Afterlife

From: Peter Hitchens

No ‘psychology’ is necessary to divine why someone might choose what is, on the face of it, by far the less attractive of the two options, namely that our lives have no point, purpose or meaning, and that ‘what will survive of us’ is not love, but nothing.

If someone doesn’t want justice for himself or anyone else, it really doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, or Sigmund Freud,  to work out why.

Comment: I like Peter Hitchens but his preference for an afterlife in which people are punished for their errors doesn't mean that there is one.

He has decided to have a strong commitment to religion because he thinks it serves a strong social purpose not because it is true.

Here is what he says:

"It is reason that tells us we cannot use reason to decide this matter."

"I would continue to believe in God if there were only the tiniest scrap of evidence for his existence left."

"The question of the existence of God is uniquely important, because of the implications of the answer we give to it to the way in which we subsequently live and die."

It's the "the choice between living in a just and purposeful universe, and life in an accidental,  pointless chaos".

However, he does believe that there are facts which support his position.

"There is indeed a great deal of evidence for God’s existence.  But it is not of the type which can be ‘confirmed’ or ‘disconfirmed’ (which I assume are synonyms for ‘proved’ and ‘disproved’)."

"It is readily available to anyone who has decided to entertain the idea in the first place. And it is not available to anyone who has not."

"I, lacking total knowledge of the universe just as he lacks it, have no way of showing him that his ’other way’ is definitely false."

"...by adopting from the start a purely materialist approach to the question. This precludes any serious consideration of the possibility of God. That’s why he can’t understand Theist ideas of what might constitute evidence of God’s existence."

"I thought( and think) that the introduction of ‘expertise’ into an argument about the unknowable is a category error."

"I am quite happy to have my belief in God described as ‘extreme, radical subjectivism’, provided the Professor doesn’t mind his unbelief being described in the same way. "

"That is why I repeatedly seek to turn the discussion to the only interesting aspect , namely our motives in believing what we believe."

"God’s omniscience and our lack of it, the wonderfulness of many parts of Creation might be mysterious and impenetrable to us."