Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

How to get from belief to disbelief

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

I was raised as a Republican, to believe in God, and that Capitalism was good, to work hard was good, and to produce and enjoy wealth was good. In college, I read a lot of anti-God philosophy and became an agnostic. Then, some years later, as my addiction to alcohol got out of control, I joined a 12-step program, accepted and surrendered to a "Higher Power", which I call God, and life ever since has been much better. Since then, I have read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and loved the books. I agree with 99% of their principles and philosophy. It's the God issue that stumps me. How can someone like me, who has depended on a, as Rand puts it, a mystical belief, live a fulfilling life as an Objectivist? How can I just toss God out the window all of a sudden and make that transition? Is it necessary? Am I a bad person just because I believe in a mystical being? I am an active Capitalist, a producer who believes that God gave me my brain to use for myself for my own good, and that I don't owe anybody anything. Thanks for any feedback.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am the son of a Lutheran Minister. I understand where you are coming from, and I struggled with these feelings for a long time myself in my 20's.

So I'm not going to sugar coat anything - and I hope you'll take it as intended - not to be insulting, just to the point and honest.

I was raised as a Republican, to believe in God, and that Capitalism was good, to work hard was good, and to produce and enjoy wealth was good. In college, I read a lot of anti-God philosophy and became an agnostic. Then, some years later, as my addiction to alcohol got out of control, I joined a 12-step program, accepted and surrendered to a "Higher Power", which I call God, and life ever since has been much better. Since then, I have read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and loved the books. I agree with 99% of their principles and philosophy. It's the God issue that stumps me. How can someone like me, who has depended on a, as Rand puts it, a mystical belief, live a fulfilling life as an Objectivist?

You can't believe in mysticism and be an Objectivist. Sorry.

How can I just toss God out the window all of a sudden and make that transition? Is it necessary?

To be an Objectivist? Yes. To be a good person? No.

Am I a bad person just because I believe in a mystical being? I am an active Capitalist, a producer who believes that God gave me my brain to use for myself for my own good, and that I don't owe anybody anything. Thanks for any feedback.

You are not a bad person - just one with what we call an irrational belief - meaning that your belief isn't based on reality.

Bear in mind, of course, that faith DEMANDS belief despite any evidence, so a person strong in faith is proud to be irrational - thus you really shouldn't take what I say as an insult *IF* you are truly faithful.

But what you cannot do is both be truly rational AND faithful. And it's ok for you not to be, SO LONG as you don't attempt to inflict your idea's (or your faith's ideas) of how life should be on us against our will.

Now - if you desire truly to be rational then you have two things to do:

1) Understand the reasoning behind why any mystic premises must be dropped as invalid. I'd suggest reading chapters 1-3 of OPAR SEVERAL times and carefully evaluating EACH AND EVERY statement made therein. If you understand the reasoning AND agree, then you will have your reasons WHY you must abandon this idea of God to be rational.

2) Knowing now why belief in God is irrational, you need to find out why this belief sustained you and carried you through difficult times such as addiction. I suspect you will find that it wasn't God, but your belief in the ability to make it through your addiction that got you through. If you could do all of that on your own conviction, then you can continue to make it through addiction (yes I know its a life long thing) on the conviction that you can, with the continuing support of other people who understand what you've been through. Your "higher power" doesn't have to be irrationally based - the higher power can be the power of reason itself, which isn't mystical at all.

But you know what? IF you choose to believe in a God, as long as you don't also claim to be an O'ist, and as long as you follow the same ethical principals, we'll all get along just fine. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You get from belief in something to non-belief in something when you realize belief is not justified, either because there is lack of evidence for something, or because it contains inner contradictions, or both in the case of Christianity. Of course, you are not expected to just suddenly and randomly change your mind just because you read a book that says so. You should seek to understand first, and above all to shine the light of truth on the issue, even if it disagrees with your past beliefs.

