In a debate in 2021 between Latter-day Saints and a Secular Nontheist (RFM), at one point an LDS guy named Kwaku points out that when you remove the religious worldview, the life of meaning and purpose, "you get sad." Those words echoed in my mind for a week. Kwaku was right. My nontheism had made me sad.
So here is the full quote at the 34-36 minute mark on the Midnight Mormons Channel, where Kwaku responds to a person going by RFM, who had just mocked and made fun of LDS beliefs, by saying:
I want to keep this precise … You can take a very cynical view of [LDS] history and you can say "Oh he did this and he did this," and the history of the magic doesn't actually matter; but ultimately what that means is RFM just does not believe in that magic, he just does not believe in that divinity. From what I know you [RFM] don't believe in really anything, and that's okay, but this idea that "Oh common sense leads you to be atheistic or secular," it's just not true. Try this out after you leave here, go to a Barnes & Noble and go to the self transformation section and just look at the crystals and tarot card books that are flying off the shelves by millennials and gen z's; and I want you to think about that specifically because even though the secularist narrative has been pushed forward people naturally still go to spirituality and faith. It will not go away, the magic does not go away no matter how many [anti_religious] PDFs and articles you write, it will not go away because there's something intrinsically part of every human being that wants that; and when you take it away you get sad. When you take it away you become unhappy. I know there's a lot of jokes being made about Moroni's sexy robe or whatever you want to say, but this isn't really humorous. We're talking about people's families being split apart because divorce is happening; ... we're talking about very very important specific things and it's not really funny, it's very serious. A lot of ex-mormons in here know the trauma of leaving the faith, it is not that funny. Spirituality does matter and you can villainize the prophets who created a pretty great church, where you find community in just about anywhere you go, and you can say "Oh it's all lies, they're bad people, … and I have to defend bad people and I can just love people exactly how they are now that I've left, because yes everybody matters, we all get a trophy; or we can be real and preserve what we have and we can actually live up to what we're supposed to be living up to as Christians. The magic is real, the spirituality does matter and your secular narrative will lead people to be miserable, it will leave people to get divorced to self harm, and do all manner of terrible things. That's the reality, and that's what we've seen. So we can laugh at it or we can deal with the reality but our society is falling literally because of the things you are espousing.
Later in the debate, the moderator Shawn McCraney talks about his own career being anti-mormonism but he stopped being anti-mormonism because he began to realize that his anti-mormonism rhetoric led to a negative fallout: of people leaving the LDS Church but then falling into the unyielding despair of atheism, corrupt pastors, or nihilism. And how much damage it did to people's psyche and how it's not good to tear apart people's faith and belief in the magic or divine unless you're going to be their "brother's keeper" and replace it with a new Divine Narrative, an existential support and grounding for them.
The irony is that many atheists don't deny that atheism makes you sad. As George Bernard Shaw, puts it:
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
Here we see that Shaw admits the believer is happier but tries to feel superior by saying it's just emotions, like getting drunk, and even calls happiness a dangerous quality. Better to be a somber and joyless cynic I suppose.
Well why is the atheist sad and unhappy compared to the believer? Well I think this was answered by the famous atheist Bertrand Russell, in a Free Man's Worship he writes:
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
How uplifting! What a pep talk, "only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, ..." I think I'd rather have unyielding hope and faith in Something, thank you very much.
I then thought about atheistic literature and how depressing it is. Reading the book The Stranger by Albert Camus, really opened my eyes to the existential emptiness of atheism. You really feel the meaninglessness of life as perceived by the atheist character. When I compare that feeling of depressing meaninglessness and unyielding despair portrayed in that book to the Gospels and other religious texts, there is a distinct difference in emotional tone and feeling it gives me.
So at the end of the day I do not like atheism. I do not like it's ultimate message and how it makes me feel sad. I want to feel joy. I want to feel good. I want to feel uplifted. I want to feel that life has meaning and purpose and there is some divine magic within the mystery of existence.
