Last Straw

I’ve been fol­low­ing a debate between Sam Har­ris and Philip Ball, in which Har­ris takes Ball and Nature magazine to task over their capit­u­la­tions to reli­gion. In one pas­sage I was reminded of one of many dis­cus­sions I’ve had over the years with my mother about reli­gion. In this par­tic­u­lar dis­cus­sion she became very dis­tressed and respon­ded to my irre­li­gious­ness thus:

But how can you not want to be with me after our time on Earth?

I wish I’d had Sam Har­ris’ words to quote at the time. This is for my mother:

I’m sure many people … hope that there is a God; they hope that they will see their friends and loved ones after death; they hope that their lives are aligned with some lar­ger cos­mic pur­pose; and they are dis­posed to make much of this hope — to cel­eb­rate it, and to gather with oth­ers who hope for these same things. [They] might say that this hope has enriched their lives or has in some way become indis­pens­able to their func­tion­ing in the world. But if [they] are really reli­gious — that is, really con­form­ing to the doc­trine of Chris­tian­ity, Islam, Juda­ism, etc. — they will have taken a fur­ther step toward delu­sion and mis­taken this hope for a form of know­ledge. They may have yanked their boot­straps this way: “How could I find this hope so con­sol­ing if it were not, in fact, well foun­ded? Per­haps this feel­ing of hope­ful­ness itself attests to the truth of thing hoped for… Praise be to God!” Of course there are many other ways to chase one’s tail under the aegis of reli­gion. … It should be abund­antly clear, how­ever, that mere hope does not con­sti­tute know­ledge, no mat­ter how lov­ingly one tends it and props it up in the wind.