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I never failed to understand how libertarians could think like that. Human rights are fiction created by the state and existing only trough the state.
And it is easy to prove - take any human, do the thoroughest possible vivisection on them and you won't be able to find a single right.
This applies to a ton of things though. Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, mercy, fairness, god, faith, happiness, race, love, LLCs, etc. The list goes on. Not everything is a physically existing element.
A strictly materialist viewpoint of reality is likely insufferably bleak to the point that no one alive would want to live it.
Dangit, now I'm embarrassed that you got to the Pratchett comparison before me.
haha, it is definitely my favorite quote of his. It has made a tremendous impact on my views.
It is probably my least favourite Pratchett passage - it may not be objectively the worst, but I think it's a terrible argument, and people citing it as inspirational drive me crazy. I want to yell, "It's not aspirational! It's stupid! It's very, very stupid!"
But I might be a little unfair.
Oooo, this might be an interesting conversation, because I like the general outlines of the whole passage. I think it fits well with the general idea of humans as a social, story-oriented species whose need for belief drives our psyche. I think looking through humankind through that lens is very illuminating. Idk about it being aspirational, I take it as cutting, disrobing, shedding of our delusions of rationality.
But I'd be interested in hearing why you think its stupid and a terrible argument?
I'll take this as an opportunity for a longer effort post, so pardon me if I go a bit beyond the brief.
I think Terry Pratchett is the atheist version of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien.
Lewis and Tolkien are authors that young, nerdy, or fantasy-inclined Christians, especially those from an English cultural background, read while growing up. They often make a very strong impression on us. I know that I was moved and a lot of my worldview, as an adult, was shaped by these two seminal authors.
Sometimes atheists read and appreciate them as well, and with all appropriate grace and charity, while I'm glad that others read them too, I don't think they make as much sense for atheists. The Christianity is too foundational - too much of Lewis and Tolkien's writing is impregnated with faith - for them to make sense otherwise.
Pratchett, however, was an atheist, and I think his work is, just as much as Lewis' is with Christianity and Tolkien's is with Catholicism, impregnated with atheism and skepticism. Pratchett is in his own way a very cynical author. Yes, there are gods in Discworld, but they are not particularly worth worshipping, and the religion he is most sympathetic to, the Omnians, are portrayed as nice but nonetheless engaging in a kind of sympathetic self-delusion.
Pratchett's real heroes are existentialists, like Sam Vimes, or Granny Weatherwax, or Death. Death admits openly: "There is no justice. There's just me." Vimes is a man who is fully aware that the society he lives in is corrupt, unjust, and miserable, and yet, grumbling all the while, refuses to submit to nihilism, and makes the world a bit better. Weatherwax is a woman who dismisses religion and faith with, "I've already got a hot water bottle", and yet nonetheless spends her life trying, in her own irascible way, to make the world a little better for the people who live in it.
Often I find, when I read a lot by an author, that author has a kind of general tone or mood. Lewis has an erudite yet common-sensical decency to him. Tolkien is wistful, and lost in memory. Chesterton is delighted by paradox. Adams is wrily amused at the absurdity of the world. The mood I get from Pratchett is, surprisingly for a comedian, anger. Pratchett writes with this white-hot anger at injustice, at unfairness, at a world where stupid bullies tread all over ordinary people just trying to enjoy the good things this world offers. More than that, I think Pratchett has a kind of moral outrage at God. God refuses to even do us the decency of existing so that he can be properly accused of neglect!
Lewis or Tolkien look at the world and they see something there, a divine wellspring to creation, a loving creator who fashioned us, in whom we live and love and have our being, and to whom we will return. Pratchett looks at the world and sees none of that. It's not there. The world may be full of powerful beings separate from us, but they don't really care, and they can't give meaning to life. So what do you do?
I think Pratchett's Discword books are, in their core, about how to be moral in a godless, meaningless universe.
Yes, he writes comedy. That's the other big difference between him and Lewis/Tolkien. The Christian authors are funny sometimes, but they're saying something sincerely. Pratchett is trying to make you laugh, but he's always, I think, got this really sharp bite aimed at all the absurdities and injustices of the world. Pratchett thus has sympathy for the idealists - consider Sergeant Carrot, or the good Omnians like Brutha or Mightily Oats - but ultimately he's closer to Vimes or Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit. The world is frequently garbage and disappointing. There is no avoiding that. But this is the one you've got and it's up to you to do your best anyway.
There is no justice other than what we make happen ourselves. So we had best get to work.
