How to submit to a
From James Wood’s review of The Joy of Secularism:
…many religionists assume that life without God would be life without meaning. Where secularists cherish autonomy and choice as qualities that make life meaningful, religionists often emphasize self-abnegation and submission to a higher power.
Yes, but the trouble with that is, how do they know what higher power to submit to? How do they go about submitting to it when they can’t know what it is? What exactly is it that they’re submitting to?
In reality of course it’s either the god of tradition and holy books, or the idea of god they work out for themselves. It’s never an actual higher power that communicates with them in such a way that they have reliable knowledge of how to submit to it.
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Right Ophelia.
And what’s with the bizarre and counter-intuitive assertion that atheists have no meaning in their lives because we choose freedom over submission?
Isn’t living your life as a slave the definition of a meaningless existence?
I just don’t see how the dynamics of this relationship change just because the slaver is god instead of a plantation owner.
Am I missing something here?
Either you’re missing something, or the pro-submission people are. One of those.
B&W needs a “like” button. But lacking that, I’ll just chime in the old-fashioned way by saying that I really like the way you’ve turned the usual bullshit religious rhetoric about “meaning” on its head, Toronto Atheist!
It has a like button! Just not on each comment.
I +1 ed it.
What exactly is it that they’re submitting to? Never heard of a celibatarian privileged priest cast ?
Lemur – yes certainly, but that’s not what they mean by “a higher power.”
Of course people submit to priests as a way of submitting to “a higher power,” but that’s why it’s worth pointing out that actually that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense – or, at least, it’s worth asking why they think there is an unbroken line of communication between a priest and “a higher power.”