Every Morning, you wake up...

...and I do mean every morning. Every single morning until the end of time, you continue to wake up. Long past when even the concept of 'morning' ceases to have any meaning, you still wake up.

When we discuss immortality, we have a tendency to place qualifiers on it in an attempt to make it palatable. Of course, it's easy to agree to just about anything if you're allowed to place your own conditions on it. One of my favorite qualifications was the ability to choose, at some point in the far-flung future, to go ahead and die. "Immortality has been fun, but I'm done now." Of course, that's not immortality. That's just a really, really, really (etc.), long life.

So, let's dispense with all of the conditions, and qualifiers, and choices. You don't get to have a say. You're immortal. You will never die. Ever. Period.

Now what?

We're going to look at two different cases of immortality, and the impact that these situations would have on us and our beliefs. How do we cope with our immortality emotionally? Spiritually? Intellectually?

The first situation is one in which there is only one immortal creature in existence. Congratulations! You're never going to die. Everyone else, however, is.

The second situation, you get to have a little company. Perhaps a few dozen or a few hundred 'fortunate' souls get to take the ride with you. Is this better?

There are only a few things to keep in mind. You don't wake up one morning and revealed unto you is the fact of your immortality in a divine or medical miracle. No explanation is given to you. You just get to be immortal. On the other hand, you are not ignorant of the fact. That's too easy. It's only full awareness of your plight in this thought experiment. Finally, you don't have a choice. It's happened. The milk hath been spilt.

So, I'll return to the deep and probing question posed before Freddie's serenade.

Now what?

Quiz Mar1

1. Does deB find Pascal's pessimism depressing?

2. Who are "the most anxious and disappointed people on earth"?

3. How would an e-Wailing Wall be more consoling than the one in Jerusalem?

4. How does deB think God's answer to Job "works"?

5. What does the secular world lack?

6. How does deB suggest we use astronomy and technology to connect to ideas of transcendence?

DQ

• If Pascal's pessimistic rejection of earthly hope is in any way consoling, isn't that because it's tied to his belief in a supernatural afterlife? Can naturalist humanists afford the luxury of spurning hope for the collective natural afterlife? Do you find promise in the prospect of "communion around our dark realities"? 181
• Is optimism really our greatest flaw? Is it true, in light of Scheffler's thought experiments, that "we do not comprise mankind"? Are we really no better off than "our medieval forebears"? 183
• Should we strive to adopt the perspective of those who believe in paradise? 185
• Do pessimists have a greater capacity for joy? 188
• Can secularists be grateful? (See Daniel Dennett's "Thank Goodness"... YouT)
• Didn't philosophers (Socrates, the Stoics...) call our attention to the fact that we're "always slowly dying" (189) before religion did?
• Would you use an electronic wailing wall? 191
• Does God's answer to Job really work? Should he have been mollified with the divine evasion?
• Which "cosmic perspective" works better for you, Spinoza's or Sagan's & Tyson's?
• Comment: "Science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality." Carl Sagan
• Have you seen Al Gore's optimistic new TED Talk? What do you think of it? What would you say to deB about it, as regards what he calls our "insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives"?

Original Sin

Apropos yesterday's discussion of Original Sin -

Study Guide

Thursday's exam questions will be reworded, when necessary, to fit the glossary format... so the best way to study is by revisiting the relevant texts. After the exam we'll commence group reports.

Baggini-

JAN 21

1. How do critics who conflate physicalism with eliminative materialism mis-portray atheists?

2. Why isn't atheism parasitic on religion?

3. Does Baggini agree that absence of evidence is never evidence of absence?

4. What did David Hume point out about our tendencies of belief?

5. Give an example of an abductive argument supporting atheism.

6. Why isn't atheism a faith position?

JAN 26

1. The Euthyphro Dilemma implies what about the properties of goodness?

2. What is Kierkegaard's (and Woody Allen's) existentialist point about Abraham and morality?

3. Does Baggini think it matters whether judgments like "pain is bad" are factual?

4. Did Sartre deny that human life lacks purpose or meaning?

5. Why doesn't Baggini think belief in an afterlife solves the problem of meaning?

6. What's the nirvana dilemma?

JAN 28

1. "Anaxagoras is the earliest historical figure to have been indicted for atheism" (Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History... & see Tim Whitmarsh's Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World - "Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills"), but the first "avowedly atheist work" was by whom? Who does Baggini name as some of his ancient precursors?

2. Did original Marxist communism advocate religious oppression?

3. Which of the traditional god arguments does Baggini find "philosophically interesting" but banal?

4. How do most believers justify their faith, according to Baggini?

5. What methodological principle does Baggini invoke, to reject the imposition of stringent standards of evidence and truth?

6. What's a humanist?

Scheffler-

FEB 2

1. What does Samuel Scheffler ask us to reflect on, and what is his implicit view of Woody Allen's immortality joke?

2. What does Scheffler consider the primary condition or prerequisite for having a life? (Or, what must we do in order to live?)

