Against Religious Fatalism

[rug]

October 14, 2015
by Adam Lee

Last month, construction was in progress at the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, the holiest mosque in Islam, when a heavy crane collapsed in high winds and crashed through the roof of the mosque. Over a hundred pilgrims were killed and almost 400 were hurt or trapped beneath falling debris. An employee of the Saudi Binladen Group, which had been operating the crane, said this about the disaster:

“What happened was beyond the power of humans. It was an act of God.” (source)

But this wasn’t even the worst catastrophe in Mecca this year. Just two weeks later, during the annual Hajj, there was a deadly stampede on the approach to the Jamaraat Bridge, where Muslim pilgrims symbolically stone the devil. Over 1,500 people (possibly many more) were trampled to death. This is just the latest in a series of crowd-crush disasters as Mecca strains at the seams to accommodate the world’s growing Muslim population. Yet, again, the disaster was labeled inevitable, this time by the Grand Mufti, the most senior religious authority in Saudi Arabia:

“You are not responsible for what happened”, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh told Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in a meeting in Mina on Friday… “As for the things that humans cannot control, you are not blamed for them. Fate and destiny are inevitable.” (source)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2015/10/against-religious-fatalism/

[PatrickforO]

1. Many Christians, particularly evangelicals, exhibit a form of this as well.

Those who don't want to use our tax dollars to help the poor, who don't believe in climate change, who say that the Bible encourages capitalism and not socialism. These are the same people who are waiting for that rapture, and who believe in individual and not collective salvation.

These are the people who are grimly waiting for the end to come and do nothing to make the earth better now. So many people need so much just to have enough, and they do nothing but wait for Jesus to come and sort it all out.

This is perhaps, the ugliest and most insidious fruit of the tree of capitalism and the 40 years we've had of corporate propaganda. Oh, they say - we're all rugged individualists. Unless you're Jamie Diamon and then you get with other corporate socialists to get taxpayer bailouts. But us peons are completely on our own, they say, and if we give public money to the poor, then we won't have enough...

They don't tell you its because the Wall Street bankers have created evil, un-Christian systems that funnel money to the very few, while the rest of us have less and less.

[rug]

2. A lot of the shoot right past the Beatitudes to Revelations.

[MisterP]

3. but Lee likes Epicurus ...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/05/epicurus-world/

[Jim__]

4. "Atheism is the answer to this bleak attitude of resignation."

I'm not sure that's quite right. From the article cited in the OP:

Atheism is the answer to this bleak attitude of resignation. Atheism means that there’s no fate, no foreordained destiny, no karma that condemns us to suffering or relegates us to lowly roles, no supernatural beings steering events behind the scenes. It means that our choices are real and meaningful and that people bear responsibility for their actions. While that’s a
solemn burden to shoulder, it’s also a source of hope and joy. And I have one more reason to offer, a thoroughly practical one: in the end, people who believe their choices matter are likely to win out over those who don’t.

From a review of Sam Harris book, Free Will:

...

His absolutist position, I should add, because, as he puts it near the beginning of the book: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.” We assume that we could have made other choices in the past, Harris continues, and we also assume that we consciously originate “our thoughts and actions in the present. . . . Both of these assumptions are false.”

...

Of course, we can't label Harris' position religious fatalism, but, no matter what you call it, it amounts to the same thing.