Now, what that tells you is that there is a problem – which I recognise myself, being an atheist – about where you get your values from. I think ultimately one peels back to something like Wittgenstein’s “form of life” and that’s what we all, in the end, endorse. Of course, many people would include some element of Christian theism, even if they were brought up in a secular family, but the idea that you can move seamlessly from atheism to a liberal morality is, I think, a complete illusion.
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It’s the power. CS Lewis wrote in a wartime lecture – which was turned into a little book, The Abolition of Man – that when people talk about the power of humanity over nature, what they really mean is the power of some human beings over other human beings. And as an atheist, my objection to this kind of eugenics is that it reposes far too much trust in the people who either regard themselves or are regarded by others as the cleverest people around at the time: far too much trust. And I don’t share the ambition that they have to reproduce themselves.
So the idea that there could be a technological solution to death seems to me to really be an absurdity. And it’s a way of avoiding or even denying one of the routes towards a need or reason that theism satisfies – to the extent that it can – which is to reconcile human beings not only to their own mortality, but even more, to the mortality of whatever it is that they love.
- Matters of life and death: Rowan Williams and John Gray in conversation
[---]
It’s the power. CS Lewis wrote in a wartime lecture – which was turned into a little book, The Abolition of Man – that when people talk about the power of humanity over nature, what they really mean is the power of some human beings over other human beings. And as an atheist, my objection to this kind of eugenics is that it reposes far too much trust in the people who either regard themselves or are regarded by others as the cleverest people around at the time: far too much trust. And I don’t share the ambition that they have to reproduce themselves.
So the idea that there could be a technological solution to death seems to me to really be an absurdity. And it’s a way of avoiding or even denying one of the routes towards a need or reason that theism satisfies – to the extent that it can – which is to reconcile human beings not only to their own mortality, but even more, to the mortality of whatever it is that they love.
- Matters of life and death: Rowan Williams and John Gray in conversation
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