3. Scheffler says confidence in a natural, collective afterlife is a condition of what?

4. How does he think most of us would respond to the 30-day doomsday scenario? What projects and activities seem least likely to be affected?

5. What's the purpose of traditions?

6. How does Scheffler think the world would react to the Children of Men infertility scenario?

FEB 4

1. Why wouldn't taking a drug to induce belief in the afterlife work?

2. What's the point of playing games?

3. To what do we lay claim, in valuing?

4. Why are we confounded when we try to integrate cosmic ideas into our thinking about what matters?

5. What evidence does Scheffler find in the popularity of the Times "In Memoriam" section?

6. Are we more altruistic than we realize, on S's view?

FEB 9, 11

1. What question did Scheffler shy away from, that Wolf finds irresistible?

2.  What does Wolf think might we come to recognize, when reflecting on our concern for those in immediate need of care after the immediate shock of doomsday has worn off?

3. Who asked Alvy Singer's question before he (and Woody) did?

4. What does Harry Frankfurt think Scheffler underestiimates?

5. What does Frankfurt consider more fundamental in understanding us than our expectations of the future?

6. What does Shiffrin find deeply tragic about the infertility scenario?

1. How can most of us not help but view Epicurus's argument, according to Feldman and others?

2. What strategy is at the heart of the Epicurean position (though they might have disagreed)?

3. What's an example of a desire that's potentially neither conditional nor categorical?

4. What's the paradox or puzzle at the heart of our mortal experience?

5. What's problematic about "reconceptualizing" immortality in noncorporeal and disembodied terms?

6. Does recognition of humanity's temporal limits exert a formative influence on our ideas of value?

FEB 16

1. What is Kolodny's point, in citing G.B. Shaw's quip about youth, with respect to temporal scarcity?

2. What does Scheffler mean (and not mean) by the "limits of our egoism"?

3. How might our human nature(s) have been differently constituted, with respect to the pursuit of long-term goals?

4. What source of great solace for the elderly and dying would be lost in the infertility scenario?

5. Does Scheffler think it would significantly mitigate the doomsday or infertility scenarios if a posthuman race remembered and appreciated us?

6. What does Scheffler make of our desire for worthwhile eternal life?

deB-

FEB 18

1. What's the premise of this book?

2. What two needs was religion invented to serve, according to deB?

3. What objection does deB expect from militant atheists?

4. What might atheists learn from a Catholic Mass?

5. What is superbia?

6. What human tendencies does deB say must be purged and exorcised if communities are to function?

FEB 23

1. What on deB's view poses the greatest risk to our chances of flourishing?

2. Who are some of deB's secular saints?

3. What is the point of higher education, according to J.S. Mill?

4. Who pioneered walking meditation?

5. What are some questions posed by religion that should intrigue atheists?

6. Why don't atheists like the Marian cult?

Quiz Feb23

Kindness, Education, Tenderness

1. What on deB's view poses the greatest risk to our chances of flourishing?

2. Who are some of deB's secular saints?

3. What is the point of higher education, according to J.S. Mill?

4. Who pioneered walking meditation?

5. What are some questions posed by religion that should intrigue atheists?

6. Why don't atheists like the Marian cult?

DQ

• Does Mill's harm principle imply that "the foibles of citizens are placed beyond comment or criticism"? At what point does comment or criticism threaten to infringe personal liberty?
• Has "an abhorrence of crude moralism banished talk of morality from the public sphere" (except, maybe deB would amend, in American presidential politics)? Should it?
• Have you known any parents who did not "spontaneously favor moralistic intervention over neutrality" or hover intrusively over most aspects of their children's lives? How did that work out?
• Do you agree that your conduct is not simply your own business? 78 Are you gratified to be "nudged" by friends to be a better person?
• Do atheists have to believe that God wasn't always dead, in order to be "shaken" by Nietzsche's infamous slogan? 79 Do we, or did we ever, really have to "pretend that morality came from the heavens"? Have we evolved sufficiently to "recognize ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments"? 80
• Do you find Original Sin charming or unifying? 82-3
• Is commercial advertizing more objectionable on libertarian (or other) grounds than the kind of homiletic reminders deB advocates? 89
• Do you esteem any secular saints? (Or role models?)
• How much of your higher education has reflected "the best that has been said and thought in the world"? 101 How well has it prepared you to value and continue pursuing such learning after graduation? Have you been disappointed by college, in its contribution to the development of your own emotional and ethical life skills? 105 Do you think educators still think about "the social value of the college-bred"?
• Is the modern university's mission contradictory? 106
• Can culture replace scripture in its "ability to guide, humanize, and console"? 106 Can literature "save our souls and heal the State"? 108 Do you agree that "the very qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often just as well be discovered in works of culture"? (See A.C. Grayling's Good Book...)

