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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

Most are atheists, which denies them access to one of the few institutions shown to promote happiness and sociability and provide meaning and consolation once life's major goals/distractions are past, and you have to stop and look existence in the face. Downboat away, HN, but it's a major cause of unhappiness: "He doesn't exist, the bastard."

Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.

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You're getting downvoted, but I think you're at least correct that it would make sense to control for the usual correlates of happiness and see if tenured philosophy professor happiness isn't already explained by those factors. Religiosity might be the big one.

This is the most productive response. However, if we're granting the OP's premise that his N=8 sample needs explanation, then it doesn't seem that anything so simple as religiosity can explain the allegedly dramatic data.

Anyways, the grandparent comment ought to be downvoted because his minor contribution does not nearly make up for the damage it does to the tenor of the conversation. If you want to save his contribution, repeat it in a top level comment and link to him for attribution.

I didn't downvote him until I read the last line of his post ("Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.") He doesn't need a God, because he obviously carries an omniscient one with him in his own mind.

> Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God

Why are those my only choices? I am neither a nihilist nor a theist. I'm just kind of enjoying being alive while it lasts. Do you think I'm doing it wrong?

You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing.

Absurdism is great if you've got something to distract you from it...

> You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing.

I would expect philosophy professors not to believe such questions are unanswerable, and in fact to believe that they possess, at the very least, a solid start on coherent and true answers.

No, you're doing just fine. You see, some theists cling to their religion so strongly, that they have difficulty imagining how they would interpret the world without god. So right and wrong, come from god. Meaning of life comes from god. etc, etc. The op even imagines happiness requires god.

So they take that point of view, remove god from it, and then apply what they imagine to atheists. And it's never good. You get these ridiculous ideas like atheists must all be nihilists; must be immoral; etc.

The people who actually know better are too busy doing other things to piss in the wind by arguing with a theist. Absence of disproof in this case doesn't equate to proof. It may just mean that nobody is willing to give you constructive criticism.

There's a concept in Buddhism called the "Dark night of the soul" which is a touchy moment when your world view is essentially nihilist and depressive and you have to pass through it. A little dangerous for depressive people looking for meaning to be in a state where they believe there is no meaning.

I'm told it passes for nearly everybody.

The expression "dark night of the soul" comes from Roman Catholicism. I don't think it refers to what you're talking about either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul

Then it has been stolen. Wouldn't be the first time. And it's not particularly different. The players are different but the story is the same: existential crises are a bitch.

Philosophy of religion departments are mostly staffed by theists, so there's an easy check on that hypothesis. I've never heard any of my philosopher acquaintances offline or online mention that the philosophers of religion seemed especially happy.

I think the entire existentialist movement would strongly disagree with your last point. (To say nothing of Absurdists and their ilk.)

You don't really provide an argument in favour of your point.

I, for one, question the notion that life must have a "meaning". Life is action, a sequence of distractions, one after the other.

If your meaning leads to you to the "praise the lord" course of action, I'll contend that other course of actions are not worse, nor devoid of "sense" (however you define it). Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

> Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

Well, at least your brain chemistry thinks so. And eventually some mixture of idiots and bullies will be in charge of the people you love and things you created. And, if not, there's always the heat death of the universe to look forward to. Or the next supervirus if you're impatient.

Atheists aren't especially unhappy, so this completely fails as an explanation.

Yeah, I'd love to see some data to support that theory. I know atheists are much less representative of the prison population and things like teen pregnancy - all things I would think would be strongly correlated with an unhappy population.

What? That is an absurdly binary thought. You're saying that you either have to believe in God or be nihilistic to be happy? Give me a break.

I think the argument is that nihilism follows from atheism and that nihilism is depressing.

Seems like a very hard thing to suggest, really. I'm an atheist and nihilist and I've actually found myself to be _much_ less depressed than I was when I was an academically studied and strong christian. I've baptized, preached, converted, etc. I was like a superstar christian and now I'm an atheist and much much less prone to depression.

I feel like I don't attribute the depression as much to my religious affiliations or lack thereof as I do to my hormone levels settling down due to older age, but my specific experiences of religion did a lot to promote the idea that it's healthy to acknowledge your guilt in all things.

I was super religious as a kid.

When I bump into people who spend all day fretting that their best friends are going to be tortured for all eternity for their poor life choices I feel pity. How do you breathe with that clear and present danger in the corner of your mind all day every day?

