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Jun 17, - But, OK, technically, if that were the case you could surivive being impaled via construction girder to the stomach by simply not believing in death. Or survive  If there is another life then why does memory loss exist, do we.
Table of contents

Does she continue to defi ne herself as a woman whose fi rst child was stillborn? Discuss how, throughout the book, locations are inextricably tied to the events that take place there. McCracken also writes about her quest for the geographic cure and taking her sadness on the road with her. Do you think physical escape provided some emotional escape for McCracken and her husband?

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Discuss why we avoid recognizing the painful situations of others, and how we can better approach uncomfortable topics. Discuss the role that superstitions played for McCracken and her husband through both pregnancies. What comforts, if any, did these superstitions provide? Even in a book about loss and grief, McCracken is able to infuse her story with dark humor. How do you think this changes the memoir? McCracken raises the idea that we are greedy about our dead loved ones, putting words in their mouths and describing what they would have wanted.

What does this say about how we manage grief and death? McCracken is honest about her feelings and impulses throughout the memoir, acknowledging her frustrations and freely admitting when they were irrational and misplaced. How do you see the issues of blame and forgiveness in this story? It was simply an informed and necessary recognition of their limits. We are often told that religion incites violence.

Yet to argue that religion is necessarily destructive or violent is like arguing that music necessarily stirs up violent passions. That was Plato's argument, and it is unsustainable. Sure, music can encourage violence. But it can also stimulate reflection, and bring inner peace. Nobody would seriously argue that the possible abuse or downside of music means it ought to be prohibited from the public domain, limited to our private worlds, or simply banned altogether.

Like science, religion can be abused. Science creates drugs to prolong life; it also creates weapons of mass destruction - such as napalm or nuclear warheads - to destroy life. Religion can create conflicts; it also motivates people to work with the poor in the slums of Calcutta.

It's not that science or religion are wrong; it's that they can both go wrong. Now some demand that religious people should prove the existence of God. Yet all of us - whatever religious, secular, moral, political or social beliefs we may hold - have to come to terms with the epistemic tragedy of humanity: we can only prove shallow truths, and that the greater beliefs that give meaning, value and purpose to our lives lie beyond proof, so that we all live by faith, even if some people try hard to avoid using that word on the basis of the flawed assumption that faith is peculiar to religion, and is always "blind.

The movement known as the "New Atheism" - exemplified by Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens - uses rational criteria to judge religious commitments. Yet it is a matter for regret that fails to apply these criteria consistently to its own beliefs. Its scepticism is expressed in the criticism of the beliefs of those it opposes, rather than its own ideas. Those of us who believe in God are told that we are required to prove this belief.

Yet on entirely reasonably asking atheists to do the same for their beliefs, we are, I fear, rather condescendingly told that you can't prove a negative, so that the New Atheism is conveniently exempted from its own criteria of judgement. The application of those criteria of judgement to the New Atheism itself can only lead to it being recognized as a form of agnosticism, an unverified and unverifiable belief.

Logical and mathematical truths can indeed be proved. Yet for the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the natural human craving for certainty simply could not be reconciled with the capacities of human reason on the one hand, and the complexity of the world on the other. Philosophy, Russell suggested , was - or at least ought to be - a discipline that was deeply attuned to this dilemma, enabling reflective human beings to cope with their situation:.

Now many think of Russell as an "atheist. Yet Russell insisted that he was philosophically an agnostic, in that he regarded the question of God to lie beyond proof or disproof. Intellectually, Russell held that someone's position on the God-question, whether negative or positive, lay beyond empirical or logical demonstration.

He himself chose to live as an atheist, but was always careful to distinguish his epistemological agnosticism from his pragmatic and volitional atheism. Theism and atheism are ultimately both fiduciary judgements that lie beyond formal proof.

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In moving from atheism to Christianity, I was actually moving from one unprovable belief system to another. The same, of course, is true of someone who moves from Christianity to atheism. I thus find myself reassured by a debate at Oxford between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams in , in which Dawkins candidly acknowledged that he was not completely certain that there was no God. The noted philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who was chairing the discussion, asked him why, given this situation, he did not "call himself an agnostic.

