Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephenhess | Hacker News Reader

With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of folks who identify as agnostic or athiest [1]. This is natural given that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods.

The problem though is that absent these religious ideologies, we're left with a number of core questions that secular philosophy has been unable to answer convincingly. Namely:

- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad? - What is the meaning or purpose of life? - Why is there something instead of nothing? What was the original cause? Was there one? - What happens after we die?

This dovetails with a number of practical issues in today's world. (1) Lots of suicide and depression. There are 30 million prescriptions of Zoloft written in the United States. Many of these folks (I assume) aren't suffering some sort of pathological illness but find themselves looking at a world that appears to be devoid of meaning when these religious frameworks break down for them (i.e. nihilism) (2) Religious extremism that manifests in sectarian violence and war.

Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

Relevant point: I'd love to see academic philosophy working to shore up these areas and provide folks a better, clearer framework in which they can live meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework.

http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religio...

View on HN

You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The idea that religion provides some sort of certainty is a complete falsehood trivially debunked by a cursory glance of theological discourse. It provides certainty only to those ignorant of it, just as those ignorant of secular philosophy who never deliberate any of these questions have quite likely settled on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them.

In practice, most of value theory is secular. The laws that underpin most contemporary states are secular. The meaning of life is an unanswered question, quite likely even an ironically meaningless question itself. The afterlife if any is also an unanswered question. Christians disagree between universalism, annihilationism, eternal torment and other dogmas on hell alone.

There are no out-of-the-box answers provided by anyone. Many religions actually conveniently avoid pondering them in any detail.

just as those ignorant of secular philosophy who never deliberate any of these questions have quite likely settled on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them

Compare this to the paucity of experimental data to back up software development methodologies and computer language design. Most software development shops just settle on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them.

There are no out-of-the-box answers provided by anyone.

There are definitely out-of-the-box answers being hawked by someone, Whether these answers are backed up by actual theology doesn't change the fact.

Oh, I fully agree on programming and software development. It's mostly pseudoscience and a swath of tacit unquestioned assumptions. Same with theoretical computer science the moment it steps out of discrete mathematics and combinatorics. It's quite unfortunate then that so many programmers are opposed to philosophy and the humanities, it would truly help them be more introspective. I would never imply that it is any different.

> The idea that religion provides some sort of certainty is a complete falsehood trivially debunked by a cursory glance of theological discourse.

You are missing the fact that most religious people aren't interested in theological discourse, much less debate.

>You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The mere presence of debate does not preclude certainty about overarching principles. Various denominations might disagree about what's moral in a situation, but they can at least agree about why this specific kind of morality is important, and what reasoning and evidence should be relevant in the discussion, and how this morality plays into a larger conception of the Christian life. Elements like the Gospel, the Apostle's Creed, and the metaphysics of traditional deism can all be harnessed to conduct and resolve debate. There are more certainties than there are the opposite. And perfect certainty will never be achieved, even on a theological level. Since one of the charges of theology is to adapt and present Christianity to a changing world.

Unlike, say, secular moral discourse, especially manifest in political speech, which makes no effort whatsoever to establish shared principles. There are few, if any, first premises which can initiate debate. There are few agreed-upon standards for what counts as relevant evidence, or how certain values outweigh others.

Wading in secular moral philosophy, the situation becomes even more dire. No one could ever hope to walk into a secular philosophy class with modern material and achieve any guidance about how to conduct their life.

The ability to debate and resolve issues is the marker of a healthy tradition. Not all issues can be resolved. But there should at least be a vehicle to coming to the best available answer. Studying, say, the progression of Catholic theological doctrine is a good example of this. But in our post-Reformation era, in which every theological debate ends up spawning a new Protestant denomination, your lack of confidence is understandable.

I do, of course, agree with you that our broader cultural approach to such issues is entirely arbitrary and resistant to intellectual progress.

Edit: Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice, Which Rationality is a stellar treatment of this problem you're noticing:

http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Justice-Rationality-Alasdair-Mac...

Even Catholics are quite inconsistent. There's the oddly progressive Old Catholic Church that split off from the mainline at the turn of the 19th century over papal infallibility. There's the sedevacantists who think all Catholic activity after the Second Vatican Council is illegitimate. Even among those, they can't agree whether or not popes after Pius XII even can be legitimate if they recant their alleged heresy, or if it's all lost. The latter conclavists thus actually get to elect their own popes (who are antipopes from the perspective of the mainline).

Then amongst traditionalists and others, they can't agree on whether or not classical liberal principles are compatible with Catholic doctrine or not. Christopher Ferrara and others thinks that all of United States history was a giant mistake and that we should revert to pre-Enlightenment theocracy, Tom Woods and others argue that liberalism is what Catholicism logically leads to.

No, there isn't much certainty about overarching principles. That you can't conduct your own life based on secular morality is false. Most people don't conduct their lives on any explicit morality. The ones that have ever pondered these questions in depth have always been a minority. Everyone else has only trickled down breadcrumbs from some clergyman, or ignored it.

Morality from religion? Please. Who practices what Jesus personally told his believers to do?

"anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery." Matthew 5:32

Combine that with God's official "Thou shalt not commit adultery"

And especially for the protestants, directly by Jesus again:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." Matthew 6:19 "But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal."

And of course, who does this, as Jesus says:

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire." Matthew 18:9

Now explain why you don't do what Jesus and God personally, according to the holy books, tell you to do if you get the morality from the religion.

Even if you are a believer you have to see that it's a human consensus that decides what's moral at any particular point in time. That consensus was historically at some times at some places more influenced by some holy books, therefore the witch hunt ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.") and luckily it's not that much anymore, at least in Europe.

Have even more fun trying to accept the morality from Islam holy books. Note the whole Quran is claimed to be the actual "words of God.": "Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward." Quran (4:74)

While I agree that no religion can answer these questions convincingly, they just don't have to. That's what faith is all about. The answers provided by religions are intended to be "believed" and followed without much questioning. That's why I think there is not much room to discuss between science and religion: one can (and must) be questioned, while the other just can't.

But it was specifically said that providing those answeres was a benefit.

Debate means that all parties are wrong?

By that logic, if, say people disagree about whether cryptography is good, both sides haven't been able to answer the question.

The previous poster was trying to make the case that the questions themselves are significant, and as are the answers, not merely that religion tells people to accept and obey.

If that's the case, then the secularist world doesn't have to come up with actual answers either. They just have to tell people what to think and do, and then they'll have the authority structure they so desired.

It sounds nice to know that when you are born, society has a place for you. They have a job for you. They can tell you what to wear, what dance to learn, and what products to buy. They can tell you how to treat your neighbor, or how to regard the Chinese. They can tell you what the good death is like.

I really don't think a world devoid of meaning is the main cause of depression. I would be much more inclined to look at more immediate, physical stressors as the causes of depression: working too much, working a job you hate, worrying about paying the bills, being socially isolated, not exercising enough, relationship problems, not getting enough sun, having a chemical imbalance in your brain, etc.

Stoicism (the actual Greek philosophy, not the pop culture perception) is very much concerned with the practical aspects of living a meaningful, enjoyable life. It's helped me immensely in dealing with the mental habits of depression. But it pales in comparison to the benefits of a steady job I like, a little pink pill, a loving partner, and playing sports regularly.

I agree, or rather I think that the 'meaning' religion offers is not a cause but more of a facilitator for all the good things you mention at the end of your comment.

So it's not the meaning itself primarily, but everything that comes from having a strong community based on a shared 'myth'.

Or to put it differently: religion is like an opinionated framework, and the non-religious world many of us live in now is like the node/express.js ecosystem.

For many of us (perhaps especially in the HN world), the latter is preferable. We can do our research and pick and choose what we like, and the end result might work as well or better than the framework, even if it might be a bit unorthodox. We figure out the things in life that make us happy, and stick with them.