• "Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts"? 109
• Do you have to believe in a dualistic eternal soul, to endorse soul-building and the inculcation of so-called godly virtues (faith, hope, charity, love)? 115
• Do secularists need parables?
• Why in the world should universities consider "doing away with fields like history and literature"? 121 What departments would you add or subtract to the university? How would you revise the curriculum? 161 Shouldn't philosophy and other presently-configured departments be capable of covering relationships, dying, self-knowledge (etc.)?
• Are university professors as lacking in the skills of sophistry, rhetoric, and charisma as deB says? Shall we try a little call-and-response in class? Or maybe you musicians can bring your instruments... 

Cruz Fires Top Aide Over False Story About Rubio’s Faith

By NICK CORASANITI and MAGGIE HABERMAN 

Senator Ted Cruz fired his communications director on Monday after the aide acknowledged spreading a false news story that purported to show his rival Senator Marco Rubio questioning the answers that the Bible provides...

Mr. Tyler was fired after he had posted a story on Facebook with a video of Mr. Rubio containing a subtitle claiming to show the Florida senator saying there are “not many answers” in the Bible. In fact, Mr. Rubio had said it has “all the answers.”

(continues... but what more do we really need to know about these guys?)

Study Guide

If any of you newly-minted authors would care to copy-and-paste all the quizzes into a new post, to create a handy study guide for Thursday's exam, it'll be worth two additional runs to you. jpo

Supreme atheist?

May have to leave it to Bernie...

Put an Atheist on the Supreme Court

BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

Who should replace Antonin Scalia? On Monday, the Times reported that the Justice himself had weighed in on the question: last June, in his dissenting opinion in the same-sex marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges, Scalia wrote that the Court was “strikingly unrepresentative” of America as a whole and ought to be diversified. He pointed out that four of the Justices are natives of New York City, that none are from the Southwest (or are “genuine” Westerners), and that all of them attended law school at Harvard or Yale. Moreover, Scalia wrote, there is “not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination” on the Court. (All nine Justices are, to varying degrees, Catholic or Jewish.) 

Scalia’s remarks imply that an evangelical Christian should be appointed to the Court. That’s a strange idea: surely, the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution strongly suggests that court decisions shouldn’t be based on religious preference, or even on religious arguments. The Ten Commandments are reserved for houses of worship; the laws of the land are, or should be, secular. Still, I’m inclined, in my own way, to agree with Scalia’s idea about diversity. My suggestion is that the next Supreme Court Justice be a declared atheist. 

Atheists are a significantly underrepresented minority in government. According to recent findings from the Pew Research Center, about twenty-three per cent of American adults declare that they have no religious affiliation—which is two percentage points more than the number who declare themselves Catholic. Three per cent of Americans say that they are atheists—which means that there are more atheists than Jews in the United States. An additional four per cent declare themselves agnostic; as George Smith noted in his classic book “Atheism: The Case Against God,” agnostics are, for practical purposes, atheists, since they cannot declare that they believe in a divine creator. Even so, not a single candidate for major political office or Supreme Court Justice has “come out” declaring his or her non-belief. 

From a judicial perspective, an atheist Justice would be an asset. In controversial cases about same-sex marriage, say, or access to abortion or birth control, he or she would be less likely to get mired in religion-based moral quandaries. Scalia himself often got sidetracked in this way: he framed his objections to laws protecting L.G.B.T. rights in a moral, rather than a legal-rights, framework. In his dissent, in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas—a case that challenged a Texas law criminalizing gay sex—Scalia wrote that those who wanted to limit the rights of gay people to be teachers or scoutmasters were merely “protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle they believe to be immoral and destructive.” To him, religion-based moral objections seemed to deserve more weight than either factual considerations (homosexuality is not destructive) or rights-based concerns (gay people’s rights must be protected). Indeed, Scalia’s meditation on the Court’s lack of religious diversity was part of a larger argument that the Court’s decision on same-sex marriage did not reflect prevailing religious and moral values. An atheist Justice, by contrast, would have different intellectual habits. I suspect that he or she would be more likely to focus on reason and empirical evidence. 

In addition, the appointment of an atheist Justice would send a meaningful message: it would affirm that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy. Such an appointment would also help counter the perceived connection between atheism and lawlessness and immorality. That unfortunate and inaccurate link is made all too often in the United States. A Pew survey conducted last month showed that, once again, Americans would be less likely to vote for an atheist candidate than for a candidate who has no experience, is gay, was involved in financial improprieties, has had extramarital affairs, or is Muslim. Atheists are widely, absurdly, and openly mistrusted. 

That distrust has ancient roots: because religion long ago claimed morality as its domain, atheism has long been connected to immorality. To many people, religiosity confers an aura of goodness. In the U.K., when people who had listed their religious affiliation as Christian on the national census were asked by the Richard Dawkins Foundation why they had done so, most said it was not because they actually accepted the detailed doctrines of their faith but because it made them feel like they were good people. This is a two-way street on which both directions point the wrong way. By the same token, when good people openly declare that they cannot accept religious doctrines or question the underlying concept of God, they are often classified as “bad.” 

