Into the void

 

These videos are somewhat...annoying. Ex-Mormon atheist Britt Hartley discusses the so-called Vallow-Daybell doomsday murders in Idaho and Arizona. She reaches the conclusion that religion can´t stop religious psychosis since the difference between them is merely quantitative. There is no particular difference between the Mormon faith at large and the psychotic delusions of crazed cultist Lori Vallow. Except perhaps that Vallow takes her religion seriously (too seriously, perhaps). Religious "moderates" therefore enable the extremists. Et cetera.

But what about, ahem, atheism? What if somebody would take the "hot takes" of atheist materialism absolutely seriously: there is no free will, the cosmos is meaningless, humanity is an accident or even a mistake...wouldn´t *that* lead to psychosis? What makes Hartley´s anti-religious agitation (including moderate religion) so weird is that she herself knows that atheism can lead straight to nihilism - the topic of the third video linked above. So why isn´t the difference between moderate atheism and radical nihilism ("a lived experience of existential depression") also merely quantitative? Maybe the reason why most YouTube atheists never get depressed is that they are "Jack atheists" (to coin a phrase), who don´t really take their bullshit seriously. 

I actually wonder what the difference might be between a person who spins into depression when realizing that the universe is meaningless, and a person who doesn´t. I also wonder if the two groups are gendered, women being more common in the first group. A person who interprets both religion and atheism "existentially" might spiral off into nihilism if rejecting religion, while a person who looks upon worldviews "intellectually" might feel less threatened. And come up with intellectually satisfying "solutions" to, say, the free will problem ("compatibilism"). And in our culture, the first group is usually female, and the second is male.

With those reflections, I end this little introduction.