What’s Next?

Reading some religious apologetics and commentators I get the feeling that I should be hopelessly depressed as an atheist, that the idea of a godless world-view is bleak and narrow, the only path to happiness is through faith and really it’s no surprise that Stalin turned out so bad. That this comes more often from not from people who believe that we’re born fallen and have to redeem ourselves through someone else’s suffering is deeply ironic for me, but I suspect they might not understand why.

I get quite frustrated when I see advertising for The Alpha Course like this:

“Is there more to life than this?” - What more do you want? Just look at that picture, can you imagine that man is seriously standing there, mighty above all and thinking “Yeah, this is pretty neat, but isn’t it all a bit meaningless really when you come to think about it?” Something I find very hollow about a lot of religious teachings is that to make the supernatural feel like a solution to the problem, they constantly devalue the real beauty and power of our lives on Earth and I can’t think of a more obvious example of this unhealthy mindset. It’s almost like they spend so much time looking for the strings they’re missing the whole show.

The basic fallacy here is this life’s meaning is more meaningful if given from the outside. That being left to our own devices to find a purpose for our lives pales in significance to the meaning the divine would bring into our lives. But if God declared tomorrow in a big booming voice that the purpose had been along to prepare big juicy brains for his favourite children, the Martians, to devour - well then our lives would have had meaning, they would have had purpose all along. Would that be enough though? Why is god given meaning necessarily better than the process of self-discovery?

There’s no divine spark in me - I’m just meat all the way though. When that meat rots away, they’ll be nothing left of me. And I’m ok with that. I’m fine with there not being a god to give me purpose because I can find it on my own. I’m ok with the idea that eventually I’ll be gone because I can’t imagine (and I’ve yet to hear any theist describe) an eternal afterlife that could sustain me forever without changing my nature so much I might as well have disappeared. All those things are fine with me - because in the time I do have I can stand at the top of mountains and live in awe.

Via Rachel from North London:

‘According to documents recently published by the National Counter-Terrorism Center, a US agency responsible for coordinating the government response to terrorism, officials are now being asked to stop using terminology that could “unintentionally legitimate terrorism,” and reorient their vocabulary away from language that might frame radicals in a sympathetic light. This entails ceasing to describe radical cells as either Islamic or Muslim, and also rejecting the term “Islamist,” which experts argue is confusing to the general public. Instead of using words such as jihad or mujahedin, which “have positive connotations for Muslims,” the report recommends replacing these terms with “‘death cult,’ ‘cult-like,’ ‘sectarian cult,’ and ‘violent cultists’” as more accurate indicators of “the ideology and methodology of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.”

This makes a lot of sense to me in the same way it’d be pretty stupid to refer to western militant groups as ‘crusaders’  - even though it functionally means something we should see as bad, it still retains a lot of positive connotations.

Whilst this tone is slightly broken by the flaming car driven into Glasgow Airport a few hours ago, this clip is an interesting watch, in it ex-cia intelligence expert Larry Johnson concludes that if the car bombs found in London yesterday had gone off, they would have made a big boom, but unless you happened to standing literally right next to it, they wouldn’t have been that dangerous.

In some ways the climate of fear even ineffectual bombs create makes them just as potent as the real thing (with the advantage that no one gets hurt). Hopefully this won’t be jumped on as another reason to push through more ‘anti-terror’ measures like ID cards. I’ll accept that there may be times where a trade off between liberty and security can be acceptable, but in those rare eventualities not only should we err on the side of liberties (because once given away, they’re hard to take back), we need to see evidence that they do actually make people more secure, something notably lacking (or in some cases evidence actively points the other way) in many measures introduced so far and those planned for the future.