But for others (and perhaps for many of us too), the freedom and the requirement to do your own research might not work so well.

Some end up with a bug-riddled system that crashes or is insecure. This may lead to depression or other (mental) health issues, or even worse, they get hacked and go straight to a cult solution (I've seen it happen, what with my background denomination being border-line cultish).

And some don't even get that far and spend their life paralyzed, agonizing over best practices, project structure, and whatnot, leading to anxiety, loneliness, and an almost permanent state of anhomie.

I've been in all these situations to various degrees, and sometimes I am almost seriously considering returning to the church-going life that provided me with structure, good habits, friendships, meaning, community, and a somewhat clearer and more solid worldview that was supported by everyone around me and not just the somewhat ad-hoc and unique framework that I've created myself.

I won't, for the same reasons that I'm currently building my own CMS over using Rails: it's more fun, and for some reason I just can't be part of something that I don't intellectually stand behind or that I can't always justify or understand (Rails 'magic').

tl;dr: many people do not have the ability, time, toolset or courage to figure out how to live 'the good life', so buying into a strong community built on some form of 'meaning' that encompasses all aspects of life is perhaps the best alternative.

Frankly, as a committed believer in a traditional religion, none of those questions are concretely finished there, either, after you take off the lid and start asking hard questions.

I agree with the thrust: religion provides an assurance, but not to the level you suggest it does.

> Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

I'm not sure that it's the job of philosophy to construct comforting fairy tales, if it actually is the case that life has no inherent meaning or purpose.

At best, it can give you a guide to construct your own meaning.

Yes. To the question of why is the world here religion answers, "Because God created it." But no religion deals with the obvious follow up question, "Then who created God?" That question is not allowed in the religious framework. Science does not allow for such questions, either, but doesn't purport to answer the final question of why the world exists.

So do we go with religion, invent God, and take satisfaction in child-like explanation of why the world exists? Or do we go with science and merely acknowledge the mystery of what we humans are unable to fully understand (i.e., the world).

It works because most people don't think about these questions on a daily basis. So if you don't think about it except when somebody explicitly brings it up, then whether I believe God created the world doesn't really matter.

So religion works because on the rare occasion that I do wonder "how did this world come to be?" there's an easy answer, and I move on with my life.

Obviously if you find this question very interesting and make it your goal to investigate the matter, then this is an unsatisfactory answer, but the vast majority of people only pay attention to this question every once in a while anyway.

Religion tends to cover a lot of topics in this category - I'll blindly accept the answer because the question is insignificant to me most of the time.

It's not satisfying, but it's not dissatisfying either. It gets the question out of the way.

Obviously this doesn't move humanity forward, but from the perspective of the individual believer, a religion can be a very attractive package compared to the ambiguity of secularism.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of how that's framed. If the religion itself can't be verified, it's not like the answers will be any more convincing. I'm also not sure that delusion will be better for people long term. I'd rather we work on encouraging the creation of values via logic, and that we look for purpose through exploration of our interests... instead of some deity/deities. It could just be a temporary problem, and I'd say it's a pretty minor problem compared to the ones we had prior to secular thinking.

I tend to agree with the parent of your post, even though I agree with your sentiment. I don't think secular thinking will ever find satisfying answers to those questions, so it's going to be more about making peace with dissatisfying answers than finding satisfying ones.

Which makes some religions a "strictly better product". I'd guess that most people will have trouble making peace with the depressing existential reality that "you and the rest of humanity are a mote of dust in the universe," so religions will often give answers that let you sleep better at night, whether or not they are correct or true.

>Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

Inferior? I'd rather have no answer and keep looking than the wrong answer that stops the questions.

I think there's a really interesting debate in the bottom of there somewhere. There are some questions that do not have a satisfactory answer no matter how long you keep looking. You could dedicate your life to answering the meaning of life and you'd fail.

