My own experience was pretty much like that. I was raised in a secular family, but when I tried to really figure things out atheism made no sense to me, at least not as something that I could honestly live. I just couldn't escape the feeling that the call for us to bestow meaning on the universe was really an invitation to make stuff up.
Same here, although my family is more atheist than secular. That one week of existentialism was the most miserable time of my life up to now, frankly, and I agree with you that it could be because we're not "wired" to think that way. Tolkien (if I'm remembering this correctly) said that imagination is of the utmost importance in one's world-view, because if you can imagine something, you can believe it. Well, it seems to work vice versa, too; I can't wrap my mind around not being, so I really can't believe it.
Joss *is* an existentialist. What's interesting, though, is how much his world view resonates with me despite that. I'd have to write a lot to explain what I mean -- but maybe the simplest way to get at it is to point to his commentary on Objects in Space and say that a Thomist could hardly have said it better. A good atheist can root out flawed concepts of God, and while they think it's clearing out space for the belief that there is no God -- it's also clearing out space for a better understanding of God. So a theist can walk in his company for quite a while before having to take a different road.
Well said. :) I would add that Joss's humanism is much more prominent than his atheism in his work, and he doesn't attempt to answer existence, he merely questions it (the absurdism of Objects in Space, the final "Where'd she go...?" of The Body, etc).
I really like the last part of the quote from Siddhartha. Our actions are our true belongings. But notice that Joss would be right there with us on this.
Yep, funnily enough, the Buddha and Sartre (whose philosophy Joss espouses) reached the same conclusion about "our actions being the ground on which we stand" even though, in action, the former is very optimistic and the latter isn't.
In the meantime, my main argument is about the fear of being dead, not the fear of the process of dying. I can't help but think that our fear about the end of our consciousness is testimony to our utter inability to seriously imagine non-being as our final end. Our only idea of non-being is us experiencing nothing or maybe of us experiencing the loss of ourselves in a way that doesn't quite erase the us that experiences that loss. We just can't imagine non-being itself. So I think Stephen King is pretty much right on. In fact, the fact that the vast majority of people talk about and react to death as though there would be some experience of it, even when they are atheists, is taken as evidence that belief in an afterlife is hard-wired in us. (Whether that's because there is an afterlife or because we just have weird wiring is an open question; but there seems to be agreement that humans are overwhelmingly prone to thinking as though there will be an afterlife).
I love you. :) One of the main reasons existentialism fails for me is summed up in these four pages from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, actually:
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Date: 2009-06-04 12:41 pm (UTC)Same here, although my family is more atheist than secular. That one week of existentialism was the most miserable time of my life up to now, frankly, and I agree with you that it could be because we're not "wired" to think that way. Tolkien (if I'm remembering this correctly) said that imagination is of the utmost importance in one's world-view, because if you can imagine something, you can believe it. Well, it seems to work vice versa, too; I can't wrap my mind around not being, so I really can't believe it.
Joss *is* an existentialist. What's interesting, though, is how much his world view resonates with me despite that. I'd have to write a lot to explain what I mean -- but maybe the simplest way to get at it is to point to his commentary on Objects in Space and say that a Thomist could hardly have said it better. A good atheist can root out flawed concepts of God, and while they think it's clearing out space for the belief that there is no God -- it's also clearing out space for a better understanding of God. So a theist can walk in his company for quite a while before having to take a different road.
Well said. :) I would add that Joss's humanism is much more prominent than his atheism in his work, and he doesn't attempt to answer existence, he merely questions it (the absurdism of Objects in Space, the final "Where'd she go...?" of The Body, etc).
I really like the last part of the quote from Siddhartha. Our actions are our true belongings. But notice that Joss would be right there with us on this.
Yep, funnily enough, the Buddha and Sartre (whose philosophy Joss espouses) reached the same conclusion about "our actions being the ground on which we stand" even though, in action, the former is very optimistic and the latter isn't.
In the meantime, my main argument is about the fear of being dead, not the fear of the process of dying. I can't help but think that our fear about the end of our consciousness is testimony to our utter inability to seriously imagine non-being as our final end. Our only idea of non-being is us experiencing nothing or maybe of us experiencing the loss of ourselves in a way that doesn't quite erase the us that experiences that loss. We just can't imagine non-being itself. So I think Stephen King is pretty much right on. In fact, the fact that the vast majority of people talk about and react to death as though there would be some experience of it, even when they are atheists, is taken as evidence that belief in an afterlife is hard-wired in us. (Whether that's because there is an afterlife or because we just have weird wiring is an open question; but there seems to be agreement that humans are overwhelmingly prone to thinking as though there will be an afterlife).
I love you. :) One of the main reasons existentialism fails for me is summed up in these four pages from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, actually: