Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Confessions of an Antinatalist- Excerpt 2
...it is my strongly held opinion that most folks believe there’s something profoundly wrong with life. This sense of wrongness emerges not only from people’s personal experiences of pain, loss, and futility, but also from the knowledge of the accumulated suffering of the world, embraced as awareness at the core of their
empathic selves. This awareness puts us on edge. So we develop coping strategies. Biases. We focus, desperately, on the positive. We seek solace in lies, such as those embodied in religion and other imaginary sidestreets that we can duck into when ugly truths come to block our rose-tinted view.
Yet a grim truth haunts us at all turns. It is reflected in the tale of Noah’s flood and the coming of the New Jerusalem. It is resonant in the Buddha’s basic maxim that all life is suffering, the knowledge of which is to be overcome through detachment,
or in the blackened glass of the addict’s crackpipe, or simply in the nine-to-fiver’s seventy-two inch plasma television screen.
The key word is escape. Get me OUT of this fucking place!
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5 comments:
Your book seems like it will be very good. I like the excerpts. Definitely get some of those readings on Youtube!
Anonymous:
I'll make a serious attempt in the next week or so, although I fear my voice is something only a mother could love :(
Your statement reminds me of the claim that all atheists REALLY deep down believe in God but just claim not to.
TGGP:
Thanks for bringing this up, as it affords me the opportunity to address both a common misconception in the antinatalist debate, as well as evidentiary justification in terms of religious claims (something I've been talking a lot about on one of my other blogs lately). And all in one shot...a twofer!
The theistic claim you reference is based on the belief that God has infused every single human being who's ever lived with an intuitive knowledge of His existence. And what is the evidence for this claim? Supernatural revelation. I suppose you could say there's a secondary line of 'evidence' in that most cultures down through the ages have had one sort of god or another. However, that's problematic, for the very reason that this supposed 'knowledge' points in so many directions from culture to culture. But for the most part, this belief is based in revealed theistic dogma.
My claim is much more humble. I simply believe that people generally don't like suffering, and that they love their children, and perhaps others beyond their immediate families. That's it. All the rest is simply logical extrapolation, to try and get people to see how procreation ultimately rubs against the grain of their own sensibilities. And to point out how we defend ourselves against our own, basic intuitions for the reasons I've outlined here and elsewhere.
This book is so good this man put in there the most perfect thoughts, I also could read the Sildenafil Citrate's book and this is something similar both of them are related.
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