Give to me to read by my friend, Ken Kelly.
Bad to time to be a materialist!
The new atheists ended up being a lot like the fundamentalist Evangelicals.
Both have lost ground to the Religion of Politics.
Page 276
It’s a mistake to assume (as many people seem to do) that if something doesn’t count as far as science is concerned, then it shouldn’t count, period. If you think along those lines, you end up int he very odd position of thinking that your own personhood – your most intimate and personal experience of yourself – doesn’t count and doesn’t need to be taken into account.
People who think this way are trying to take science very seriously and with integrity. They are trying too be consistent. To them it perhaps seems to be a sad but unavoidable consequence of science, true even if difficult to accept, that things that we take to be at the very center of our being – our freedom, personhood, and personal thoughts and feelings – just don’t matter or count when you look at things objectively, consistently, and scientifically.
In a very dear and odd way, people who think that way are in a position parallel to that of Christian believer! If you are a scientific materialist of that sort, you tell yourself that science compels you to believe that your personhood is ultimately unreal and shouldn’t really matter – even though your common sense insists that that can’t possibly be true. And if you are a Christian, you believe in faith that your personhood is so real and important that it matters even to the God of the entire cosmos – even though your common sense insists that that can’t possibly be true.
Woody Allen was a deep materialist it seems given the universe is expanding and that seem to bum him out. So not thinking that what you do and your decisions in your life mattering is not that great…
Also, this was written in 2014, pre-Trump, pre-covid, pre-all-of-this.
Different world, man!