In his correspondence our friend Gaedhal tells a group of correspondents:
Clarification on my theistic status (a critique of right-wing atheism)
As I said before, I am very clear as to which gods I disbelieve in. I disbelieve in the gods of Classical Theism. I disbelieve in the gods of revealed religion: Yahweh, Zeus, Krishna et al. However, other conceptions and formulations of Deity I am extremely open to. I like to speculate upon this topic in the privacy of my own mind, and entertain my own god concepts within the sanctuary of my own mind.
The reason why I don’t critique atheism that much is because Christianity is a trillion-dollar conspiracy. Atheism is not. Atheism runs on a shoestring. Richard Dawkins does not own any basilicas. Sam Harris does not own a microstate in Rome, filled with jewels and priceless works of art. However, there are things about atheism that must be critiqued. Atheism, in my view, is full of disturbing ideas. Dr Robert Morgan, here, seems to drift into Benatarian antinatalism.
The link to the Wikipedia article is mine.
Morgan calls himself a misanthrope. I personally, do not hate humanity: I hate the mob. As Aron Ra puts it: thanks to competing evolutionary strategies, humanity is both the best species on the planet, as well as the worst.
This seems obvious to me. Although Gaedhal doesn’t appreciate Uncle Adolf, I think people like him would redeem the world from its evil, if only we would follow him (that’s why I recently uploaded so many posts about the New Order).
Morgan says that love does not exist, only hate. I say that hate is this planet’s ruling passion, but that love also exists. With Schopenhauer, I say that hate is our default setting, but that love is an active negation of hate. Hate is an effortless default state. Love takes effort, and is a negation of hate.
Morgan believes that existence is homo homini lupus, ‘man is a wolf to man’. Morgan believes that existence is a war of all against all. However, as Aron Ra and P.Z. Myers point out, cooperation is also an evolutionary strategy. The reason why humans are this planet’s apex predator is because humans cooperate the best.
I sometimes use ‘atheism’ as a lazy shorthand for: ‘a rejection of classical theism’. However, I kinda agree with Sheldrake quoting Bertrand Russell: Deterministic materialism culminating in heat death [also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze in cosmology—Ed.] is a philosophy of unyielding despair. I agree with Benatar, in that if this universe really is a machine that is slowly running out of steam, and will soon disintegrate into the heat death of maximum entropy, then, yes, it is immoral to bring children into such a quicksand existence.
Perhaps Gaedhal didn’t read what I wrote about the hypothetical Big Chill in a post of December 2021, ‘Time here becomes Space’ in honour of the numinous music of Wagner’s Parsifal: ‘Once in the very distant future, where there are no more corpses of stars, and not even black holes that evaporate with time (remember Stephen Hawking’s phrase: “black holes are not so black”), leaving only photons in an expanding universe, if time ceases to make sense—then space, in our Newtonian sense, will cease to make sense. The moment time ceases to exist, space ceases to exist as well! And that would mean a new beginning or big bang insofar as astronomically large space would be, without time, nothing: equivalent again to a mathematical point or a new singularity. I hadn’t thought of that possibility…’ In other words, perhaps an eternal Big Chill won’t happen. Gaedhal continues:
One of Benatar’s books is The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism. Morgan has ‘skimmed through’ Benatar, and is undoubtedly familiar with this book. Morgan’s comment below [not quoted here—Ed.] reminds me of Benatar’s book. However, the reason that I do not espouse Benatarian antinatalism is because I do not positively believe in deterministic materialism culminating in heat death. I call atheists ‘oblivion chasers’.
Oblivion chasers? This reminds me a lot of a scene from ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’, the second episode of the last season of Game of Thrones, where Bran Stark reveals the mind of the Night King: he wants perpetual night (the Big Chill). I think I’ve already talked on this site about that scene where Sam says in public, before the Battle of the Long Night, that this is precisely why the Night King wants to kill Bran, who represents the knowledge of Westeros’ past.
I do not see myself represented in either the atheism of the left or in the atheism of the right. To call oneself an ‘atheist’ is to place oneself as a member in the set of atheism—and this is not something that I am comfortable with. I don’t want to be associated with co-members in the set of atheism.
That’s why I don’t call myself an atheist either!
Postscript. Atheists say that atheism is not a belief system and technically, they are correct. However, is it mere coincidence that most of them—damn near all of them—positively believe in deterministic materialism culminating in heat death?
