Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

As if anyone really had any clue about the noumenal world or anything of the kind; it's fashionable now to blame Christians and Catholics for this and that, but everyone believes something in their own way, and whether on a national scale or a personal scale, someone in their lives are going to hear about it. Dogmatic non-belief is an oxymoron. By the same token, any claim to absolute certitude on the part of anyone at all is a confirmation of deceit.

Just from sheer observation and life experience, free of any sacred texts or overweening influences, a day has not gone by since my brain recognized a nearly inscrutable mystery in everyday life--sometimes in the most mundane things. Sure, we get into moods (depression, etc) where this seems to fade, but it's still there.

This brings us back to Leon Chestov and Soren Kierkegaard: if everything is absurd and senseless, which it certainly seems to be when it comes to the blunders of nature,
the atrocities committed every day on this planet randomly, blah blah--then by extension the most illogical metaphyiscal belief is no more absurd than anything else. I am a pessimist at heart and this has somehow lead me to be a very active Roman Catholic. This is a world of grievous suffering and the best thing we can do with our lives is to help others suffer a little bit less (and realize our talents, take pleasure in things, et al.) But there is an inescapably moral dimension to existence.


I think the sometimes unbearably pretentious and at other times incredibly beautiful work of William Peter Blatty best represents the kind of Catholicism I'm talking about.


WHO KNOWS!:D

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

In some threads I mentioned the work The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, and I think I often do this because I mention some points given by Roger Scruton in his essay, that the idea of the sacred is part of what makes us human. I think the same can be said for the idea of worshipping.

I suppose worshipping can take several forms, which includes looking up to show business or sports idols or artists or anything else. Perhaps it has to do with the propensity of individuals to believe that there is something greater than he is, whether it is an object or cause or idea. Given that, I might say that everyone is a worshipper of something, and that thing might not always be concrete and one might even do so without question. For example, one might worship a god while another the god of reason.

Of course, skeptics can appear on both sides, and it's likely that one becomes skeptical because of the same psychological weaknesses.

Finally, I'd like to add that my views are the same as Dekadent's.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

About Pullman, you'll find one interview linked at www.aldaily.com and another in Christianity Today. What I find interesting is the view that his work was influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost and gnosticism.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

And by Lawrence Durrell's 'The Avignon Quintet'.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

A decent Youtube clip.



Sam Harris has a new book out titled The Moral Landscape, and Richard Dawkins has a new one called The Magic of Reality. I've read most of the Dawkins book, but I haven't picked up the Harris book yet.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

Harris is often brilliant, as in the video, when he calmly, methodically, relentlessly points out the utter moral depravity of what many Christians claim to believe and, what's more, claim everyone is supposed to believe. However, I find him less persuasive when he outlines his own positive vision. I have a copy of The Moral Landscape but haven't done more than glance at it. However, I am somewhat familiar with his views from reading his other books and some of his articles and blog entries. The subtitle of The Moral Landscape is How Science Can Determine Human Values. I could go along with something like "can, in some ways, help us to be more informed and wiser about human values," but from what I've read Harris has a totalistic, brave-new-world vision which he expresses with an air of supreme confidence. It is, of course, "scientific," so that answers that. Any rival philosophies are now to be considered obsolete. Any dissenters, skeptics, malcontents, laggards, refuseniks, pluralists, individualists, antiquarians, pessimists, etc., are evidently to be put to rout by the sheer force of his unanswerable arguments. Hitchens wrote somewhere that we should distrust anyone who has no sense of irony. Harris, though he and Hitchens were friends, doesn't seem to have much of a sense of irony.

Although I disagree with some of John Gray's opinions, I share his dim view of utopian progressivism. I can't quite follow Ligotti and Zapffe to the furthest extremes of their pessimism, but I think that if human life is to be tolerable at all, here and there, from time to time, it won't be through an embrace of rationalist utopian progressivism. That to me is a delusion and a nightmare. If life is to be tolerable, we should take guidance not only from science but from experience, a study of history, and our own practical judgments synthesized from all the things that practical judgments are synthesized from. Surely we should also be very cautious, very skeptical about calls for programmatic change. I'd even recommend a self-protecting refusal to be swept along.

Ironically (remember the need for ironic perspective) many religious believers have a more realistic view of human life than messianic secularists do, despite the fact that the former indulge in what I would regard as transcendental fantasies, and often transcendental fantasies of an unsavory character. I'm not much exercised by the question of antinatalism myself, but here is a good post about religion at Say No To Life: Religion, Procreation, and a Divine Hatred of Life.

