. You can only go from individual to individual and try to connect the dots between biological imperatives and the existential parameters of their own unique collection of experiences. Theodicy becomes just one more component of how enormously complex and convoluted all of these interacting variables become when “I” confronts meaning and purpose in my life.
God and religion is merely one possibility for connecting all these dots to a transcending font. But it’s the psychological need itself to connect them that I focus in on. And the part that my own understanding of dasein plays in all of that.
On the contrary, human existence is such that there are any number of distractions – wants and needs – able to take our minds elsewhere. And isn’t God and religion always an option for taking any thoughts you do have about oblivion to a comforting and consoling place “in your head”? Sure, some can talk about the need to be “authentic” in regard to facing up to death…but what is that but just another existential component of dasein.