Is it better to live a lie in happiness, or to learn the truth, even if it leads to unhappiness?
I believe that there is an often unacknowledged disagreement to the answer of this question. Reading and watching Dawkins work, he has explicitly stated that the answer to this question is yes. This is, presumably, based on the belief that although the truth may interrupt ignorant bliss in the short term, it will ultimately lead to a much more fulfilling and peaceful happiness in the long term.
Born and raised a Christian myself, Dawkins work, alongside a passionate interest in science, has led me to conclude that Christianity and religion in general is not real, at least not outside of our own minds. The transition from Christianity to atheism was a very difficult one for me. It challenged my ability to make the bigger life decisions with any real conviction, decisions which previously and implicitly sat on a foundation of a greater, spiritual good. Even my understanding of morality became confused. Sometimes, those decisions were so confusing that the seductive comfort of Christianity returned to me, and I found myself praying, asking God for advice, direction, and attention.
To make the transition, I had to rebuild much of my understanding of life from the ground up. I turned to human progress, self motivation, empathy, nature, the beauty of the universe, alternative perspectives, a healthy truce with the fear of death, and humanitarian outlooks in general to regain a meaning to my existence once more. That understanding did not come to me all at once. It didn’t come in a flash. It came gradually, and often painfully, piece by piece. Now, I feel as though I have come out the other side with a much more attractive truth, with less confusion and contradiction. For me, facing the truth, and ploughing through temporary pain to reach a fuller happiness was the right thing to do.
I am still in the company of my family and friends who remain Christian. I openly question their beliefs to gain an insight into their motivations for it, out of a sense of curiosity rather than an argument with agenda. I see in them that, like I once was, much of their world and meaning also relies on the presence of God, or at least some form of pure and good omnipotence - almost as though they do not believe they can rely on their own strength without it. Again, this draws parallels with how my life once was. I believe that they, like I did, have a tiny voice of doubt, but it remains ignored, perhaps because of their reliance on this belief for that life meaning.
But who am I to say that they are wrong to doubt their own strength? Perhaps they really aren't strong enough to find meaning without God? Perhaps an ally of their tiny doubting vice concerns them that even if they were leading a lie, they could not make the same difficult transition that I made. I cannot, without arrogance, reassure them that they are strong enough, even if they would entertain the argument.
Others I know, grieving the loss of those dear to them and with little else to turn in life but the repetition of their daily routine, have only the false hope of religion to support their ability to make sense of the world. Is taking that, their final crutch, from them perhaps a dangerous and fruitless undertaking? Could even atheists consider supporting a desperately grieving loved one's belief that their daughter is in heaven a bit of a white lie? A good lie? Wouldn't it be cold and heartless to take that from them, right there and then? Is that the right time to start them on their journey to atheism, or even to prevent their journey of finding God? When polarised into anecdotal, personal stories of hope in the face of grief, and bound only to the framed perspective of the sufferer in that story, I believe that religion is seen as many as a beneficial thing. A good lie. My Christian family and friends would certainly use this as a useful story to demonise cold reason here. When talking to them about it, citing this example, I get a real sense of passion from them, which they led to a wider generalisation. They began to hypothesise that even if their religion was not entirely truthful, that the world would not be an entirely better place without it anyway. Ignorance is bliss, as the occasional anecdote can show. Their view in this seemed to give them a comforting justification for their own belief, in a day when it is being challenged so regularly.
But what if there was no religion? What if the concepts of heaven and eternal life, of mystical forces and unseen Gods, were frankly ridiculous? What if our world was simply intolerant of such nonsense, in the same way we would be intolerant to the insane ramblings of a stumbling drunk? What if I believed that when people die, they simply go and live in the sea, where their loved ones can visit them and listen to their whispers in shells? How comforting would my belief be to the grieving sufferer of our earlier example then? How would they feel if they were trying to respectfully but purposefully move through the stages of grief to regain happiness and a constructive life once again, and all I was doing was badgering them to go to the sea and listen to their sunken lost one in shells? To take the vision of a world without religion further, in this world I would have never learnt the meaning of life through the flawed eyes of Christianity in the first place, only later in life to have to painfully rebuild my understanding. I would have been saved a painful transition.
On the one hand I certainly can see that if someone is suffering and their reliance on religion is helping them, then it might be a good thing, or at the very least a bad thing to take it away (in similar ways, incidentally, I’m intrigued to know how one considers placebo medication to continue to work even if the medication is labelled as such). On the other hand it concerns me because I believe that if religion wasn’t present in the first place, as though if somehow the liquor bottle wasn’t an option when the recovered alcoholic returns to it through grievance, then the sufferer would enjoy a speedier recovery.
In any case, what does seem pretty clear to me is that this question of truth versus ignorance does contribute to the beliefs of much of my family and many of my religious friends. I believe that if they are not compelled by a proper and thorough answer to it, they won’t ever be motivated to relax their beliefs (and, in some cases, motivate them to stop peddling it). I’d like to see more evidence and discussion within the atheist community which shows that people really would be better off without the crutch of religion to support them when the chips are down (I don’t consider the amount covered in The God Delusion to be sufficient), but I would imagine such an experiment quite difficult to devise and even more difficult to control.
For me, in a non-religious family, it's been easier to become an atheist than it's been to walk under a ladder and rid myself of all the other daft supernatural beliefs my family and friends taught me about!
Ridiculously, I *still* 'touch wood' through habit. I can easily understand how difficult it might be to let go of religion.
