I turned on the television in my hotel room Monday night, and sure enough, there was Richard Dawkins on the Bill Maher show. With those two atheist know-it-alls, I knew I was in for something especially dark and perverted, and I wasn't disappointed. Dawkins--speaking from England and wearing his trademark scowl--remarked to Maher's great amusement that he was going to have witnesses and camera crews to record his death. Why? Because apparently religious types keep saying that atheists convert on their deathbed. Dawkins wants people and film crews there to verify that he isn't going to convert. What bravery! What intellectual panache!
Lab-trained atheists like Dawkins, who have hardly any knowledge of history, seem to think that transcendence--the notion of something eternal, something "higher" than this life--is an invention of revealed religion. This is pure ignorance. An ethical code like Confucianism preserves transcendence without recourse to the gods. We also find this concept in Indian philosophy, quite apart from Hinduism. Even the Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who were hardly religious in the sense that we understand the term, resolutely affirmed the idea of eternal truths and transcendent realities. And here is the romantic poet Wordsworth, hardly a Christian, writing that "our destiny, our nature, and our home is with Infinitude--and only there."
In his latest book A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor discusses how transcendence is not merely about the afterlife or the next world. The idea has for two thousand years given depth to our terrestrial existence. For instance, transcendence implies that life has meaning beyond our everyday ups and downs. Transcendence also affirms cosmic justice: there is a final reckoning in which earthly wrongs will be corrected and everything will be turned right-side-up. In life, we know that this is not always the case. So transcendence gives us what Kant called "a reason to hope."
What happens when you get rid of transcendence? Nietzsche worried that you get petty, narrow, selfish and grasping human beings, what he termed the "last men." The last man has no higher aspirations but only thinks of his own comfort, lust and acquisitions. His morality is largely a pose, designed to make himself feel good. He cheats on his wife and enriches himself under the table while making exhibitionistic donations to the United Way. He is fiercely defensive about his vices and pathologies, and responds very angrily when they are pointed out. No, I'm not naming names here and so you shouldn't think "Bill Clinton." I am thinking of a social type that Camus regarded as modern European man. Camus described modern man as one who thinks no higher thoughts but merely "fornicates and reads the newspapers."
What Nietzsche and Camus regarded as a horror, the writer Michael Kinsley seems to regard as the most successful products of the Baby Boom generation. In an article in the April 7, 2008 New Yorker, Kinsley describes the great Baby Boom challenge: not to save the world or to ennoble your soul but merely to live the longest. This is a game you win not by having the most money or the most toys but by outlasting your cohort. If your genital equipment is still working, Kinsley suggests, so much the better. To bring Clinton into the discussion at last, if the Arkansas wonder can make it into his eighties and still speak at the World Economic Forum and get babes, he will be crowned master of the Baby Boom universe. Kinsley's article is titled, "Mine is Longer Than Yours," and you can read it here.
Kinsley himself has Parkinson's Disease, and he frets that he is falling behind in the Baby Boom race. Even his article shows traces of this atrophy: notwithstanding a few halting attempts, it is notably lacking in Kinsley's usual smart-alecky tone. I guess it's not so easy to crack jokes when your voice is failing and your body parts are giving up. Yes, it's sad. For Kinsley the solution lies entirely in pills and cures that he hopes will extend his tenure on the track a little longer, although he fears that modern science won't come through in time for him. And here is what I find most unfortunate: entirely missing from Kinsley's article is any notion of a universe beyond himself, of any transcendent hope that can sustain him when other earthly prospects are running down.
This is the pathos of secularism, a predicament that I wish Kinsley, Dawkins, Maher, Hitchens and others would recognize. If they were open to transcendence, they might find themselves with an altered outlook even in this life. Kinsley might find genuine consolation and meaning, even in the midst of suffering. Hitchens might drink for pleasure, not to destroy his body and drown his desperation. Maher's corrosive narcissm might let up enough to permit real happiness to sneak in. Dawkins might lose his constipated expression and actually smile once in a while. It all seems very improbable, I know, but miracles do happen.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 50)
1. DD: "With those two atheist know-it-alls, knew I was in for something especially dark and perverted, and I wasn't disappointed."
Yikes! Atheist == dark and perverted!
ROTFL!!!
Joe Bob at 5:57AM on Apr 16th 2008
2. DD: "Transcendence also affirms cosmic justice: there is a final reckoning in which earthly wrongs will be corrected and everything will be turned right-side-up."
This is what the preachers always tell the slaves. The concept is also known as "pie in the sky, bye and bye". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Preacher_and_the_Slave
Joe Bob at 6:06AM on Apr 16th 2008
3. DD, I don't think you understood Camus. He was talking precisely about people like you...
Joe Bob at 6:12AM on Apr 16th 2008
4. Agreed, Joe Bob.
dd, amazing how you mentioned thinking Bill Clinton, in reference to Nietzsche and Camus. YOU, you shallow, self-deluded, pseudo-intellectual. YOU are the one that came to mind.