The prejudice against atheists has real-world consequences. In December, 2014, the Times reportedthat seven states—Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—still have laws on their books that make atheists ineligible to run for public office. And anti-atheist prejudice is shaping our Presidential race, too. Consider the case of Donald Trump in South Carolina. After Trump insulted Ted Cruz using a sexist slur, one voter responded by saying, “The way he speaks—that doesn’t sound like somebody who really believes in God that much. You want your children to look up at the President of the United States.” 

Implicit in that statement is the idea that a politician’s belief in God is, in itself, a reason for children to look up to him or her. Meanwhile, other aspects of a candidate’s character seem not to matter. If the opinions of Cruz’s colleagues in the Senate and elsewhere are any indication, he seems to be rather unlikable; his competitors in the Republican primaries have suggested that he is less than truthful, as well. Still, Cruz captures a significant fraction of the evangelical vote because his character seems to matter less than his open and pronounced invocation of God in discussing his policies. 

Our strange attitudes about atheism warp our politics and our laws. It’s time to remove the stigma attached to it. One way to do that is by appointing an atheist to the Supreme Court. Happily, such an appointment would be a tribute to the spirit, if not the letter, of one of Scalia’s last opinions. More than that, it would be a tribute to the secular principles upon which this country was founded.

New Yorker, 2.18.16
==

Should Atheists Confront the Deathist Culture Religion Has Sown Around the World?

In the West, atheism is growing. Nearly a billion people around the world are essentially godless. Yet, that burgeoning population faces an important challenge in the near future—the choice whether to support far longer lifespans than humans have ever experienced before. Transhumanist tech could potentially double our lifetimes in the next 20-40 years through radical science like gene editing, bionic organs, and stem cell therapy. Eventually, life extension technology like this will probably even wipe out death and aging altogether, damaging one of the most important philosophical tenets formal religion uses to convert people: the promise of being resurrected after you die.

About 85 percent of the world’s population believes in life after death, and much of that population is perfectly okay with dying because it gives them an afterlife with their perceived deity or deities—something often referred to as “deathist” culture. In fact, four billion people on Earth—mostly Muslims and Christians—see the overcoming of death through science as potentially blasphemous, a sin involving humans striving to be godlike. Some holy texts say blasphemy is unforgivable and will end in eternal punishment.

So what are atheists to do in a world where science and technology are quickly improving and will almost likely overcome human mortality in the next half century? Will there be a great civil rights debate and clash around the world? Or will the deathist culture change, adapt, or even subside? More importantly, will atheists help lead the charge in confronting religion’s love of using human mortality as a tool to grow the church?

First, let’s look at some hard facts. Most deaths in the world are caused by aging and disease. Approximately150,000 people die every day around the world, causing devastating loss to loved ones and communities. Of course, it should not be overlooked that death also brings massive disruption to family finances and national economies.

On the medical front, the good news is that gerontologists and other researchers have made major gains recently in the fields of life extension, anti-aging research, and longevity science. In 2010, some of the first studies of stopping and reversing aging in mice took place. They were partially successful and proved that 21st Century science and medicine had the goods to overcome most types of deaths from aging. Eventually, we’ll also wipe out most diseases. Through modern medicine, the 20th Century saw a massive decrease of deaths from polio, measles, and typhoid, amongst others.

On the heels of some of these longevity and medical triumphs, a number of major commercial ventures have appeared recently, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the field of anti-aging and longevity research. Google’s Calico, Human Longevity LLC, and Insilico Medicine are just some of them.
Google Ventures’ President Bill Maris, who helps direct investments into health and science companies, recently made headlines by telling Bloomberg, “If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes.”

Increasingly, leading scientists are voicing similar ideas. Reuters reports that renowned gerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey, chief scientist at SENS Research Foundation and the Anti-aging Advisor at the US Transhumanist Party, thinks scientists will be able to control aging in the near future, “I’d say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I’d call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so.”

Even smaller projects like the musician Steve Aoki supported Longevity Cookbook with its Indiegogo campaign have recently launched, in an effort to get people to eat better to live longer. All these endeavors add to a growing climate of people and their attitudes willing to accept the transhumanist idea that death is not fate. In fact, in the future, death will likely be seen as a choice someone makes, and not something that happens arbitrarily or accidentally to people.

Despite this positive momentum in the anti-aging science movement, changing cultural deathist trends for 85 percent of the world’s population may prove difficult. Humans are a species ingrained in their ways, and getting fundamentally religious people to have an open mind to living far longer periods than before—maybe hundreds of years even—could prove challenging.

Recently, a number of transhumanists, including myself who is a longtime atheist, have attempted to work more closely with governmental, religious, and social groups that have for centuries endorsed the deathist culture. Transhumanists are trying to get those groups to realize we are not necessarily wanting to live forever. As science and reason-minded people, we simply want the choice and creation over our own earthly demise, and we don’t want to leave it to cancer, or an automobile accident, or aging, or fate.

