"Isn’t it odd that we have such a great longing for things that don’t exist? Nowhere else in our human experience has an “itch” so primal, so central to our humanity, developed without any correspondence to a real “scratch.” We’re hungry? We have food. We’re thirsty? We have water. We’re lonely? We have friends and family. But we need meaning, order, and wonder…and we have drugs to distract us from that need? It seems a bit wasteful of evolution to work so hard developing a complex need to match a phantom solution that never existed. After all, other primates have survived perfectly well without developing a need for the transcendent.
Atheists might be able to explain the existence of belief in God and meaning as originating long ago from lying, power-hungry tyrants who then passed on said beliefs, but that scenario presupposes an already-existing need those tyrants could exploit, and it can't explain the continuing need experienced by atheists. Human beings couldn’t have invented the universal need that's satisfied by these beliefs. Where did it come from, and why?"
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COMMENTS
"But we need meaning, order, and wonder…and we have drugs to distract us from that need?"
The author is making up a story! We have thousands of religious sects to distract us from anything and everything! Nobody "needs" drugs!
"It seems a bit wasteful of evolution to work so hard developing a complex need to match a phantom solution that never existed."
HUH? Possibly the most stupid sentence I have ever come across!
"After all, other primates have survived perfectly well without developing a need for the transcendent."
So have we. Our life span is far longer than most other creatures. The "transcendent" has not increased our survival time. Science has. |