Would that mean you life was better lived than someone who believed in God and that religious meaning of life? Does such a pursuit return any value? It's interesting to think about.

>There are some questions that do not have a satisfactory answer no matter how long you keep looking.

This is true, but in my view, the act of looking has value in and of itself. It opens at least the opportunity for learning something new as opposed to being given and satisfied with an answer.

It is the difference between growth and stagnation.

I suppose someone could get bogged down in trying to find an unfindable answer, though...

You are right, interesting to think about.

Not just the wrong answer that stops the questions, but the wrong answer that consumes people's lives. If Christianity is wrong, then a lot of people have had their time and money consumed by it. All those Sunday mornings given away, all that money donated. Following a religion with anything other than lip service consumes resources.

To be fair, it also creates a great deal of value. Comfort, community, scholarship, good works. It could be argued that these things can be created outside of a religion and they'd be right but religions have created organizational frameworks for these kinds of value for thousands of years.

I agree to some degree, but also it should be noted that religion merely provides a framework to do good deeds in. People still do good deeds outside a religious framework; it's just that having an existing framework in a town makes it easier to work with than start afresh.

I'd also add that those wrong answers also cause a lot of strife, for example, a lot of Catholics feel constantly guilty throughout their life. While Catholicism does provide community and comfort in some areas, it also provides sometimes wracking guilt in others. Not to mention how it treats you if you aren't part of the 'in' crowd (eg: homosexuals), where the 'community' part of the religion mutates into something monstrous.

If not having an answer leads some fraction of the population to suicide or depression, then having an answer (wrong, right, or otherwise) which results in fewer suicides and a reduction in fear and loneliness is not strictly worse. I agree that stopping inquiry is very bad, but suicides are also very bad. This isn't mathematics, it's a social issue, so the optimum response is very nuanced and difficult to discern.

It is people who stop the questions, not the religions. All world religions with some centuries on them have extensive philosophical and theological writings, some of the younger ones do too. It's a myth some find convenient to propagate that religions require you to uncritically swallow their ideas and yell at you if you slightly disagree. There are some people who do that, there are even places where they group together and form sects, but, well, have you noticed how non-religious people join in such activities quite freely, too?

Somewhere, though, in those religions is the answer 'Because, God wills it so or says it so.' Everywhere that happens is a dead question.

For an argument that that's exactly what we need philosophically, see "He Is There And He Is Not Silent" by Francis Schaeffer.

http://www.amazon.com/There-Silent-Paperback-Schaeffer-Franc...

I'd rather have no answer and keep looking than the wrong answer that stops the questions.

This is dependent on the type of person you are. Many people simply can't stand the lack of an answer[0]. This dovetails with the general tendency to accept the first explanation for anything that doesn't contradict what they already believe[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity_tolerance%E2%80%93in...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

> Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions.

No, it really isn't. It's really strange that you talk of science, then just throw out that 'today we have more suicide and depression', when we know we have extremely poor historical records of both those things, particularly depression.

Just because it doesn't have some canned answers doesn't mean secular thought is an inferior product. Secular thought has brought us egalitarianism, for example - civil rights gains are not birthed from religion. It wasn't Jesus that brought us feminism, desegregation, or minority voting rights.

I believe that stephenhess's point was that secular thought was an inferior product in terms of its ability to provide certainty and meaning to people. If you look at some branches of existentialism, say (You validate your life by having a "final experience? Or, worse, by experiencing angst? Seriously? That's how I'm supposed to validate my existence?), then it becomes pretty hard to disagree with stephenhess (presuming that I understand his point correctly).

"civil rights gains are not birthed from religion"

I find this statement particularly ironic as we enter the holiday weekend in which we are called to remember the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.

As Wikipedia says-- "He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs."

It's not that ironic. There were plenty of impassioned essays in the 19th century using the bible to support slavery, for example. And also to oppose slavery. It's not like christianity enshrines civil rights for all.