And of course you aren't a bad person for believing in God. It's important not to take Rand's polemics against explicitly anti-reason philosophers and transpose them onto all religious people, most of whom aren't irrational or bad people (actually mostly are victims of the aforementioned philosophers in Rand's view.) Rand even had high praise for the Thomistic tradition, in which it was held that God can be proved by means of reason and that morality is based on reason and man's nature.

If you claim that God gave you reason and expects you to use it, then how can you justify holding a mystical belief? You can't hold two irreconcilable premises and believe them both seriously. So the question is, along the lines of Greebo's post, basically why, in your opinion, do you need to believe in God? To live a fulfilling life? Whatever for? Why believe something in the absence of evidence, even in contradiction to evidence, even in contradiction with itself? Is it fear? Guilt? Anxiety?

I mean, we can point to various psychological issues, to stuff going on in your life, to emotional attachments, and so forth, and try to ask what need this fulfills for you. Some might assert that their happiness depends on finding the truth, others might say it depends on them clinging to something they wish would be true. But at the end of the day, after all the arguments have been dispassionately laid out on the table, it's either a correct proposition or a false one. And once you've determined that it is not a rationally tenable position, what more is there to say? If you do need help dealing with issues, as is completely understandable that religion would appeal, why cannot man's reason do a much better job of investigating and dealing with the causes of misery?

Edit: In addition to the aforementioned OPAR, I'm not sure if that's the best place to start, but there is also Atheism: The Case Against God for free, and Branden's Basic Principles of Objectivism book, which includes an excellent chapter on "The Concept of God."

Edited by 2046
Link to comment
Share on other sites

maybe, just maybe, you could analyze what that word and concept "g'd" really means to you. humans, we are in the childhood of our evolution. Once you might have believed in santa claus, or in creatures hiding in the dark. you got past both things, discovering bitterly that santa was nothing magical, but something ordinary and even more important, your father; and earlier you might have had fear of the dark, and maybe you still remember how proud or brave or new you felt when you discovered that you could roam your room or house (or woods!) in the dark without being afraid.

Extrapolating that to once adult life might give you another scope of what god has for all these years meant to you, and what it will mean once you cross the proverbial rabbit hole, once you light the torch.

In all honesty, as I understand the phrase,

god bless

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You may know this already, but the "OPAR" Greebo mentioned is Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff. It's a comprehensive explanation of Objectivism, and it explains in detail why Objectivism is an atheistic philosophy that rejects all forms of mysticism. If you're really interested in learning about the philosophy, I'd definitely recommend it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi ya fellow Newbie.

You phrased your question in terms of "belief." If you reconsidered the same issues in terms of faith, might that be illuminating? Do you have faith in the natural or the supernatural, or can you hold both in your mind simultaneously? Do you have faith in the rational or can there be faith in the irrational?

Ayn Rand's fiction is exciting and inspiring, but only opens the door to her non-fiction expositions of philosophy. Read on, read to discover the roots of our modern dilemma and Immanuel Kant's 220 year old curse. Objectivism suffers the same controversies of orthodoxy and progressivism that torment us all.

My brother struggled with addiction until he transferred it to his "Savior." I am disturbed by my faith in my rationality.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How can I just toss God out the window all of a sudden and make that transition? Is it necessary?

You might try looking into the ideas of Joseph Campbell, there’s a good bit here, early on, where he talks about theists believing their metaphors are facts, while atheists know they are not, his point being that both groups still need metaphors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyK1KKi1QPM

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How can I just toss God out the window all of a sudden and make that transition?

Look at it this way. There are thousands of religions out there. None have any better arguments than the next one. How can you justify believing in religion X over religion Y? In the absence of particular evidence for one of 'em, the simplest explanation is that they're all made up.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How can someone like me, who has depended on a, as Rand puts it, a mystical belief, live a fulfilling life as an Objectivist? How can I just toss God out the window all of a sudden and make that transition?

You can realize that while you had gotten yourself into a problem, it was YOU who also got yourself out of that problem.

My completely amateur opinion of situations like this is that many people who think they need some "higher power" to help them get through their problems tend to have issues with self-esteem and/or they don't like themselves as a person.

