Oh, thanks. I’ll look into that when I get home in June and update the last link if there was an error.

Just wanted to let you know that the last two examples in your section “Argument from Parental Love” about the Nature of Love seem to be the exact same link.

I love your work.

The evidence of world religions (e.g. much of the world clings to different fantasies than Brierley’s; and only highly educated, comparatively more just societies show a significant rate of abandoning these superstitions) proves that Brierley’s delusion is the causal confluence of two factors: historical (and thus concomitantly geographical) accident (e.g. had Brierley been born and raised and lived in Saudi Arabia or India, or ancient Egypt, odds are good he’d have written this book in defense of Islam or Hinduism or Osiris Cult instead: see John Loftus’s Outsider Test for Faith) and universal cognitive defects in the human brain that result in it making poor judgments about reality when not disciplined with corrective methodologies (hence I referenced in this article Dennett and last time also Hutson on this point, whom between them summarize all the science answering your question).

This is why the more exposed to, and encouragement to use, those corrective methodologies (whether from inner encouragement, from one’s own personality disposition, or outer encouragement, from one’s admired peers or in-group; or both), the closer one’s worldview and beliefs come to alignment with reality. This is as true of atheists as theists. There are plenty of non-supernatural superstitions that operate pretty much the same way as religions today. Atheism by itself does not equal the reliable adoption of a life-pervasive stance of effective critical thinking. That you figured out one thing about the world does not mean you are well equipped to figure out the rest. That requires actually being so equipped, and actually applying that equipment to everything, not just the one thing. So atheists have a lot more to do than just get on without one particular superstition.

Despite the growing numbers of atheists around the world, it’s probably fair to say that atheists are (and have been) the weird ones. Most people do seem to have believed in gods, and its persistence seems to imply an evolutionary benefit of some kind. And even atheists are not free from superstitions, dogmatic thinking, or convincing themselves of something via emotion rather than evidence.

Is it (as PineCreek likes to say) that atheists are just a little more dead inside (he says it tongue-in-cheek, but does think his own deconversion was possible because of his stoicism and detachment from emotions)? Why do so many people need a purpose to come from on high, and others just don’t care?

A person who proposed to their partner in a clearing in the woods is going to have a very particular meaning for that clearing for however long it remains even remotely recognizable. To everyone else, it’s just a spot in the forest.

We all impart our own sense of meaning onto things, whether that’s in the semiotics of a term, the understanding of the significance of a place or even or object, etc.

Trying to root that into the universe itself somehow is silly. But at least it’s less silly than trying to pretend that those meanings are being silently nodded along to by an intrusive omni-spirit.

If there’s going to be an objective root to meaning, it’s going to be something that emerges from the facts of the human species and our place in time and space, or about the way that meaning is ascribed and negotiated universally.

Being charitable, I can recognize that people want to imagine that the things that matter to them matter to the universe… but that’s already pretty arrogant. But it gets much worse because, in practice, it seemingly always gets used to deny someone else’s sense of meaning.

Logicked and David Wellman are engaging with a new very low-tier Christian apologist, Christrighteous, and he had the gall to tell Logicked that Logicked’s purpose isn’t to make YouTube videos… even though that’s what Christrighteous is doing. Christians routinely want to colonize everyone else’s meaning and purpose.

Pushing back on that doesn’t just help them, it protects everyone else from their immaturity.