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"...a more excellent hope"
"Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith..." Ether 12:4
"O ye that are bound down under a foolish and a vain hope, why do ye yoke yourselves with such foolish things?" -- Korihor (Alma 30:13)
Here's a question: what's the difference between a real hope and a false (or 'vain') hope?
From a personal standpoint, the feelings seem to be the same--in both cases, they represent future situations you are looking forward to, and working toward.
Presumably, then, the main difference is that a real hope will eventually be realized in the future, while a false hope will not be. The danger of 'false' hopes, then, is that there will come a time where you will be sorely disappointed that what you had originally hoped for never materialized. Thus, even though the personal feelings of peace and happiness that come from both kinds of hope are the same, one will eventually lead to a future period of sadness and disappointment, while the other will not.
It's interesting, then, to hear people who don't believe in God say that belief in God is a 'false hope' because that implies that even though belief in God may provide some tangible comfort to us in this life, we're setting ourselves up to be sorely disappointed in the future...yet, if they are right, and there is no afterlife and our consciousnesses (sp?) are consigned to oblivion...then after we die we won't have any kind of existence to contemplate that disappointment, will we? Therefore, is there really a difference between the hope for the existence of God being real or false? Since that 'day of disappointment' never actually occurs, you haven't really lost anything by believing in God in the first place, have you?
Imagine we have a passenger jet plane cruising over the ocean. The flight proceeds smoothly for a time, until the pilot becomes aware of a severe mechanical failure, such that in ten minutes time, the entire plane is going to explode and everyone inside will perish. Now, consider all the people in the passenger section: they have a hope that they are going to reach their destination, and that their lives are going to continue on for many days and years afterwards. Given the situation, we can classify that hope as 'false' since the truth of the matter is, they only have ten more minutes to live before the plane explodes. The pilot, on the other hand, has no such hope...yet the fact that he doesn't subscribe to the 'false hope' that his life will continue on past the ten minute mark doesn't make much of a difference, does it? The pilot is still in line to suffer the same fate as everyone else and his advanced knowledge provides no benefit him, nor does the lack of knowledge by the other passengers especially make much of a difference to them, either--other than they are still calm, peaceful and happy for those ten minutes, while the pilot is probably very, very nervous...
Taking this a little further, suppose the pilot was wrong in his diagnosis--that, in fact, once the ten minutes had passed, the plane did not blow up, and in fact continued onward to its destination, exactly as the majority of the people aboard had hoped for when boarding. Now, it's the pilot's "hope" (or 'expectation') for the future that proved to be false (although it would be hard to argue that he would be 'disappointed') and again in the end there really is no difference between the final condition of the pilot and all the other passengers despite the difference in hopes.
Let's continue even further: suppose the pilot--AFTER making the flawed diagnosis--makes several irreversible life decisions based on the assumption that he has only ten minutes to live. This could be, I don't know, him radioing his supervisor to tell him exactly what he thinks of him, stripping off his clothes and running naked around the plane, you know, just for the heck of it, or perhaps throwing open the emergency exit and jumping into the ocean, prefering perhaps to 'skydive' for a little while before dying, instead of passively waiting for the explosion. In this case, there is a great difference between the pilot and the passengers since one made significant decisions based on his 'knowledge' that life was not going to continue beyond point X, while the others did not.
In all three cases, regardless of whose hope was real or false, the passengers' situation ends up being the same or better than the pilot's every time. Now compare this with a belief in God and the afterlife...even if the atheists are right, how exactly does that belief benefit them in the end.
Now, only a cynical person would say the lesson in all this is that everyone should join a church and believe in God just to be safe...but it does raise the question of what exactly the harm is in believers having faith in God, the afterlife, and a final judgment even if it is 'false', and why the 'There is no God' types seem to think everyone would be better off in some way accepting their point of view...
continued tomorrow...
September 15, 2004 in Religion | Permalink
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Comments
How could believing that God exists ever possibly be worse than believing He doesn't? Even if God does not exist, believing that He does is a comfort in life and inconsequential after death. And, even though non-believers are right they come out no better than believers. Have I encapsulated your point?
I don't assume that anyone else feels the same way I do about this, and I certainly don't wish to speak for the anti-religion crowd, but I am an atheist in the practical sense and I think you have overlooked something.
You have already stated one temporal benefit of religion (it is a comfort), but there are others. The most important, I believe, is that it answers the burning question of humanity, the question that we all ask:
Why am I here? What am I here to do? What... is my... Purpose?
They are the same question. We need a purpose. We need one so badly because we cannot take action without it. As inherently rational beings we must have a reason for everything that we do.
Beliefs, little ones to great ones, are the organized statements of what we think is reality, of what we think is true. They are what we use to decide what our purpose is. A belief in God and its attendant beliefs provide an answer to humanity's question; they provide a purpose. It is our beliefs that determine our actions.
If one's beliefs are untrue, one has been committed to the wrong purpose and has been acting wrongly. One has been wasting time and has lost a portion of one's life that one will never get back.
No amount of comfort or security is more valuable than truth, because without it the comfort is unwarranted and the security is illusory. For this reason, an ugly truth is better than a beautiful lie.
Let us return to the jetplane scenario. The pilot has just discovered that he and everyone else on the plane have only ten minutes to live. His knowledge of the truth is not a detriment to him; it is a benefit.