When all is said and done, regardless of what you believed at the time, it was YOU who saved yourself from your alcohol problem.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You can realize that while you had gotten yourself into a problem, it was YOU who also got yourself out of that problem.

My completely amateur opinion of situations like this is that many people who think they need some "higher power" to help them get through their problems tend to have issues with self-esteem and/or they don't like themselves as a person.

When all is said and done, regardless of what you believed at the time, it was YOU who saved yourself from your alcohol problem.

I totally agree with you RationalBiker. My own personal experience is that I could only really take responsibility for my own life when I let go of a concept called god/higher power.

As long as I put my trust in god I could always blame him if I messed up.

As soon as I took responsibility for my life I could take the credit when I did things right and build up my self esteem.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How can I just toss God out the window all of a sudden and make that transition?

One way you might approach this is to first grasp the fact that acting in an irrational way damages you and those around you; if carried to an extreme, it can even be fatal. Perhaps you came to grips with this in your 12-step program. This is true for all forms of irrationality, though, because to be irrational means to deny that the world around you is real.

Next, come to understand that a belief in God is irrational, and that the Bible itself is hugely irrational. There's lots of good reading on the web that will help back this up, if you need it.

Rejecting irrationality is also fundamental to Objectivist morality. If you can't be consistently rational, then you also can't be consistently moral -- which also means that you can't be consistently happy.

Maybe it would help to think of letting go of that last tinge of irrationality called religion as the 13th step.

Also, perhaps it would ease your mind to think of atheism not as a belief that God doesn't exist (which would be a belief in the arbitrary), but rather as a lack of belief in God (yet not uncertainty; not agnosticism). They are really two completely different concepts.

From Galt's speech:

"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of the things faith is supposed to teach us is about being humble. Meaning, I am not the end-all, be-all in the universe. I take it humility is not a virtue in Objectivism. In fact, being humble seems to be a "sin" in Objectivist thought. Correct? So, as a rational being, am I the end-all, be-all? Isn't that arrogance? Is arrogance good in Objectivism? Or are we all #1?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of the things faith is supposed to teach us is about being humble. Meaning, I am not the end-all, be-all in the universe. I take it humility is not a virtue in Objectivism. In fact, being humble seems to be a "sin" in Objectivist thought. Correct? So, as a rational being, am I the end-all, be-all? Isn't that arrogance? Is arrogance good in Objectivism? Or are we all #1?

Objectivism certainly doesn't advocate self-aggrandizement. It's true that humility is not a virtue in Objectivism, but the philosophy doesn't define humility in the way you're using the term here. Instead, Objectivism recognizes pride as virtue - specifically, the virtue of continuously improving yourself by seeking values. Humility, then, is the contrasting vice that essentially says, "I am worthless."

On the contrary, faith lends itself to arrogance more readily than reason. The latter demands evidence, justification, and the willingness to revise one's beliefs in the face of new data. Faith claims to bypass these requirements and guarantee absolute truth and infallibility. (I'm not accusing all theists of arrogance, I'm speaking of the logical conclusions of the traits in question).

Edited by Zoid
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I totally agree with you RationalBiker. My own personal experience is that I could only really take responsibility for my own life when I let go of a concept called god/higher power.

As long as I put my trust in god I could always blame him if I messed up.

As soon as I took responsibility for my life I could take the credit when I did things right and build up my self esteem.

Similar to my own experience of "letting go".

The precise statement (for myself) I used, was " Now, with no god to curse, credit , or cajole..."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of the things faith is supposed to teach us is about being humble. Meaning, I am not the end-all, be-all in the universe. I take it humility is not a virtue in Objectivism. In fact, being humble seems to be a "sin" in Objectivist thought. Correct?