Of course, for atheists, the elephant in the room is overpopulation. If everyone lives longer, surely the world will become even more crowded than it is. The good news is that scientists generally believe Earth could handle a far larger human population than we have now, without destroying the planet. But we’d need better methods of resource distribution and laws that ensure equality among people. The key to handling a large population likely rests in new green technology, and using it to fix major environmental problems. Meatless meat is a great example. Much rainforest destruction comes from creating pastures for animal grazing. But we could regrow those forests (which would help the greenhouse and ozone layer problems) by creating meatless meat in laboratories and bypassing the need for livestock. I like this for more reasons than one; 150 million animals are slaughtered every day for our consumption. That’s a lot of killing that could be avoided.

In the end, longer lifespans and more control over our biological selves will only make the world a better place, with more permanent institutions, more time with our loved ones, and more stable economies. People, including those who are atheist or religious, will always have the choice to die if they want to, but the specter of death from formal religion will no longer be able to be used as a menacing tool for growing a deathist culture and agenda.

*****
Zoltan Istvan is an atheist futurist, author of the novel The Transhumanist Wager, and the 2016 US Presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party.
Want to know anything else about Zoltan Istvan? Here is a collection of all his articles, interviews and plans for the future, which you can follow here: https://wakelet.com/@ZoltanIstvan

Quiz Feb18

Religion for Atheists - Wisdom without doctrine; Community

1. What's the premise of this book?

2. What two needs was religion invented to serve, according to deB?

3. What objection does deB expect from militant atheists?

4. What might atheists learn from a Catholic Mass?

5. What is superbia?

6. What human tendencies does deB say must be purged and exorcised if communities are to function?

The School of Life

DQ

• Do you agree that it's "boring and unproductive" to ask about the truth of religion?
• "...it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for rituals and concepts." But some atheists flatly reject the very idea of "reverence" too. Can't we just like some of the hymns, and the excuse for earthly communion?
• Do you agree that secular society has not helped solve our "central needs"? 12
• Have you had a crisis of faithlessness? 13 What triggered it?
• Can you really "engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content"?
• "We have grown frightened of the word morality." We who? "We don't go on pilgrimages." I do. Do you? What about the rest of deB's "we" statements on 14?
• Is there anything wrong with treating religion as a buffet, taking (eg) Buddhist compassion but leaving the afterlife?
• Do you have to be a militant atheist to think religion on the whole less salutary than deB suggests?
• What have you learned from visiting different churches?
• Is Christianity's gift for getting people to "kneel down and abase themselves" wholly admirable? What do you think of Sen. Cruz's statement that no one should be president who doesn't begin each day on his/her knees?
• Are you "going a little out of [your] mind" behind a "well-defended facade"?
• Would a Feast of Fools be a healthy way to relieve the pressures of adult life? Or would it be, for some at least, infantilizing and ridiculous?

Strange Gods: A Secular History Of Conversion, by by SUSAN JACOBY

Offers an examination of relgious conversion as an expression of secular social forces, as it has played out in different historical periods and cultural environments, looking at both forced conversion and true religious choice since the Enlightenment.

1


AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (354–430)

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
—Paul, Colossians 2:8

AUGUSTINE, a teenager studying in Carthage in the 370s, begins to ponder what he will one day consider the inevitable shortcomings of human philosophy ungrounded in the word of God. This process begins, as Augustine will later recount in his Confessions, when he reads Cicero’sHortensius, written around 45 b.c.e. The young scholar, unacquainted with either Jewish or Christian Scripture, takes away the (surely unintended) lesson from the pagan Cicero that only faith—a faith that places the supernatural above the natural—can satisfy the longing for wisdom.

“But, O Light of my heart,” Augustine wrote to his god in Confessions (c. 397), “you know that at that time, although Paul’s words were not known to me, the only thing that pleased me in Cicero’s book was his advice not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be. . . . These were the words which excited me and set me burning with fire, and the only check to this blaze of enthusiasm was that they made no mention of the name of Christ.”

The only check? To me, this passage from Confessions has always sounded like the many rewritings of personal history intended to conform the past to the author’s current beliefs and status in life—which in Augustine’s case meant being an influential bishop of an ascendant church that would tolerate no dissent grounded in other religious or secular philosophies. By the time he writes Confessions, Augustine seems a trifle embarrassed about having been so impressed, as a young man, by a pagan writer. So he finds a way to absolve himself of the sin of attraction to small-“c” catholic, often secular intellectual interests by limiting Cicero to his assigned role as one step in a fourth-century boy’s journey toward capital-“C” Catholicism. It is the adult Augustine who must reconcile his enthusiasm for Cicero with the absence of the name of Christ; there is no reason why this should have bothered the pagan adolescent Augustine at all. Nevertheless, no passage in the writings of the fathers of the church, or in any personal accounts of the intellectual and emotional process of conversion, explains more lucidly (albeit indirectly) why the triumph of Christianity inevitably begins with that other seeker on the road to Damascus. It is Paul, after all, not Jesus or the authors of the Gospels, who merits a mention in Augustine’s explanation of how his journey toward the one true faith was set in motion by a pagan.

