📜 So - middle of the night reflection, because I can't seem to post the Patreon piece I need to without saying something deeper here, o CoSo, where the "human" in me is at its safest:
I'm in an odd spot. I'm able to care for many, but I'm in no position to help myself. I'm an immigrant in constant precarity, and also not at all the most vulnerable of immigrants in the world (or of people living in the land of their own birth, for that matter). /x
I grew up atheist, and therefore full of wonder at our indifferent cosmos. No god, no purpose save what we make for ourselves. But we keep making TERRIBLE choices.
And it can be unbearable.
A child often has a better sense of right and wrong at times than we adults, many of whom have crafted lifetimes' worth of elaborate and academic/political vocabularies to justify the unequal and unjust positions into which we were so unthinkingly born. /x
@MLClark Please allow me to make one observation: in this thread (I have read further into it) you lament the troubles of the world but it is in this particular post where you mention your upbringing being atheist.
I will be the first to tell you of the moral failings of modern christianity especially in America. The church has *never* managed to live to up to its ideals but in striving to it has created a lot of good in the world.
@MLClark As a believer, I see a connection between the general loss of faith that has occurred, broadly during the 20th century, and the increase in general moral failure. When people are not taught the difference between right and wrong as an absolute given by a moral deity, and they instead choose their own set of moral principles to live by, isn't the result chaos? Isn't this what we are seeing and experiencing?
It's something to think about. I just wonder if you see that connection too.
I do not, because I am a student of history. That supposed recent decline of faith manifested in many eras prior to our own: a very loose Deism, at best, was common in other centuries, along with atheism.
I'm glad faith provides you with solace - I have no interest in taking your belief from you - but the deep history of humanity speaks for itself. We have always contained multitudes, & many generations before our own believed they were living amid what you consider novel chaos.
@MLClark You are correct when you speak of a general deism, etc. There was a general and pervasive sense of a god or gods in control for millennia which can still be seen in many under-developed places in the world. However, you seem to be unaware that atheism was extremely rare before about the start of the 20th century, before humans began to congregate in large urban areas. WWI shattered the faith that many had in humanity that it was, for lack of a better term, evolving.
@danielbsmith
Oh, no, you're speaking to a scholar of literary history with a focus on 19th century literature and a broader literary background that marks the presence of atheist thought back to the ancient Roman era.
Again, I have no interest in taking your faith from you. If you're Christian, you still very much believe in a relativistic god, but you move in a context that allows you to think that there's an "objective" moral standard. Glad it works for you, but it's ahistorical. Cheers!