Rick,
For a philosophical question, a philosophical answer. Being lazy, I quote from Bertrand Russell:
The natural impulse of the vigorous person of decent character is to do good, but if he is deprived of all political power and of all opportunity to influence events, he will be deflected from his natural course and will decide that the important thing is to be good. This is what happened to the early Chistians; it led to a conception of personal holiness as something quite independent of beneficient action, since holiness had to be something that could be achieved by people who were impotent in action. Social virtue came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics. To this day conventional Christians think an adulterer far more wicked than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a thousand times as much harm. The medieval conception of virtue, as one sees in their pictures, was of something wishy-washy, feeble, and sentimental. The most virtuous man was the man who retired from the world; the only men of action who were regarded as saints were those who wasted the lives and substance of their subjects in fighting the Turks, like St. Louis. The church would never regard a man as a saint because he reformed the finances, or the criminal law, or the judiciary. Such mere contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not believe that there is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saintship is due to work of public utility.
I recall E posting a statement of belief which, according to defective memory, went something like this:
Appeals to the beyond are useless.
Whatever needs to be done must be done by us.
Do you really feel that such a creed is negative?
Atheists do not sit in musty cubbyholes concocting proofs of God's non-existence. We generally do not bother with it at all, unless we are disturbed by the nonsensical harangues of the purveyors of fantasy. Pope once wrote:
Presume upon thyself not God to scan.
The proper study of mankind is man.
He was right, in my view. Do you really believe that inquiries into the nature of existence are philosophically superior to inquiries into the means by which the material existence of the people living on this planet today may be improved?
I see many people, many of whom are among the most privileged ever to walk the earth, wasting their intellectual substance in frantic and futile inquiry into the color of auras, the nature of deity, and speculations into what happens after we die. In my view, they're a bunch of wankers. Don't you think this energy might be better spent in beneficient action? Don't you think that those who have by accident of circumstance been born in the comfort of the upper caste of the developed world have an obligation to try and spread those benefits we take for granted - education, health care, opportunity, and so many others - to those who do not have them?
Do you believe that the abstract philosophizing of the believer is superior to the practical action advocated by the nonbeliever? If so, why?
Steve |