It is impossible to consider Augustine, the second most important convert in the theological firmament of the early Christian era, without giving Paul his due. But let us leave Saul—he was still Saul then—as he awakes from a blow on his head to hear a voice from the heavens calling him to rebirth in Christ. Saul did not have any established new religion to convert to, but Augustine was converting to a faith with financial and political influence, as well as a spiritual message for the inhabitants of a decaying empire. Augustine’s journey from paganism to Christianity was a philosophical and spiritual struggle lasting many years, but it also exemplified the many worldly, secular influences on conversion in his and every subsequent era. These include mixed marriages; political instability that creates the perception and the reality of personal insecurity; and economic conditions that provide a space for new kinds of fortunes and the possibility of financial support for new religious institutions.

Augustine told us all about his struggle, within its social context, in Confessions—which turned out to be a best-seller for the ages. This was a new sort of book, even if it was a highly selective recounting of experience (like all memoirs) rather than a “tell-all” autobiography in the modern sense. Its enduring appeal, after a long break during the Middle Ages, lies not in its literary polish, intellectuality, or prayerfulness—though the memoir is infused with these qualities—but in its preoccupation with the individual’s relationship to and responsibility for sin and evil. As much as Augustine’s explorations constitute an individual journey—and have been received as such by generations of readers—the journey unfolds in an upwardly mobile, religiously divided family that was representative of many other people finding and shaping new ways to make a living; new forms of secular education; and new institutions of worship in a crumbling Roman civilization.

After a lengthy quest venturing into regions as wild as those of any modern religious cults, Augustine told the story of his spiritual odyssey when he was in his forties. His subsequent works, including The City of God, are among the theological pillars of Christianity, butConfes­sions is the only one of his books read widely by anyone but theologically minded intellectuals (or intellectual theologians). In the fourth and early fifth centuries, Christian intellectuals with both a pagan and a religious education, like the friends and mentors Augustine discusses in the book, provided the first audience for Confessions. That audience would probably not have existed a century earlier, because literacy—a secular prerequisite for a serious education in both paganism and Christianity—had expanded among members of the empire’s bourgeois class by the time Augustine was born. The Christian intellectuals who became Augustine’s first audience may have been more interested than modern readers in the theological framework of the autobiography (though they, too, must have been curious about the distinguished bishop’s sex life). ButConfessions has also been read avidly, since the Renaissance, by successive generations of humanist scholars (religious and secular); Enlightenment skeptics; nineteenth-century Romantics; psychotherapists; and legions of the prurient, whether religious believers or nonbelievers. Everyone, it seems, loves the tale of a great sinner turned into a great saint.

In my view, Augustine was neither a world-class sinner nor a saint, but his drama of sin and repentance remains a real page-turner.
Also by Susan Jacoby

The Age of American Unreason

The Great Agnostic

 

Disbelieve it or not, ancient history suggests that atheism is as natural to humans as religion -

People in the ancient world did not always believe in the gods, a new study suggests – casting doubt on the idea that religious belief is a “default setting” for humans. Early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal Tim Whitmarsh Despite being written out of large parts of history, atheists thrived in the polytheistic societies of the ancient world – raising considerable doubts about whether humans really are “wired” for religion – a new study suggests. The claim is the central proposition of a new book by Tim Whitmarsh, Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. In it, he suggests that atheism – which is typically seen as a modern phenomenon – was not just common in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome, but probably flourished more in those societies than in most civilisations since... continues

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Carl Sagan on the meaning of life-

In the past few decades, the United States and the Soviet Union have accomplished something that — unless we destroy ourselves first — will be remembered a thousand years from now: the first close-up exploration of dozens of other worlds. Together we have found much out there that is magnificent, instructive and of practical value. But we have found no trace, no hint of life. The Earth is an anomaly. In all the solar system, it is, so far as we know, the only inhabited planet.

We humans are one among millions of separate species who live in a world burgeoning, overflowing with life. And yet, most species that ever were are no more. After flourishing for one hundred fifty million years, the dinosaurs became extinct. Every last one. No species is guaranteed its tenure on this planet. And humans, the first beings to devise the means for their own destruction, have been here for only several million years.

We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. We have an obligation to fight for life on Earth — not just for ourselves but for all those, humans and others, who came before us and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after. There is no cause more urgent than to survive to eliminate on a global basis the growing threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, economic collapse and mass starvation. These problems were created by humans and can only be solved by humans. No social convention, no political system, no economic hypothesis, no religious dogma is more important.