Similarly, it wasn't anything inherent to christianity that made King behave that way; King chose the parts he wanted to implement. Evidence for devout christians not following the non-violent tenets of the faith is hardly rare.

I am not religious and I don't feel scared or lonely.

Religion provides wrong answers to all the core questions you raise. If your life is made better by getting wrong answers to these questions I am happy to oblige provided you send me a bank check for $100,000. My contact details are in my profile :p

I find it hard to believe that not having an answer about the uncaused causer (no religion can solve that either!), or the meaning of life, or why things exist, or what happens when we die, etc., remotely explains why people are depressed or commit suicide.

Where's the connection?

I can accept that being a member of a religious organization can have protective effects, not just psychologically, but also socially, financially, or logistically (people can take care of your kids or give you legal and tax advice.

But how does that remotely link not knowing the mysteries of life to depression and suicide?

Not to mention, religion isn't even able to answer any of those questions.

They just tell you accept things. If that's the case, it's not the answer that matters, it's the presence of an authority structure that tells you what to believe so you don't have to make decisions for yourself.

Sure, for those people, we can bring structure and authority back in their lives. A social authority can tell you what to believe, where you belong, and what's right and wrong. It doesn't even need to explain anything. It just needs to command authority, because that's what religion does.

I find it hard to believe that Christians solve for any of these questions any better than Buddhists or Muslims or Sikhs.

I don't think it's an accident that a modern, secular framework hasn't arisen to replace traditional religion. For what resources could a framework draw upon? The founding principles of the Enlightenment have stricken notions of "value," "good," "bad," and "purpose" from the realm of knowledge. Modern rationality is anti-teleological. It precludes any exploration of first causes. When constrained by the epistemological standards of empiricism, theorizing about such subjects is impossible. For before it produced modern standards of scientific proof, it was a rebuke against Aristotle and Aquinas, whose methods represented the most fruitful exploration of "value," good," etc. Modernity's absence of such a framework is a feature, not a bug.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written in far more depth about this change. Anyone who's concerned with modernity's apparent difficulty in handling "meaning of life" questions would be advised to discover how exactly we landed in this situation:

http://www.amazon.com/After-Virtue-Study-Moral-Theory/dp/026...

MacIntyre's work was incredibly interesting to this layman. The main point I took away from it is that earlier moral theory asserted that the moral good was the same as in the sense of "this is a good chair". Looked at this way, the ancients had much simpler answers for moral questions than we do, because they all boiled down to "is this person fulfilling their purpose by this action?". Virtue ethics, which he's famously associated with, then brings back that question, with an intermediate step of "what are the traits of a person who is fulfilling their purpose as a person?", as a way of reducing the original question to a heuristic than can be applied to situations.

Where I think this has a problem is that people may disagree about the purpose of a person, or people in general. Just as a chair's purpose is most clearly set by the chair's builder, talking about a person's purpose intuitively implies a person's builder, or "Builder", if you will. A rock shaped by water and accident to look like a chair may serve as one, and so be a good chair, but being a good chair doesn't have any apparent bearing on whether it's a good rock. Without design and intent, purpose is a little fuzzy. Hence (I believe), MacIntyre became religious a while after writing _After Virtue_.

So, even though virtue ethics, if accepted as better than consequentialist ethical theories, makes moral questions simpler, it seems a bit arbitrary with regard to the actual answers, and two virtue ethicists might disagree on which are the important virtues without either being more correct than the other. Without a creator, virtue ethics is on only slightly firmer ground (in my opinion) than consequentialism, but with a creator, it provides strong moral guidelines while not requiring that those guidelines apply to the universe at large, or to said creator. That is, for a virtue ethicist, believing in a creator god grounds moral theory for humans in a way that neither deontology nor consequentialism can.

Losing focus and wondering about the start of the train of thought, stackoverfloing while recursing is a first order intrinsic problem.

