The joys of the materialist faith
Sage McLaughlin writes:
The Derbyshire-ite, evolution-is-all brand of nihilism is on display today: “You run around for a few years having as much fun as your circumstances allow. Then you get married and have kids. You give the kids as much as you can to get them started in life. After that you’re pretty superfluous; and, as VDH says, you start paying for the follies of youth. After about sixty it’s pretty much diminishing returns, far as I can see.” So beyond satisfying one’s youthful urges and birthing the next generation, an individual human life is largely superfluous.
And they’ll argue until they’re blue in the face over at Secular Right that their materialist atheism does not lead inexorably to this view! Who are do they think they’re kidding?
LA replies:
This reminds me of the recent entry, “From Christian to atheist,” about the former Christian pastor and columnist John Loftus who has become an atheist, where I wrote:
It’s one thing for an outspoken atheist to become a Christian, and to say, “I was blind to the truth of God, and now I see, praise God for delivering me.” But when an outspoken Christian becomes a outspoken atheist, what is his message? “Haleluyah, I was blind to the great truth that the universe is nothing but matter, and now I see! Because of the great revelation that been vouchsafed to me, I understand at last that even my experience of my own consciousness as non-material is a material illusion! I’m so happy!”
To the above, we could now add Derbyshire’s own Advertisement for My (Material) Self: “I was once a watery Anglican, but then the great Gregory Cochran, the master spirit of our age, converted me to the true Darwinian faith, and now I see! I see that life is nothing but satisfying some vagrant desires, conceiving and raising children, and then becoming a superfluous entity waiting for the end. I’m so happy! I wish everyone would join me in this great, liberating experience of what human life is all about! In fact, I’m going to devote what remains of my superfluous existence to spreading the Good News.”
I also note that Derbyshire’s comment was posted not at Secular Right, but at National Review. I thought part of the reason for Secular Right was to give Derbyshire a place away from the “flagship magazine of American conservatism” to indulge his materialist ennui. But apparently not. NR’s teeny-con editors (by which I mean of course not their chronological age, but their intellectual and moral age), Kathryn Jean Lopez and Richard Lowry, are as void of any sense of conservative vocation as ever.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 03, 2009 02:50 PM | Send