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Excerpts from Getting Over Jesus
Copyright © 2024 by Ari Armstrong
These excerpts are from my book, Getting Over Jesus: Finding Meaning and Morals without God. See also the landing page for the book.
Chapter 1, "My Journey to Secularism"
"[A]s human beings, we live our best lives by embracing reality and pursuing reality-based values. We properly ground our morals in reality, not in some mystical fantasy or in ancient books of mythology—especially ones, such as the Christian Bible, that excuse such horrors as slavery and genocide."
Chapter 2, "Christianity's Defense Mechanisms"
"Unfortunately yet unsurprisingly, Christianity contains strands of doctrine that developed in order to protect the faith from outside criticism. These ideas act as the religion's immune system by blocking or destroying invading ideas. These are Christianity's defense mechanisms that evolved to thwart apostasy. Christianity has survived and thrived for over two millennia partly because of these mechanisms. To begin to think rationally about their religion, people raised within it need to learn to recognize these defense mechanisms."
Chapter 3, "Death without God"
"Do not say, 'I will die someday,' without also saying, 'That means I am alive today.' Think about all the wonderful things you are able to do while you are alive: commune with friends, pursue interesting work, read novels and philosophy, watch your child develop (if you have a child), reach out to others with aid or kindness, rekindle a romance, wonder at the trees and the clouds and the stars, contribute in some small way to humanity's betterment."
"We face death because we are alive. We know that we will die because we are conceptual beings capable of contemplating the wonders of the universe and of the life in it. Almost none of the vast stuff of the universe partakes of life or of consciousness. We do, and this is an extraordinary privilege. If death is the price we pay for life, then purchase a full share."
"The best way to deal with the death of loved ones is to deeply appreciate our loved ones while they are alive as well as when they are gone, and to make aspects of their lives a meaningful part of our own lives. That way, when a loved one dies, in a very real sense we carry a part of the person with us."
Chapter 4, "Meaning in the Natural World"
"Meaning arises in the context of people—living, conscious, conceptual beings—pursuing values. In a lifeless universe, there are no values at all. The universe as such has no consciousness, no goals, no values. So of course our lives are meaningless to the universe, just as our lives are meaningless to a given rock or planet or galaxy. The universe has no capacity to experience meaning. The question, what is the meaning of our lives to the universe, is senseless. We can sensibly ask only what is the meaning of our lives to us."
"The meaning of life is not something fundamentally 'out there,' originating apart from us. It is something we create in our own lives by pursuing our values, including those oriented to developing our minds, and by using our minds to plan the long-range scope of our lives. We build meaningful lives by pursuing a career and other major goals, by forming tight social bonds, by taking interest in hobbies and recreation, by discovering our place in the universe, by contributing your verse to the human pageant."
"Contra Pascal, happiness is not fundamentally about a person being filled up by something; it is fundamentally about a person doing the internal mental and psychological work to develop worthy values and a virtuous character. Fundamentally, a person who finds happiness and meaning develops them from within. Happiness is not something you find outside yourself; it is something you work to achieve."
"It is true neither that a person can find happiness fundamentally outside himself nor that a person's particular values—his marriage partner, friends, career, hobbies, and possessions—are irrelevant to his happiness. Rather, a happy person builds an inner life in harmony with outer values. Although happiness does not come fundamentally from outside us, it does depend largely on the people and things that we meaningfully incorporate into our lives. Thus, although a person cannot find happiness just by pursuing a career or art or other worldly values, for a basically happy person such values contribute to and help constitute his happiness."
"An atheist can look up at the night sky, or through the leaves of a forest into the sunlight, or into the colorful hues of a sunset, or at glorious photographs of our galaxy and beyond,37 or into the cellular structure of life through a microscope, or at the skyline of Manhattan through a jet window, and whisper, with full knowledge that no one else will hear, 'Thank you for my life.'"
"Once we recognize that meaning arises in the context of conscious beings pursuing values, we can see that the universe and our lives can be meaningful to us. Even if there were a God who found the universe and our lives meaningful, part of what would make the universe and our lives meaningful to us is our own understanding of the universe and of our place in it. The universe has no meaning to a stone or an asteroid or a planet or a solar system. My life has no meaning to those things. But those things, and my life, can have meaning for me."
