And, you know, it was fine.
Given that death is my favorite topic, I really latched onto:
Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives.
But I ask you Mr. Sullivan, how exactly does christianity solve death? How does christianity protect us from THE existential moment?
By unrealizing it. You never die. You are eternal. He that believeth in me...
I like my solutions a little more solution-like.
You might say don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
But the bath water never cleaned the baby and christianity NEVER solved the death problem.
You die. we die, he dies, she dies, they die...all men are mortal, Socrates is mortal...
Death is your own-most possibility and it cannot be outstripped.
How are you going to LIVE with this possibility?
By unrealizing it? This has epistemic-health consequences.
What you believe matters.
What you think matters.
A lot.
Pinker's progressivism and all it entails doesn't deny death; it has that going for it. Which is more than I can say for christianity.
psst: http://www.pewforum.org/2018/11/20/where-americans-find-meaning-in-life/
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