The hard truth seems to be this: We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We would prefer it to be otherwise, of course, but there is no compelling evidence for a cosmic Parent who will care for us and save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/07/08/carl-sagan-meaning-of-life/

Quiz Feb16

That I Should Die and Others Live; Death, Value, and the Afterlife (DA comments & reply); and see "The Importance of the Afterlife"*

1. What is Kolodny's point, in citing G.B. Shaw's quip about youth, with respect to temporal scarcity?

2. What does Scheffler mean (and not mean) by the "limits of our egoism"?

3. How might our human nature(s) have been differently constituted, with respect to the pursuit of long-term goals?

4. What source of great solace for the elderly and dying would be lost in the infertility scenario?

5. Does Scheffler think it would significantly mitigate the doomsday or infertility scenarios if a posthuman race remembered and appreciated us?

6. What does Scheffler make of our desire for worthwhile eternal life?
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• Some Christians believe God rewards the faithful. So why did I get Stage 4 cancer? nyt
• Re “Wanted: A Theology of Atheism,” by Molly Worthen (Sunday Review, .... Absence On the Bench: Scalia's Absence Is Likely to Alter Court's. nyt
• Justice Antonin Scalia and the 'Dead' Constitution .... The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea ...
• But it makes atheism seem kind of boring, a spiritual handicap, the opiate of the ... Antonin Scalia, Justice on the Supreme Court, Dies at 79 ...

• 

	Reason Rally (@reasonrally)
2/15/16, 5:57 PM We'd love for these college students to come to the #ReasonRally! #nonestwitter.com/americnhumanis…

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DQ:

• Do you agree that death might not be a deprivation for someone who is "unfortunate enough"? 160
• How would you characterize the difference between passing into and out of non-existence? Is there something uncanny (but not fearsome or disquieting) about the latter? 
• What's your commentary on Romans 6:23 ("the wages of sin is death, a gift of god is eternal life")? Does it not "fall on deaf ears" in your case? What do you make of it? 165
• Is immortality, when viewed through a Promethean, Sisyphean, or hellish lens, more terrifying than it is seductive when viewed as a divine gift and reward?
• If we took the threat of species extinction more seriously, would we in fact do more to promote the survival of humanity than our own? 171
• Would being deprived of all human contact be worse than death?
• Do you think it follows from our dependency on others to lead meaningful lives that we will or should be more motivated to ensure their survival than our own? 179
• Is the vocabulary of egoism and altruism generally unilluminating? Does it clarify anything important between theists and the godless?  Should it bother us if we can't decisively prove our own purity of heart? 180
• Is "an egotism so powerful that no external catastrophe can prevail against it" (181) admirable or reprehensible?
• Comment: "The rewards we derive from listening to music do not consist simply in a set of brute sensations." (183) Does the same go for reading, eating and drinking, appreciating nature, etc.?
• What issues in philosophy would still interest you, if the disappearance of humanity were nigh? 184
• Would you find it personally consoling of death-and-despair-defying to write books, plays, and commentaries in earth's dying days? 187
• Do you have an Alvy Singer solution? 189
• Does it bother you to think that future humans will not share our core values? Does it undermine your confidence in those values? Why shouldn't it? 195 Do you think there will again as sudden a shift in social attitudes as we've seen in recent years with respect to gay marriage etc.? 195, 205
• Comment: "the fantasy that the lives we are now leading might continue is inherently confused and in principle unsatisfiable."

*Scheffler's Stone essay concludes:

There is also a lesson here for those who think that unless there is a personal afterlife, their lives lack any meaning or purpose. What is necessary to underwrite the perceived significance of what we do, it seems, is not a belief in the afterlife but rather a belief that humanity will survive, at least for a good long time. 

But will humanity survive for a good long time? Although we normally assume that others will live on after we ourselves have died, we also know that there are serious threats to humanity’s survival. Not all of these threats are human-made, but some of the most pressing certainly are, like those posed by climate change and nuclear proliferation. People who worry about these problems often urge us to remember our obligations to future generations, whose fate depends so heavily on what we do today. We are obligated, they stress, not to make the earth uninhabitable or to degrade the environment in which our descendants will live. 

I agree. But there is also another side to the story. Yes, our descendants depend on us to make possible their existence and well-being. But we also depend on them and their existence if we are to lead flourishing lives ourselves. And so our reasons to overcome the threats to humanity’s survival do not derive solely from our obligations to our descendants. We have another reason to try to ensure a flourishing future for those who come after us: it is simply that, to an extent that we rarely recognize or acknowledge, they already matter so much to us.

We might wish to sample some of the nearly-500 comments this generated from Times readers...

Also worth noting, the latest Stone essay: Is Humanity Getting Better?

And this. Cheers.