He has the opportunity to use the last minutes of his life to call his parents, his wife, and his children. He can tell them that he loves them. He can tell them, if he is a God-fearing man, that he will always be with them and that he will see them again. He can use the last ten minutes of his life to their fullest. He can also go mad and jump out of the plane. (Which do you think is likeliest?) Because he knows the truth, no matter how ugly it is, he has the opportunity to act rightly.
The oblivious passengers do not have this opportunity. For instance, at the ten minute mark a mother has just smacked her misbehaving child. She feels badly for it but believes that discipline is important. She promises herself that she will make it up to her child once they get home. She then spends the last ten minutes of her life feeling mad at her child. Her child spends the same time whimpering, wondering whether his mother loves him. Their last minutes were not used to their fullest, they were scuandered, and it is because they did not know the truth.
I am an atheist, but I realize that I could be wrong. That's partly why I'm here, writing comments to you. I am in search of The Truth, even if it turns out to be something I don't like.
I admit, if the truth is that God exists, it will not be entirely palatable to me. For one, it will mean that I have wasted a good chunk of my life. For two, it goes against many of my strong beliefs. However, if it is true I hope I have the courage to swallow it.
More disturbing than all of this, I see as a logical extension of your viewpoint that a believer can gain nothing from questioning his faith. He should not seek truth because his beliefs are already pragmatically superior to any others, even if his beliefs are false. In my book, that is intellectual sloth and cowardice, and in my experience, latter day saints show neither. I respect mormonism as the religion most willing to verify the truth of its tenets. Don't let me down.
Posted by: Noah Langenwalter | Sep 18, 2004 7:38:44 PM
Good comment!
The airplane model isn't perfect--it's oversimplistic among other things as are all parables--but it's the best I could come up with at the time of writing. The pilot calling home during those ten minutes is a good point, which I had purposefully neglected since there really isn't anything comparable in the 'flight' through our mortal existence for in-flight cell phones (which was the purpose of the parable, of course...)
"No amount of comfort or security is more valuable than truth, because without it the comfort is unwarranted and the security is illusory..."
I'm not sure I can agree absolutely, because this requires that the comfort and security gained from the false hope will one day be exposed, and the 'illusion' destroyed--which is not guaranteed to happen. Should person X live his/her whole life under an 'illusion'--believing in something that is false, without ever finding out that it was false, I think you'd be hard-pressed to conclude how their experience is really any worse than someone who only believed in 'true' things.
Take a person living his life peacefully in a small town in southern Florida, and another person who thinks he lives in a small town in southern Florida but is actually in a fake town inside a California soundstage run by actors (a la "Truman Show"). In the case where (opposite from the movie) the second person lives their entire life never knowing that their world is fake, how exactly does their life experience differ from the first person?
(Consider this dialogue near the end of "Truman":
Truman: "Was nothing real?"
Christof: "YOU were real..." i.e. the fakeness of the environment didn't change the reality of his life and his feelings...)
Consider also the numerous people who live and die inside the Matrix never knowing that their world is fake... As I recall, Cypher, in his bargain with Agent Smith, made it a requirement that his memory would be erased when he was inserted back into the Matrix. Without the memory wipe, he knew he wouldn't be satisfied inside the Matrix because he would know it was false, but if he didn't know it was false and never found out, would his personal feelings of comfort and security be any different than someone in our world today? I think the key is, the feelings of hope and comfort (and associated benefits) are inherently the same even if the situation that created them is false--and without that falseness being exposed at some point in the future, I'm still not sure there's any difference.
This isn't saying we should hide under whatever 'security blanket' we can find like Cypher did...the search for Truth is important, even with truthes that we might not particularly like. But, I think the key questions are (1) what tangible benefits does my belief in this particular truth bring to me and (2) what consequences are there if I am wrong? Not believing in God when the 'truth' is God exists is dangerous because you might be forced to face judgment for things that you didn't originally think you'd be accountable for. Believing in God where the truth is God does not exist (and presumably then, we're just random organizations of molecules that came together in a cold, empty universe and our consciousnesses will disapate into the void when we die...) it's hard to see any comparable consequences for the believer since in the end the believer and the non-believer suffer the same fate. The benefit for the non-believer might be he/she is more likely to indulge themselves in a more 'morality-free' lifestyle, since without the final judgment after we die, you could argue that one's actions really don't matter. (I would still argue against this as a 'benefit', because we believe the following of God's commandments still makes you more likely to have peace and happiness in THIS life, regardless of what happens in the next, but that's a whole other issue...)
Like I said, I wouldn't tell an atheist that they should believe in God because it's the 'safe' way to go (and another LDS tradition is that 'passive' belief like this isn't helpful anyway...the only real benefit now and after comes from 'active' belief, including action...), but I would argue that (unlike what some say) there's nothing inherently wrong or damaging from a belief in God even in the worst case scenario that God doesn't exist, and given the increased benefit and decreased consequences on the other side, I would encourage an atheist that the existence of God is something that should probably be pondered further--and not casually abandoned.
I believe in seeking after Truth, and also of questioning one's beliefs (as long as you know where to look for answers...) The point is mostly just that the 'harm' of religious belief is overstated (although, of course, the beliefs of some involve violence towards others, but that's also a whole other issue...) and that the benefits of exploring the matter further far outweigh any drawbacks...
Posted by: The Baron | Sep 20, 2004 8:24:47 AM