But I think Dawkins was simply and wisely facing up to the issue that all human beings have to confront - the limits of human reason, and the complexity of our world, which force us to leave behind the shallow epistemological certainties of the so-called "Age of Reason. Does this mean that, since nothing that really matters can be proved, we simply believe anything we like? That we are condemned to a relativism in which we pick and mix according to taste?

No, I make no such suggestion. Recognition of the limits on our epistemic capacities does not entail random or arbitrary belief generation or selection. We need to justify our beliefs - to show that there are good reasons for believing in God, or in the goodness of human nature, or in the rationality of atheism, depending on our decisions. Like scientists who are confronted with a complex set of observations which are open to multiple interpretations, we need to work out which are the most defensible and reliable, recognizing that these judgements are contestable.

Social psychologists argue that human beings are meaning-seeking animals. To lead meaningful and fulfilled lives, we need defensible notions of our personal identities, our sources of value, purpose, and our own self-worth.

Who are we? Do we really matter? What are we meant to be doing? And what is the good life, and how can we lead it? Now unless you have disengaged from reflective existence, everyone as views on those matters.

Religion a figment of human imagination

They matter to you; but you can't prove that they are right. And here's my point. That's the epistemic dilemma of humanity as a whole - something that shallow worldviews try to avoid or ignore, but which is affirmed and engaged by their wiser alternatives. But we can't prove those deeper truths that give meaning and direction to our lives.

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We may indeed consider them to be warranted or motivated beliefs; they nevertheless remain beliefs. We have rightly moved away from the gross simplifications of the bygone "Age of Reason" and the forms of modern atheism that depend upon its severely limited notions of rationality. These were all very well in the eighteenth century. But that was then.

This rationalist spell is now broken, precisely because, as Pascal pointed out, the greatest achievement of human reason is the demonstration of its limits. We now understand much more about what it means to be rational, and how our views of what is "reasonable" are shaped by culture and history. It may be an uncomfortable thought, but the way we reason is shaped significantly by where we find ourselves inserted into the flux of human history. We are very good at ridiculing the self-evidently true beliefs of the past, but we are not so good at anticipating the ridicule that will be directed against our own self-evidently true beliefs in future centuries.

The contrast is thus not between an irrational faith and rational facts, but between different belief systems, which underlie, whether explicitly or implicitly, our moral and social norms. One may indeed seem irrational from another's perspective. Yet unless we attribute normativity to any specific belief system, this does not mean that its rivals may be deemed irrational.

I agree entirely with Richard Dawkins when he insists that we must provide reasons for our beliefs; I simply and respectfully invite him to apply those same criteria to his own beliefs.

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Sceptical readers of the New Atheist manifestos cannot help but note that their anti-theism seems to rest on a raft of presupposed moral values such as "religion is evil" or "God is not good" which cannot be established with certainty by reason. The New Atheism exists and thinks within a bubble, a foundational set of beliefs which cannot be conceded to be beliefs without pricking that bubble and causing it to collapse. The best critic of the overambitions of the New Atheism is thus the older and wiser agnosticism of writers such as Bertrand Russell. I gladly concede much of Russell's analysis of the human situation, diverging from him primarily in terms of the pragmatic responses that the two of us offer to the human predicament, so brilliantly captured in Alexander Pope's Essay on Man - that, being "born but to die, and reas'ning but to err," we are trapped in an unsettling shadowy world suspended delicately and problematically between scepticism and certainty.

Both Russell and I are hard-headed epistemological agnostics who are suspicious of the slick and shallow certainty of pseudo-sceptics; yet both of us also recognize that we can still make meaningful and warranted decisions about what we can believe and how we can live. Whether we like it or not, all of us - whether religious believers or not - find ourselves living in this strange world of space and time, trying to work out why we are here, and what we are meant to be doing.

We find ourselves drifting on a misty grey sea of ignorance, hoping that we might discover and inhabit an island of certainty on which all our deepest questions would be answered with total certainty and absolute clarity. Yet this island does not exist.