There is a lot of the etymological fallacy going on with the definition of ‘atheism’. If ‘atheism’ is commonly used to denote deterministic materialism culminating in heat death, then that is its definition. If 99.9% of atheists believe in deterministic materialism culminating in heat death, then it is not wrong to say that this is a tenet of atheism. A word is not defined by its etymology, but by how it is used. Atheism is very very often used to denote deterministic materialism culminating in heat death.
That’s why it is worth re-reading what I wrote about a phrase from Wagner’s Parsifal. Roger Penrose made me see that space—like time—is also an illusion, although this won’t be apparent until the last black hole evaporates. The Night King might not get his way after all in the cosmological song of ice and fire!
10 replies on “On atheism”
See also what I wrote in 2020, ‘Between ice and fire’, although that post was uploaded in the old incarnation of this site and now contains more than a broken link.
This stuff about “it is immoral to bring children to this world” is one of the most cucked, emasculated rationalizations I have heard.
Any man who castrates itself by suppressing his own will to power like this deserves extinction.
However, I find it amusing that this antinatalist ideology has become trendy in recent years, which wouldn’t be a problem if not for the influence it may have on younger women.
Women who are ridiculed for aspiring to become mothers instead of sterilizing themselves by pursuing a career and having fun in the process.
The system encourages this and it’s important to be aware of that.
Some would argue that when the last conscious observer dies then this universe would go out of existence. I think that Amit Goswami and Joseph Selbie would argue this. If this is true, then the notion that this universe will drift on into heat death—a process that would take inconceivably long epochs of time—after the last conscious observer dies, sounds to me a little farfetched.
The point at issue is that only a conscious entity can sense time. Without consciousness the time lapse until black holes evaporate (Penrose compares it to the disturbances that raindrops cause in a pond), though astronomical, would be paradoxically instantaneous.
Nice to see Benatar getting mentioned again. As you know, I believe the only constant is suffering. On that note, I should inform you that I have recently suffered a regression and become very ill again. The months ahead are going to be absolutely horrendous.
Just out of curiosity: what disease do you suffer from?
César, we have discussed that before. You know it is a very sensitive subject. I was a highly neurotic child, who became a highly neurotic adult. I am tormented by my own mind. I always have been. For me, cnsciousness is an inescapable curse. Sometimes I become so overwhelmed with fear, uncertainty and self-hatred, I break. These depressive episodes can be severe. The worst one, in October 2016, lasted six months. I wrote a short poem about that experience.
My life is a nightmare, I cannot wake
I regret my birth, that dreadful mistake
The hurt I try so hard to hide
Betrayed by the tears welling up in my eyes
It is such a weight, this burden I bear
How I envy those fools without a care
I feel the warm stream down my face
Of agony unspoken, my secret disgrace
It is so immense, the pain that I feel
From an open wound that will never heal
Consumed by anger, guilt and fear
As the wound grows, I disappear
You should stop all intellectual activity online and write a book about the most painful episodes of your life, especially how you were treated by those who raised you. It is curious that none of the racialists I know want to follow me in the footsteps that saved me. (Those of my relatives who didn’t follow in my footsteps ended very badly, like my cousin who killed his daughter and then hanged himself.)
My mother raised me alone. Her life has been absolute hell also, and for 30 years I’ve been there to see her suffer. It affects the way you develop. She has had vicious migraines for 50 years. I don’t really have anything negative to say about her as a mother. She has done, and continues to do, the very best she can under extremely unfavourable circumstances. I will only say that, as is the case for all procreators, they know not what they do. My mother understands that I would like to end my life peacefully in the not-too-distant future. She will be 63 in January, and signs of her age are becoming more apparent to me. It bothers me enormously. I am not comfortable with me remaining alive past her reaching age 70. She understands that the forces arrayed against us are immense, she knows how dire things would become if I were left alone in the world, and for this reason, she agrees that a comparatively early death would be in my best interest. Ideally I would like for her to accompany me on that final journey, as she could never endure the grief of losing her only child, but this is complicated by the fact that she has a partner who she loves very dearly. How could I possibly ask her to choose between us?
When you create a new sentient being, you are condemning an innocent person to suffer these agonising, inescapable scenarios. There is never a good reason for doing so.
I think you will follow in the footsteps of my family. My cousin was not the only one who met a tragic end. Nobody wants to write down in detail, anecdote by anecdote, the most painful events of their lives. If they did, they would make findings.
When I was living in utter darkness, I believed that the cause of my problems was the lack of a partner. When I sat down to write down my life I couldn’t believe that this was a myth: the cause was always my parents. But I had it all bottled up. It wasn’t until I corrected the syntax of my books (you have to read the same paragraph about twenty times to polish the prose) that I saw the light: a light that no one will see because they won’t cross that psychological Rubicon.