You trust that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, but ultimately fair God knows what He's doing better than we do. It's called faith for a reason.

On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice?

But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains? It's not like they have a choice anyway. And many of them like it.

>On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice?

Well, mostly, we try to bring the perpetrators to justice and provide rehabilitation for the victims.

>But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains?

Who said we pity them? Besides which, "involuntarily" doesn't mean that. Some of those chemicals and impulses are under conscious control, because they're the ones that implement conscious self-control. You are in fact affected by your experiences and can in fact change your beliefs, should you choose to.

I live in the middle of one of the most highly concentrated christian areas in the south of the US (at one point we were the most concentrated christian area in the world a few years back). I've baptized more people than probably 99% of the christians you know. I've done mission work in probably more countries than 99% of the people you know have even visited. I was exactly what the church wanted me to be and that didn't make me happy. I believed in God with such a strong conviction and faith that I took it by his words to test the spirits and that's the only reason I allowed the thought into my mind that God might not be real because I decided to test the spirits like instructed in 1 John 4:1.

Only outside of this self persecution of faith that tells everyone they aren't worthy and they should relinquish all ideas that they could ever handle something on their own just builds guilt upon guilt. Jesus take the wheel? Oops I drove my own car today, I guess that's just one more subtle way I didn't have faith, because remember just a small amount of faith can move mountains but I don't have even enough for God to drive my car.

Luckily, I'm outside of that now and it's pretty easy to see all the subtle emotional warfare the church perpetuates regularly and without shame.

"You're useless without me"..."If you don't love me I'll allow you to suffer (in hell none the less)"..."You need to understand how stupid you are and how the beginning of you ever knowing anything is to accept how insignificant you are and that I'm all that matters"

Sound like church or an abusive psychopath? Hard to tell the difference when you put all these subtle common church teachings side by side.

So forgive me when I call total bullshit on you for suggesting that faith is a sure way to find happiness, because I had more faith that anyone I know and I can say that while being surrounded by more christians than you know (likely, statistically speaking).

edit: also, what do you tell rape victims? God wanted that to happen to you? Do you tell them he knew it was going to happen before they were even born and that it was part of his plan? Do you tell them that he was capable of preventing that kid from being born with a disease that killed him slowly and painfully, but he allowed it to happen?

I'm not interested in your opinions. I'm interested in what you actually tell the victims, because I'm confident you apologize and console them and say that was bad while fully acknowledging your God knew that would happen before he even created mankind. Your idea of God is portrayed in many places as making/allowing good people to suffer because that's part of his plan - but yet you never tell rape victims to chin up because maybe that was supposed to happen, do you?

> I'm interested in what you actually tell the victims, because I'm confident you apologize and console them and say that was bad while fully acknowledging your God knew that would happen before he even created mankind.

I tell them I love them because God loves me. I pray for them. And I be there for them as well as an imperfect human can be. And I tell them I do it because God loved me first.

If we're all random atoms, that's a huge waste of time though.

(can't reply to your comment because hacker news hates discussion)

so you only tell victims nice things to make them feel better? Interesting. That's exactly what everyone does regardless of faith. It's almost as if that's a universal human trait and not something exclusive to your religion.

But keep telling yourself that your actions make sense because you have the context of christianity and no one else has any idea wtf is going on in this world.

The fact that mankind shares common decency doesn't invalidate any particular theology. If anything, it sort of undermines physicalist philosophies, since common decency is just an illusion or evolutionary trait (and at some level involuntary) if reality is just random matter plus time.

Socialization is perfectly adequate as a basis for everything you've talked about, though. Otherwise, you couldn't trust your dog not to kill and eat your family the moment your back is turned. And some ongoing research has even suggested that pure altruism exists in a cross-section of the animal kingdom.

No need to postulate supernatural forces when we can't say we fully understand the natural world yet.

Aside from the fear and trembling eventuated by religion, we have happy atheistic philosophies. This just came up from the fortune program, for example:

    If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing
    of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur
    of this life.
                    -- Albert Camus

That pretty well describes my philosophy, and I'm reasonably happy.

Yeah, when reality gets depressing you should retreat to insanity...

If you're that desperate, try meth; it's less harmful to society.

What about the ones who are not atheists?

So then nihilism or hysterics? I guess, with few exceptions, everyone choose hysterics.

>Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.

Nope. You can't base a sound theory of value in mere supernatural human-like minds.

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