Religion: Atheism

Atheism: the belief that all other religions are wrong and God does not exist.  We'll be talking BRIEFLY about how this goes.

The God exist/not exist argument goes all the way back to the Middle Ages.  It was a time when the Pope had a lot of hold over much of Europe, so it was logical for many anti-religion movements to spring up.  Around this time, a number of arguments were proposed, some more ridiculous than others.

1) God's omniscience is incompatible with human freedom.  If he is all-knowing and perfect, why would he give freedom to things he knew would abuse it? 2) God cannot create a rock that he cannot lift.  This is self-contradicting (unless he can do things at once- please refer to my essay) 3) His omnibenevolence interferes with the problem of evil.

I introduced in that previous paragraph something very important to know about, and that is the problem of evil.  How can evil exist in a world where God is omnibenevolent/all good?  I really don't want to push my opinion on the matter, but this is a common argument against God.  A perfect being that is all-powerful should be able to, theoretically, prevent evil from existing.  If God is all good, why doesn't he do this?  Good question.

A religious person would say that the only way that a perfect world could exist is if people have problems that they can solve.  Alternatively, the only way a perfect world could exist is if good and bad both exist simultaneously.  A Western philosopher would say that this perfect balance is necessary, so there is no such thing as a possible world without evil.  Let us examine this deeper.

Imagine two schools.  One is in the slums, where people pick fights daily.  Also, imagine the other school has no fights ever.  When comparing the two schools, the more "perfect" one is the one without fights, so the slummy school is altered so that no fights exist.  Now, they are both perfect!  However, they both have cheating problems.  Erase the cheating problems, now we have people failing tests.  Erase the failing tests, we have people getting up to use the bathrooms too frequently.  See my point?

I don't know if this has a name, but the purpose of our two school example is that when you take away one major problem, a smaller problem then takes its place as the main focus.  One can never have a perfect world.  In order for a world to be perfect, people must be content with both good and evil existing.  More on that in my Western Philosophy section.

Let us now go to something called Religion of Man, presented by Ludwig Feuerbach and his student/disciple: Karl Marx.

Feuerbach was a socialist kind of guy and did not really adore the idea of one person having more power than his neighbor.  He didn't much care for religion, so his Religion of Man was really more of a "religion is stupid" type of argument, not so much a "God doesn't exist" argument.  He was inclined to prove that religion was a manifestation of humanity's confusion about the purpose of existence.  Not unlike an existential crisis...  We'll get to that.

He used the story of Job as an example of how religion is stupid.  If you don't know it from memory, I strongly suggest you refresh yourself on it, because if you don't, you won't understand the argument completely.
Now, Feuerbach would stare at it with an eyebrow raised and would say that people must be resigned to misery, never question God, and whatever happens is ok.  His point is that "if God is everything, Human is nothing."

Because of his socialist ideas, Feuerbach believed that the only perfect world was one where man helped out man.  He thought the only thing standing in the way of perfection was religion.

Marx was impressed by Feuerbach's teachings, but he was not committed to all of them.  He called Feuerbach an "idealist" (which was a pretty terrible insult coming from Marx, I'll have you know!) so he set out to improve upon them.

Marx concedes that religion alienates some things, but the solution was not to outright critique religion as a whole.  He says that religion is not the cause of "the disease" that plagues humanity, it is a symptom.  He thinks that the problem is the holy family idea.  With someone at the head of the house, religion will exist and problems will occur.  The way to cure the disease is to dissolve the parameters of family: make man, woman and chile equal to one another.  When this occurs, religion will vanish naturally.

I don't get it either, really.  I do advise you to remember this guy wrote The Communist Manifesto.  He did not like one person overpowering another at all.

That should be it, I think...  I could include Freud but I probably won't.