No. You needn't take this to it's polar opposite. Rather, you are as good as what you accomplish according to your goals and values. One needn't be an arrogant braggart to be proud of what one has accomplished. The key is simply giving yourself credit for what you actually do rather than attributing your accomplishments to some non-existent "higher being". When you have built something of value with your own hands, with you own mind, it rightfully feels good to have accomplished something. Christianity teaches you that YOU did not do that without the "grace of god". It compels you to deny the joy of what you have done with your own mind, with your own hands to "keep you in your place" in relation to your "creator".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

his point being that both groups still need metaphors.

I have a friend, not very close but still a friend, who's an atheist Rand-fan, and did AA. He needed something like AA, he couldn't stay sober on his own (though his real problems are coke and women, if you ask me). He told me one of the things they were doing was referencing the Lord of the Rings films. Apparently Frodo carrying the ring serves as a good metaphor for staying on the wagon.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think that the O'ist equivalent of humility is the the recognition that anyone can make a mistake, including ourselves. This is why one of our primary directives (that's the wrong word for it but I can't think of the right one) is to always check our premises.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of the things faith is supposed to teach us is about being humble. Meaning, I am not the end-all, be-all in the universe. I take it humility is not a virtue in Objectivism. In fact, being humble seems to be a "sin" in Objectivist thought. Correct? So, as a rational being, am I the end-all, be-all? Isn't that arrogance? Is arrogance good in Objectivism? Or are we all #1?

Your life must come first, but that's not arrogance, it's recognizing reality. In fact, I would characterize the Objectivist view as being one that recognizes and respects truth (also called honesty), and that allows you to feel good about your accomplishments (pride and self-esteem). A false sense of pride or self-esteem would be dishonest, and therefore immoral.

That's different than saying you are the "end-all, be-all in the universe," which to me implies that you therefore might want to sacrifice others to you. No. Others have value to you, too, in many ways. Human life is the standard, it's just that you have to put yourself first in line in order to survive and be happy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If we're talking about ideas that support a healthy self-esteem, you don't have to be the be-all end-all number one in the entire universe, you just have to be enough. In other words, you have to believe you have a right to exist, that you are for yourself, that you are worthy of self-respect and happiness, and that you know your characteristic means of dealing with reality is reliable and competent to deal with the problems of life. This is obviously not at all equivalent to some kind of grandiose megalomania, or sitting around basking in the glow of your own awesomeness.

And it does not mean that you are closed-minded and never willing to learn and grow, actually that's a requirement of the ability to move from belief to disbelief and vice versa: that you must clearly grasp and know the reasons why you believe something (know its validation), and that it must never be closed to further scrutiny or examination. As was previously mentioned, which method leads to stubbornness and willingness to defy the plain facts, and which method is a precondition of accepting a mistake, taking charge, and changing?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is interesting to see Ayn Rand's take on God in interviews. She knew how meaningful the concept of God was to man, she appreciated it as a primitive form of morality.

When asked "You might even thank God for it[this country]?" She said "Yes, I may not literally mean a God, but I like what that expression means "Thank God" or "God bless you", it means the highest possible to me, and I would certainly thank God for this country."

(At the end of this video)

Lack of proof is the easiest fact to refer to, but it doesn't break a mans emotional connection to the investment he has made in all matters of morality he ascribes to God, and what God has meant to him. Part of the process includes seeing how religion has manipulated mans desire to believe in God, and used it to justify atrocities.

Why do men believe in God? What are its benefits? What are its drawbacks?

Man's nature includes a need for hero worship, your desire to look up to an ideal is being projected onto a God, as it might be projected onto a muse, an imaginary friend, or a fiction character. (Which are powerful tools in the creative process, and in making value oriented decisions) Looking up to other men you can admire and learn from could fill that void in a more detailed and tangible way.

I look at nature, and see the complex engineering involved in something like an eyeball, and it seems that some form of intelligence in inherent in nature. How does nature "know" that there is light, how does it move in the direction of the construction of an optic nerve? Is it possible for an organism to communicate its needs to the evolutionary process? The answer seems to be the process is automatic, that it has always been here. Can nature know what it takes to produce the possibility of a rational consciousness? Is consciousness one of its goals? Can the immense universe be shrunk into the personification of a man shaped God in the clouds?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...