religion, philosophy, freewillI don’t know how many times I’ve encountered a religious person who, when sincerely hoping for a particular event or outcome, abstracts away their personal involvement and says something to the effect of “It’s in God’s hands now”. Atheists, in my experience, tend to be much more practical and actively look for ways to get involved, or even just acknowledge that they have an emotion called “hope” and are actively doing some hoping.
This happens in innumerable other situations: two people don’t just fall in love, they were brought together by the powers that be; a man behaves irrationally not because he’s mentally unsound or simply upset, but because he was brought to do so by forces beyond him.
It seems to me that this is an attempt on the part of these people to absolve themselves of being involved in their own lives, to take away from their own free will and thus free themselves from the burden of responsibility. But what motivates a person to do this in the first place? Are all religious people necessarily like this at some level? What makes a person give up a lead role in their own life?
what motivates a person to do this in the first place? … What makes a person give up a lead role in their own life?
It’s easier. Especially if you already have all the groundwork laid via upbringing, immersion in culture, etc. It’s easy to be told what to do. It’s easy to act like you have no control over your own life. Whether you project the responsibility for your fate on some deity or on the people around you, the same thing is happening at the root.
The universe is chaotic and grants no special status or favor to man. Nature is a cold mistress. There is no underlying meaning to natural events, just equations being balanced. However, our minds have evolved to look for patterns, to embrace regularity, and to seek meaning when possible.
Turning over control to God is a way to get back some semblance of control, to assign some meaning to the events that are unfolding before us, for it wasn’t just coincidence or due to factors we cannot comprehend, but rather it was because that was how God wanted (or didn’t want) it.
Whenever I hear someone say “It’s in god’s hands now,” I often find myself needing to suppress the urge to say something to the effect of “I hope he washed them.” (I’ve thought other, significantly less respectful, things as well, but I digress…)
The simple truth about statements like this, is that it’s actually a throwaway statement. You’re effectively saying that everything that can possibly be done has been done, and all that’s left is to wait until the outcome comes out. And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with hoping for the best. Two easy examples of this are for the time between the end of a surgical procedure and the end of the recovery period following that surgery, and the time between when you, personally, vote for the candidates you like, and when you find out if they won.
Of course, someone who says “it’s in god’s hands now,” gives him- or herself an ideal set-up for when things don’t go as they hoped: “It was god’s will.”
As far as the related phrases like “fate brought them together” and the like, this is nothing more than an attempt to define order out of chaos. Meeting another person is random, unpredictable, and downright frightening at times. That you ended up in the same place at the same time as the person you married is the net result of both your own choices and your partner’s choices. If either of you had chosen something different, you might not have even met. If that hadn’t happened, would someone else be in your partner’s place right now? Possibly, possibly not. So it does represent a fear of the unknown.
Knowing that religions often claim to know the unknowable to begin with, this is just a natural extension of those claims.
Theists like to ask if you believe in fate or destiny. I make my own fate and write my own destiny. Yes, there are things that are out of my hands. That doesn’t alter the fact that I do what I can, when I can. If I have no control over it, I may or may not like it, but I can still know that I’m fighting the proverbial “good fight”, so when things don’t go my way, I just need to remind myself that I did fight the good fight. That ought to be enough to help me get up again tomorrow and keep fighting.
My wife lost the diamond to an old ring she inherited. The same week, my sister-in-law lost the diamond to her ring. She did all the right things…shut off the water, called the plumber, but she thanked Jesus for returning the diamond to her. Much later, I took the car for an oil change, the place that will vacuum your car. As it turned out, it wasn’t the place that vacuums. So I had to vacuum it myself and there under the seat was the diamond.
I had no one to thank but dumb luck. It would have been nice to have someone looking out for me, saving my day. Alas I had nothing. I can understand the desire to have a ‘personal god’. But this incident was a little exhilarating, because it made concrete that I didn’t need a co-pilot. And c’mon, sister-in-law, take some credit for shutting off the water, and give the plumber a shout out too.
Well it seems pretty straightforward: they believe there is a higher power at work in their lives, so they attribute things in their lives to it’s intervention. From that it follows that things will work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds, and that god will swoop down and cure the terminal cancer in your 108 year old mother.
Atheists don’t believe, so they look for other explanations, and they don’t expect problems to solve themselves.
This is honestly one of the things that bothers me most about theists: the belief in an immediate and personal god. Not just belief in god, but belief that god would have nothing better to do than get your boring ass through your boring day.
Scapegoating is a normal thing for a lot of people; nobody wants to be completely responsible for their life. Christians just have a ready-made set of good and evil scapegoats, and their religious doctrine suggests they are ultimately powerless.
It’s a ploy designed to absolve them from all responsibility for their actions. If things go well they must “give the glory to god”, but the payoff comes when things go horribly wrong. When that happens they can say it’s not their fault; they had nothing to do with it; it’s god’s will.
Even better, their peers will accept the excuse without question (because their peers intend to use the same excuse in the future) and the Christian, who has just made a terrible mistake, can strut around with his head held high and boasting that God has taken a personal interest in his life and set him back on the path to glory.
To adress the latter part of your question, no, not all religious people look for ways to shirk moral responsibility, and more importantly, they are not the only ones who do. Plenty of secular people defer to things like “the markets”, “genetics”, “evolutionary psychology”, “popular opinion”, “ratings” etc., to either explain why things are the way they are, or to explain why they will come out the way they want them to come out. It’s a basic human trait - order out of chaos, control over uncertainty etc., all mentioned above - that is pretty universal.
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