Actually, despite my negative comments about Harris above, I appreciate much of his writing and public speaking.
I'm looking forward to his forthcoming book Free Will -- a notion that, as I remember, he wrote against, briefly and in passing, in The End of Faith. I've recently become more interested in determinism and, depending on what one means by that term, may be inclined (determined?) to accept at least some aspects of that view of things. (Yeah, I know, I'm talking like I have free will; can't help it.) Also, although Harris does not use the term, he seems to be a (as am I) about consciousness and about the origin of the universe. [For some reason, that mysterianism link won't insert properly.] Here are two excellent posts about consciousness from Harris's blog:

The Mystery of Consciousness

The Mystery of Consciousness II

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

Another good clip by Sam Harris. The film The God Who Wasn't There is uneven, but the interviews make it worth watching. Robert M. Price has a great interview.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

Harris is interesting as always, but --

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." -- Kant

Maybe one could posit a rough division between "crooked timber" nontheists and "straightener" nontheists. Without trying to justify any of this, I would quickly list Ligotti, Cioran, John Gray, Nietzsche, Santayana, Mencken, possibly Robert M. Price among the former, and Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Wells, Russell, Asimov, J. L. Mackie among the latter.

Update: I figured I'd regret reeling off names so glibly. Nietzsche is on the list of "crooked timber" nontheists because of his insistence on the Dionysian as well as the Apollonian. But now it occurs to me that he could be considered the most extreme of the "straighteners" because of the Übermensch nonsense. No doubt there are problems with the other names, too. But I still think it makes sense to posit a conceptual distinction between "crooked timber" nontheism and "straightener" nontheism.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

I know this is quite an old thread, but this interview by WFR conducted around the time the Penguin double feature was published interrogates Ligotti on his religious background and he confirms that he has been an atheist since around nineteen.

Interview: Thomas Ligotti and the Realm of Nightmares | Weird Fiction Review

As for me and my relationship with Ligotti's works, I've been an atheist since I was a relatively young child. Discovering Lovecraft and learning about his worldview made me feel very insignificant, rightly so, but I wasn't necessarily saddened or frightened by it. I was more awestruck than anything, and carried around this fact without much worried. I retained a fair bit of optimism and opportunism because that was the prevailing outlook of the New Atheist figures I was listening to at the time. Then I graduated to Ligotti and took his more extreme worldview seriously. Now I say: "we can fix some problems, but only in the short term, even if the means of solution is radical; we will become extinct sooner or later."

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

I'd forgotten that Sam Harris even walked the planet.

When was it...2003 that I last heard of him? He's certainly been keeping himself in good currency, it would seem.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

Never did care for Harris much, especially his imperialist politics; Hitchens and Dawkins seemed to always be better orators (especially Hitch) and arguers anyways.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

Hitchens was funny...except all that time wasted on Bill Maher's show. Disappointing, the whole Iraq thing. The need for attention can sometimes can completely erode an intellectual's integrity.

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

An interesting blog post, but I have a couple of gripes with it.

One being that the author appears to siv the choice to reproduce down to what an individual's opinion is on the existence of a deity or if they're a materialist. This ignores secular, societal factors thar drive people to have children regardless of their religious preferences, namely family/peer pressure, economic pressure, and state pressure.

Another being that, even though the major religious doctrines tend to harbor a negative view of humanity and may fall more in line with antinatalism philosophically, not so pragmatically. This paper, though a bit old, correlates stronger religiosity in adolescents with less contraception use when they become sexually active compared to those with weaker religiosity.

Adolescent Religiosity and Contraceptive Usage on JSTOR

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

He's still around. I don't think he does the lecture tour like he used to. He goes on TV from time to time to denounce radical Islam. He got in a heated argument with Ben Affleck about it. Affleck is always going off on something or other. Harris spends most of his time writing, doing a podcast, and working in neuroscience research. He went to some private AI conference with his friend Elon Musk which sounded intriguing.


He bashed Trump recently and I thought it was funny.

Here it is for anyone interested:

Re: Atheism and Ligotti
 

Can't say I personally see anything particularly remarkable about him as a thinker, but he is definitely emblazoned in my memory as one of the early millennia's many figureheads.

As for Thomas Ligotti's work, I've always seen more of a metaphysical wound--a yearning for justice--than any kind of positivistic materialist atheism.