"We are intimately connected to the broader universe. Most of the light that we perceive comes from the nuclear reactions of stars. When we look up at the night sky, we physically commune with the stars; their light penetrates our eyes and causes profound changes in our brains. We partake in the universe."
"[W]e can look to the stars in wonder and recognize that we have a place, not in some fantasy supernatural realm filled with angels and demons, but in a universe filled with galaxies and stars and planets—and, at least in our little corner, life."
"The absurd promises of the supernatural cannot compare to the bright future that beckons to us as beings of nature—if only we embrace that future and help to build it. The real question is not whether we can find meaning in our lives without religion. The question is why we would try to find meaning fundamentally in ancient myths and superstitions when we can find meaning in our families and friendships and other social ties, our productive work, our art and recreation, the progress of the human race, and our capacity to understand aspects of the universe as it really is."
"Cast off the shallow dogma of religion, with its promise of meaning among the ghosts, and embrace a truly meaningful life as a real and living part of the universe. Do not squander your meaningful life by enslaving your mind to fear and superstition. Look at sunlit sky or starlit sky in gratitude and breathe deeply, and live."
Chapter 5, "Morals without God"
"Things can be good or bad for conscious living beings because they evolved the capacity to experience some things as good and other things as bad. The roots of normativity are biological. Some facts have normative content; they are a feature of the natural world. Conscious living beings experience pleasurable things as good: things including satiety, normal body temperature, bodily integrity, species- normal activities involving food acquisition and play, the exercise of their faculties, sex, and (in the context of social species) various social interactions. And these conscious living beings experience painful things as bad: things including hunger, extreme heat and cold, injury, entrapment, and (in the context of social species) social ostracism or isolation. Because our universe contains conscious, caring creatures, our universe contains facts with normative content—these beings experience certain states as good or bad. In a universe without conscious, caring creatures, normativity would not exist; there would be no such thing as good or bad."
"Although members of some other species also are forward looking to an extent, people, because we are capable of complex abstract thought, conceptualization, and (therefore) highly complex predictions about the future, are radically forward looking. We can set in motion plans that have intended effects decades later. And (normally) people naturally care about their future selves. Thus, to achieve their values, people have to carefully plan out how to fit their values together over the long term. That is, they have to integrate their values, an inherently rational process. We can integrate our values only insofar as we use observation, evidence, and logic to do so. Value integration, I hold, is the bridge between our biological needs and dispositions and a robust moral theory grounded in reason."
Chapter 6, "The Dangers of Faith"
"By getting adherents in the practice of going by faith, Christianity encourages the use of faith to reach conclusions more generally. But faith is not a means to knowledge. It is a means to delusion, sometimes dangerous delusion. So far as people go by faith, one person's delusion is as good or bad as any other person's— faith offers no means to discover which beliefs are true. Someone can have faith that God demands that he murder his child or fly a jet airplane into a skyscraper. Insofar as a person goes by faith, he is impervious to reason."
"[A] slightly more sophisticated version of religious obscurantism is the claim that something must be taken on faith, so we might as well have faith in God. This position confuses philosophic foundationalism—the (correct) view that knowledge must have some starting point—with arbitrary assertions. When I look down I see directly that I have two hands each with five fingers. When I slam my thumb with a hammer I experience pain. I do not similarly have direct awareness that God exists—and, no, an emotional desire to believe that God exists, as many people profess to have, does not count as a form of direct awareness of anything beyond that emotional state. 'I wish it were so' or 'I imagine it to be so' does not count as foundational knowledge."
Chapter 10, "The Religious Animal?"
"We are not fundamentally beings of religious faith but beings able to reason to live successfully in the world. True, giving up supernaturalist religion means losing the false sense of security that some super-powerful being is looking out for you, drawing up a plan for your life, and guaranteeing your happy afterlife. It also should mean facing the fact that you have one life to live and that it is your responsibility to live it. That realization can be the spark for an authentic, non-supernaturalist spirituality as a conscious person finding joy in reality. We have a potentially wondrous home on Earth. Go live."
Buy Getting Over Jesus: Finding Meaning and Morals without God from Amazon.