America's Most Gangsta at 7:14AM on Apr 16th 2008
5. Can't say I've heard many atheists say or do PERVERTED things.....catholics...on the other hand...
Strados at 7:21AM on Apr 16th 2008
6. DD,
getting people who believe in no god to believe in a hereafter is counter-productive to their lives and lifestyle.if there is a hereafter there are going to be alot of people who judged wrong and will pay for the error. and in truth will not be able to blame god, but themselves.when they finally see it will be too late. and your right DD,they only have today and that is a shallow existance with no transendant meaning at all. it even makes their good deeds very hollow. now if there is a hereafter then our deeds here have eternal value. i side with you
brian at 7:24AM on Apr 16th 2008
7. DD, once again, you speak of stuff like transcendence as if it surely exists. You act as if you are the sole bearer ofinformation of the universe. Wake the fuck up listen to other ideas except those prescribedto you by your religion!
Atheist for life(and not after) at 7:36AM on Apr 16th 2008
8. DD,...i side with you
brian at 7:24AM on Apr 16th 2008
(punctuation added for emphasis...more punctuation than subject has used in his lifetime)
Shocking!
America's Most Gangsta at 7:47AM on Apr 16th 2008
9. Not to be off-topic, but I'd like to pose a question to atheists...when you die, let's say you do experience an "afterlife", would you change your mind and suddenly believe, or would you be utterly convinced it was simply your brain emitting hallucinogens as it shuts down?
Strados at 7:54AM on Apr 16th 2008
10. Smart-alecky, perverted, dark.....His morality is largely a pose, designed to make himself feel good.
Oh D'ouche how you pretend to understand others, all you do is hate then accuse your detractors of the same.Deluded hypoctrie.
Dennis at 7:59AM on Apr 16th 2008
11. DD.
jesus said they hated him and they would hate those who followed him and it is ever true. they love the darkness better than the light. as john said he came unto his own and his own recieved him not, for he was the Light and the darkness did not comprehend it. DD, darkness cannot understand light,what a great metaphor that every generation of un-believers prove. darkness has no fellowship with the light-
DD why do you post these comments knowing full well your going to get bashed?
brian at 8:12AM on Apr 16th 2008
12. I think Dawkins is a real piece of work.
In his bestseller, THE GOD DELUSION, he says pedophiles and terrorists are today's version of the Salem witches.
What? Pedophiles are unjustly accused of wrongdoing like the Salem witches?
Instead, Dawkins describes child abuse as teaching religion to your own children. So, in the warped, immoral mind of the world's leading atheist, adults having sex with children is not a crime, but teaching your own religion to your own child should be a crime someday.
So much for atheists being able to tell right from wrong without God to guide them.
In fact, Dawkins wrote THE GOD DELUSION to discredit the existence of God, but in that book he says he can't think how to refute the idea that we might all be living in a giant computer program which Dawkins read about in a sci-fi novel.
When you don't believe in God, you will believe just about anything, purposely as an anti-God argument.
Liberals and atheists are notorious for pious bragging about virtues that they never quite display themselves. "I may not agree with what you say, but I will die for your right to say it," is largely a pose. Then they try to get laws passed to censor and silence Christianity and Biblical values.
I doubt that Dawkins will have a film crew to record his death, but it sure does sound like a good boast to brag about amongst other atheists.
If, by chance, he actually does have a video camera recording his death, I think it will show a look of horror and despair as he finally realizes his lifelong, tragic mistake of promoting atheism, as his soul is heaved into the pit of flame made for Satan and his angels, as the Bible promises to those who reject Jesus.
Christians and atheists agree about one thing: atheists don't go to Heaven. Unfortunately, I think most atheists believe in an imaginary Plan B, that if God does exist, God will surely let them into Heaven anyway because they had strong arguments not to accept Jesus.
Believe the Bible, the bestselling book throughout history, not the atheist bestsellers.
Rev 3:16 at 8:27AM on Apr 16th 2008
13. Wow, Dinesh is really talented at synthesizing a lot of good sources into a pile of crap. Amazing.
I'm not even 100% sure what he's talking about. It's better to believe in an afterlife, wheter true or not, because then you won't act like Kinsley, Dawkins, Maher or Hitchens?
Ryan Anderson at 8:30AM on Apr 16th 2008
14. Deathbed experiences often demolish outlandish egos, though of the four you mentioned, I'm not hopeful. Your line about Bill Clinton reminded me of the clever phrase "pelvic atheism" from "What's so Great....". Poor Bill is desperately trying for some earthly form of recognition even as he destroys his wife's chance for nomination. How funny is that; the pathological liar himself, defending his wife's propensity for same. What a shame these people have nothing else to live for, or die for, than sheer self-aggrandizement for the few short, fleeting moments we're alive on this planet.
fanmanaf1 at 8:31AM on Apr 16th 2008
15. rev 3:16
"When you don't believe in God, you will believe just about anything, purposely as an anti-God argument.
your exactly right. it just opens up pandoras box. but as romans says when you exchange the truth for a lie!!! what else can you expect? how would you like to be talking with someone knowing full they are lying? this is atheiast babble,its lies and lies and piled high. because absent of the truth all we can do is speculate and hope science proves our case,which will never happen
rev.god is in control we know this!!
"I think most atheists believe in an imaginary Plan B, that if God does exist, God will surely let them into Heaven anyway because they had strong arguments not to accept Jesus."
and what is that strong argument? i have never heard a good case for atheism yet, except its a license to be perverte and call it normal,anything goes
brian at 8:43AM on Apr 16th 2008