> It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

I think you could say the same about religion when it becomes unmasked (in times of great hardship) or under honest rational doubt (The defeated priest trope). The out of the box answers start looking ridiculous and don't seem to offer much hope.

Bergman's Winter Light really made me realize that religion isn't an answer but rather a framework designed to stop looking for answers using things such as tradition, community and moral certainties to ignore the deeper questions. It is useful until it breaks down and then it becomes apparent that we don't have any good alternatives and the resulting reality is rather bleak. One woman in the film finds faith in Love, at least that is a tangible emotion that can be felt, even if it is as misunderstood as anything else.

I think one of the failures of secular thought is to assume that the alternative to religion (universal and rule based) is also universal and rule based. Often depressive thoughts lean towards a thinking that "if EVERYTHING was like X, or if EVERYONE thought like X we would be okay and everyone would be happy". The knowledge that the world will never be like that, along with the desperate hope that it could be, is what imprisons someone in depression. Usually getting out of depression is either an acceptance of a out-of-the-box answer (like religion) or a change in ego where one learns that they define the meaning of life. I've always been partial to egoism in philosophy and ethics and I believe we are advancing the future to better suit it (virtual worlds, no need to work, more of a focus on creativity, leaving the binds of this planet, etc).

"Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad?"

Religion doesn't provide these answers, either. It merely moves the questions one level up the chain.

As an Atheist who has pondered your questions I'll have a shot:

- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad?

Our perceptions of value come from evolution so a fun Xmas/Thanksgiving dinner with the family is considered good by us, bad by the turkey.

- What is the meaning or purpose of life?

It doesn't have a definite one which leaves us free to choose what to go for. Having fun, helping others etc

-Why is there something instead of nothing? What was the original cause? Was there one?

Probably mathematics has to be and physics and hence us are a subset.

- What happens after we die?

Not quite sure - maybe nothing but maybe as Einstein wrote "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" so from some perspectives you don't.

- clearer framework in which they can live meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework

Not sure about a clear framework but my take is that our instincts may be here through evolution but we can still go for the positive ones, love, happiness, beauty and the like.

As Francis Schaeffer said, religion and philosophy are trying to answer the same questions. (Your second and third paragraphs agree with this.) But...

> With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of folks who identify as agnostic or atheist. This is natural given that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods.

The tenets of most major philosophical positions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods, either.

Sauce for the goose...

Religious ideologies have never answered these questions either.

Just because we have not yet answered these questions in a scientific manner does not mean that we cannot. But religion, being absolutist, cannot evolve in a way that scientific understanding can. A religion that evolves is a religion that was false to begin with.

Suicide and depression are largely a result of over diagnosis, which is to be expected when incentives align that way in a capitalist system.

The world is much, much more complex than you understand it to be.

The Big Two of Roman-era philosophy—Stoicism and Epicureanism—tackled these issues without relying on god(s). Now, one may find their arguments unconvincing or their premises unjustified, but if the alternative is religion then they're likely at least as strongly supported and well reasoned as what you'll find there.

And it's not like no other systems/schools have attempted similar feats in the last 2000 years. Just pointing out that this isn't a new problem.

While Epicureanism was an atheistic philosophy, Stoics very much did believe in God. It's all through Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

I find Stoics to vary in their degree of belief in the divine, but generally to consider choosing a particular stance on it unnecessary to carrying on with the rest of their philosophy, often explicitly conceding the point for the sake of argument because it's not especially important. God/Nature/Fate tend to be treated as interchangeable for the purposes of the system, and nailing down which precisely is acting isn't a priority.

I haven't seen god(s) a major component of their philosophy, a kind of tepid and only occasionally-invoked pantheism aside.

[EDIT] "panentheism" to the intended "pantheism"

> Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions.

How would we know how good a product religions are if almost every single consumer was forced into them from a very young and gullible age by the biggest authority figures in their life, their parents?

One might even call this phenomenon "the death of God"...

EDIT: I'm at -1 here, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead

Reply on news.ycombinator.com