Atheism by Julian Baggini

Author:Julian Baggini [Baggini, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781402781919
Publisher: Sterling
Published: 2010-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

The English novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the famed 1932 science fiction novel Brave New World, set in “the year of our Ford 632” (the year 2540). According to the introduction of a recent edition of the novel, Huxley’s experience working at a chemical plant in England—an experience of “an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence”—was one source of inspiration for the novel. Huxley appears here in a photograph taken in January of 1925.

Aldous Huxley’s vision of a world in which human beings are created in a laboratory to fulfill a specific purpose has perhaps come true with the introduction of the Actroid, a robot developed by the Japanese company Kokoro, Inc. The machine, designed to demonstrate products at trade shows, speaks four languages—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English. The droid shown here, a kind of mechanical emcee, was unveiled at the 2005 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, Japan.

A second way out for the religious is to simply trust that God has a purpose for us which is genuinely a purpose for us rather than something we do for him. We may not know what that is but we’ve got eternity to find out, so what’s the rush? This is a perfectly coherent position but as with much else in religion it has to be recognized that it requires the religious to take something on complete blind trust, or, as they prefer to put it, on faith. To adopt this position is to admit that the religious actually don’t have any clue what the meaning or purpose of life is, but that they simply trust God has one for them. And there is still the troubling doubt that a meaning that is given to us by others isn’t necessarily the kind of meaning which makes life meaningful for us. The religious just have to have faith that their purpose is not the equivalent of cleaning paradise’s lavatories for eternity.

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