Quizzes Feb9, 11

Afterlife 3 - "Fear, Death, and Confidence"/ Comments - Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, and Seana Shiffrin [Thursday's quiz below*]

1. How can most of us not help but view Epicurus's argument, according to Feldman and others?

2. What strategy is at the heart of the Epicurean position (though they might have disagreed)?

3. What's an example of a desire that's potentially neither conditional nor categorical?

4. What's the paradox or puzzle at the heart of our mortal experience?

5. What's problematic about "reconceptualizing" immortality in noncorporeal and disembodied terms?

6. Does recognition of humanity's temporal limits exert a formative influence on our ideas of value?

DQ:

• Is there really something sadistic about Scheffler's Epicurean torturer's words, in the context of this scenario?
• Is Nagel's deprivation theory really beside the point of Scheffler's question as to the status of our fear of death? 85
• Is the prospect of not growing old, attending your child's wedding, enjoying your grandchildren etc. something you fear? If not, how do you think about that prospect (if you do)? "Philosophically" and stoically, tragically, angrily, uncannily, vertiginously, in a panic, or... ?
• Would it be irrational and/or unreasonable to fear death even while acknowledging it as a condition of meaningfulness? 
• Would you be irretrievably and eternally bored with an excessively, very, or super-long life? 90 How would you know, 'til you tried? And, is boredom such an awful prospect that you'd rather be dead? Must boredom really be unthinkable, and absorption constant, to make a long life appealing? Would the mere possibility of death be enough lighten the boredom of eternity? 95fn
• Since life has stages, do you imagine your attitudes towards long life will change as you age?
• Is the Rawls/justice analogy helpful, in clarifying Scheffler's assumption that temporal scarcity is a condition of valuing? Does it secure his point that you cannot imagine or appreciate living with all the time in the world? 99
• Literally and figuratively, do you plant trees? Which projects whose payoffs you don't expect to live to see are you committed to? 
• Did you watch "World of Tomorrow"? What did you think? (See previous post)

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*Afterlife Comments - Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, and Seana Shiffrin

1. What question did Scheffler shy away from, that Wolf finds irresistible?

2.  What does Wolf think might we come to recognize, when reflecting on our concern for those in immediate need of care after the immediate shock of doomsday has worn off?

3. Who asked Alvy Singer's question before he (and Woody) did?

4. What does Harry Frankfurt think Scheffler underestiimates?

5. What does Frankfurt consider more fundamental in understanding us than our expectations of the future?

6. What does Shiffrin find deeply tragic about the infertility scenario?

DQ

• Do you place more credence in the conclusions of psychologists and social scientists, or the speculations of philosophers and novelists, in anticipating how we would react to the prospect of imminent extinction?
• In the infertility scenario the planet survives, even though humanity does not. Does this make it a happier scenario for you? Are you a closet misanthrope or a radical Green? Would you have to be, to answer affirmatively?
• Do you think most people are "either purely or dominantly egoistic"? 116 Are non-egoists voting for Trump?
• Do you think "it would be profoundly gratifuing" to you as a humanities scholar merely to be appreciated, but not importantly influential? 119
• Do you dance or play an instrument recreationally? If doomsday is announced tomorrow, will you dance or play again?
• Would the degree of apathy and anomie with which you greet doomsday depend on the quality of leadership exemplified by others? What would "the right leadership" look like?
• Do you think thoughtful people have always been motivated by concern for posterity? Are we their fortunate beneficiaries? Do you feel an obligation to "pay it forward"?
• Frankfurt says obscure research can be pleasurable and rewarding, but "writing articles is not in itself a notably satisfying activity." 133 Can you explain the difference?
• Frankfurt says some of us might face a global catastrophe by wasting less time and working harder on our relationships, taking trips, doing other things we'd postponed, and just generally "seizing the day." Would you? Or would you become morose and withdrawn? Or...?
• Since tomorrow is Darwin Day: Is Frankfurt right that the explanation of our interest in the collective afterlife is "simply Darwinian"? 138
• Name some things (ideas, goals) you care about will require the continuing efforts of an indefinite number of generations. How confident are you that those things will be achieved? Does your answer incline you to reconsider your commitment to them?
• Do you feel more drawn to future-directed progressive projects, to backward-looking concern for the eventual fruition of our predecessors' projects, to both, or to neither?
• [Please suggest more DQs on Wolf, Frankfurt, and Shiffrin]

World of Tomorrow

This is a short (16 minute) animated film that was nominated for awards last year. Seems like it might be relevant to our discussion of the collective afterlife. It's on netflix. Your thoughts?

World of Tomorrow (2015)

Quotes

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Emily: That is the thing about the present, Emily Prime. You only appreciate it when it is the past.

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Emily: Now is the envy of all of the dead.

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Emily: I am very proud of my sadness because it means I am more alive.

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Emily: This is your future, Emily Prime. It is sometimes a sad life, and it is a long life. You will feel a deep longing for something you cannot quite remember. It will be a beautiful visit, and then we shall share the same fate as the rest of the human race: dying horribly.

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Emily: One day, when you're old enough, you will be impregnated with a perfect clone of yourself. You will later upload all your memories into this healthy new body. One day, long after that, you will repeat this process all over again. Through this cloning process, Emily, you will hope to live forever.

Emily Prime: I had lunch today.

imdb... Rotten Tomatoes... Atlantic