Put charitably, this is what I think the "atom of justice" speech is trying to say. Justice isn't a metaphysical constant; it's not out there, it's not written into the fabric of the universe, and there isn't a god coming to make it happen for us. We have to do it ourselves. If stories about gods or spirits or hogfathers have any virtue, it's that they train us to believe the impossible, to go on seeking justice, despite the emptiness of the universe we're in.
Suppose you were a young, teenage atheist, and a fantasy fan. You like people like Lewis or Tolkien, or even their lesser imitators like Robert Jordan, or Weis and Hickman. However, you cannot share their faith, or make that connection. What can you do? Pratchett comes along and writes equally entertaining stories, in an equally expansive mythos, that addresses this question for you. Here's what you do if you share these values, but can't believe in their metaphysical commitments. You acknowledge this godless universe and then set out to make justice happen anyway. More than even that, Pratchett's theory of "the little lies" actually helps contextualise the Christian authors - perhaps Narnia or Middle-earth are lies, but they are lies that help prepare you to believe, and fight for, the big ones.
(Compare Lewis' Puddleglum: "...I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.")
So, all that said, why do I hate the "atom of justice" speech?
Well, mainly just for the reason I said. I think it doesn't work because it's a straw-man. Nobody believes that justice comes in atoms, or mercy in molecules. Things that aren't elemental particles are not lies, or any less worthy of being valued or loved. Death's rebuttal of people who believe in justice does not land, and because I know Pratchett was a brilliant author and extremely capable fantasist, I believe that Pratchett could have come up with a metaphor that worked. It is not beyond his imagination to make the same point in a more artful way. After all, most of his other books make the same point, often more successfully.
Maybe I am just an intolerable pedant. But I hope it comes through that I'm saying this from a place of appreciation for Pratchett.
Good post I mostly agree with, but just an aside:
Something a lot of Christians forget is that many atheists are either former Christians themselves, or have had enough exposure to Christianity that they understand it even if they don't agree with it. We are perfectly capable of reading Lewis and Tolkien and "getting" what they are saying about God and faith and morality.
It's possible this is more true of Americans than Brits, as my impression is that while religion is a pretty weak force in the UK, even among those who still believe, in the US even atheists probably have regular exposure to sincere, hardcore believers. If you grew up in an atheist home and never went to church at all, maybe your only impression of Christianity is a kind of sneering disdain for the god-botherers. But most Americans, at least until the current generation, probably had parents who at least took them to church occasionally. The idea that atheists find religion alien and unfathomable (and that all atheists are militant sneerers) is not true across the board.
I don't know what Pratchett's childhood was like, but he was born in 1948 so he probably didn't grow up atheist. I think you are right that he clearly became one, of the "angry at God not existing" variety.
Yes, it's a straw man in that of course justice doesn't exist in physical particles, and neither Death, nor the author using him as a mouthpiece, thought people did think of justice that way. His point, whether you agree with it or not, is that a lot of people believe in justice and mercy and goodness as intangible but very real metaphysical forces in the world, manifested by divine powers (God, for Christians, obviously). And he's pushing back against that, saying no, these things only exist in our heads, they only exist to the degree that we create them. The metaphor was perfectly coherent to say what the author was trying to say: there is no Just World, there is no deity who is going to make sure that good and bad people get their just rewards in the end. Justice is only what we make of it.
Perhaps it is you, only able to conceive of atheism as nihilism or an angry reaction against religion, who finds it difficult to comprehend the speech from an atheist author's point of view.
I certainly don't think it's an absence of imagination on my part - I was an atheist as a younger man, after all. I don't mean to generalise that all atheists feel the same, nor was I suggesting that atheists have no intellectual knowledge of Christianity.
Nonetheless I do think it's fair to say that ideological or religious alignment/difference with a text affects the way one receives it, and therefore that atheists and Christians will respond to authors like Lewis or Tolkien differently. In the same way I'm conscious that my own reaction to Pratchett is different and conditioned by my own background. I am speculating a bit about atheist responses to him, with what I hope is empathy born of my own experience of atheism, but nonetheless I am in a different position now. To the extent that I appreciate Pratchett today (and I'm not actually a huge fan), there is a level of imagination involved, putting myself in the position of someone for whom the world seems very different to the way it seems to me. The same thing, mutatis mutandis, for ex-Christian appreciators of the Christian authors.
There's probably another effortpost to be written one day about the atheist appreciators of Tolkien specifically. That is for another day, though.
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