blasphemy

blasphemy

Ask an atheist why it is so hard to believe on God, you will get answer like not enough evidence.

Bertrand Russell(British Philosopher), who was once asked what he would say if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked why he had not been a believer. Russell's reply: "I'd say, 'Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!'". For an atheist, theism is incoherent, inconsistent and ill confirmed by the evidence. They would rather like to believe that it is unreasonable and irrational to believe in GOD. This evidentialist objection can be seen as the ground for conceptual rationality which demands a obligation on one’s belief to the strength of evidence. The argument is that, a believer who has no evidence has violated an intellectual an cognitive duty of conceptual rationality.

W.K. Clifford said “if a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body and spread to the rest of the town.”

But the rational against theism here is little bit questionable. Its little difficult to assume that believing on God, without evidence, could be going against intellectual duty. The simple reason behind this logic is like most of the time our own beliefs are not in our control. Suppose if somebody offers you 10 million dollar and ask you to believe that 1 is greater number than 2, would u be able to change your belief. Evidence could also be subjective in some cases, which can also distort our beliefs, for example if a person has been taught right from his childhood that number 2 is smaller than number 1 he will have difficulty to believe other way around, incidentally which might be the truth. Here the person has not failed in his intellectual obligation; nevertheless he is intellectually flawed and disfigured.

Sigmund Freud says “Religion is universal obsessional neurosis of humanity” and it is destined to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies. Freud saw religious beliefs as “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wishes of mankind.”He sees theistic belief as a matter of wish-fulfillment. Men are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle of the overwhelming, impersonal forces that control our destiny, but mindlessly take no notice, no account of us and our needs and desires; they therefore invent a heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who exceeds our earthly fathers in goodness and love as much as in power. So according to him theists are the victims of pervasive illusion inherent in our society.

A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx:

Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man who has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has lost himself once more. But man is not an abstract being . . . Man is the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society, produce religion, produce a perverted world consciousness, because they are a perverted world . . . Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is the demand that it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.

So if we analyse these two statements it seems the theists have lost their cognitive functionality of brain ‘cause they are not able to come out of this illusionary spell. They are still not comfortable with the fact that any comfort or help we get will have to be our own devising. There is no Father in heaven to turn to, and no prospect of anything, after death, but dissolution.