Reason's Greetings

friendlyatheist:

Religion is nothing more than human vanity writ large.

-FA

I’m going to disagree on this one. This is a generalization and I’m afraid overly simplistic. I am very skeptical about tracing back causes to specific, singular reasons. Usually sociology is much more complex than that.

There are a significant number of people who believe partially or significantly because they are convinced that evidence for God exists. I was talking with a friend the other day, and he seems to view the afterlife as a kind of unification with God, a God of science and reason, and it isn’t self-focused at all from what I can tell. I think the only thing differentiating us on this matter is that he believes God exists, and I think that the concept of a God is tremendously extravagant and does lack evidence completely. He also does not see life as meaningful or purposeful without God - an emotion I can relate to intimately. It’s an enormous emotional hurdle to overcome, and about the only thing that pulled me over it was my gradual realization that reality is truth, and truth does not revolve around questions of meaning or purpose.

I wouldn’t call him narcissistic at all; the way that he was brought up, and the way his mind was molded would make a deconversion experience, like my own, utterly painful. It really can feel like losing eternal life initially.

So, I suppose that I can see narcissism as a partial reason for belief in an afterlife, for some more than others, but to claim that it is the only reason, for everybody I think is an extraordinary claim with contradictory evidence behind it.

(via katniss--m3llark)