Existential Angst

Existential Angst

I am not surprised that about 95% of Americans believe in God because
of the cultural demographics of Americans and their traditions.
The number is far less in Europe and Asia. There are thousands of minor
religions in the world today and there are the larger major religions.
[about 2.1 billion Christians, 1.3 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus -
(and 350 million Buddhists). About 10% of the world is atheist.

We, humans, think about these things because we must. We have evolved the
cognition and consciousness to inquire about everything including our
existence, sense of purpose and meaning in our lives - but doing so also
causes a concommitent problem, that of knowing about our own dying - and
thus the risk for extinction by the existential angst for contemplating
our own mortality. It is reasonable that those those with less anxiety
about death would have a greater sense of purpose and will to survive
would be favored by evolutionary pressure to eliminate the less fit to
survive to reproduce.

When humans could enumerate and contemplate their navel, they needed
to also be able to rationalize "ultimate and intrinsic meaning" or the
fear of death would be overwhelming; they needed their absolutes.

"Furthermore, without God, there are no absolutes. All of our laws, our
morals, our so called "eternal truths," become subjective conceptions,
man-made devices, as flawed and imperfect as the humans who created them.
Good and evil become relative terms, devoid of any true means. Without God
there is no absolute moral order in the universe. We become existential
orphans, barren of purpose, truth, or soul, lost forever to the vast and
meaningless abyss." (Matthew Alper, The "God" Part of the Brain" A
Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God (98))

We have come a long way toward having a deeper understanding for who we
are and never so much as the last 3-400 years and especially the 100 years
in science.

Writer Christopher Hitchens says religion is bad for you. He says this
about religion: "I'm an atheist...I'm not just neutral about religion, I'm
hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one."
And scientist Richard Dawkins says, only the ignorant are religious.

The view about religion may be changing but as humans can we stand the
knowledge upgrade? I'm not sure. Religion is good for some people. There
is no doubt it can drive men (and woman) insane, but it can also cause one
to go insane if to obsessed with it but as a good thing it can create the
conditions for coherence for communities and cultures and a codification
of morals - although there have been major breakdowns in religious
societies and their morals and ethics also.

    To be an atheist it is not necessary to prove that God doesn't exist.
    What do we call people who don't believe in leprechauns, the Tooth
    Fairy, the Sandman, or Tinkerbell? Do we have to prove they don't
    exist? Rather, it is incumbent upon those who assert God does
    physically exist to prove it.
       -- A-Bierce

Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, the author of On Human Nature and
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge is
an atheist who believes we must co-exist with religionists. In his
autobiography, Naturalist (1994), he said, "Religion had to be explained
as a material process, from the bottom up, atoms to genes to the human
spirit. It had to be embraced by the single grand naturalistic image of
man."

In an interview he did for Salon (April 2000) he calls himself a secular
humanist: "And humanists -- I'll identify myself as a secular humanist --
recognize that they do not have 2,500 years of the evolution of ritual and
mythology into which they can invest their spiritual energies. That's the
easy way. Humanists recognize that there's another way. It's harder and
it's not undergirded by a long history of sacralization. And it may never
have sacred prayers and sacred hymns."

Religion and God which it now seems likely evolved as a module in our
brains to make us more fit to survive to reproduce (and then die)
answers the basic question a conscious being would ask, why there is
something rather than nothing.

However, there is also the question which is often posed, that if God
created the universe, what then created God?

Hank Roth
POINTER: http://inyourface.info/ - links