angst

My friend J has me reading about Existentialism. I was just going through the Wikipedia article on it, and this passage stuck out to me.

Pascal argued that without a God, life would be meaningless and miserable. People would only be able to create obstacles and overcome them in an attempt to escape boredom. These token-victories would ultimately become meaningless, since people would eventually die. This was good enough reason not to choose to become an atheist, according to Pascal.

I think a lot about how I'm a religious atheist--I completely lack faith while finding pleasure in certain aspects of my religion, like the flowers and incense and devotion to my swami. Recently I was trying to explain it to my friend G. He accused me of being "comically self-conscious in my religiosity." I argued that my religiosity is very self-conscious but that there's nothing funny about it. Being an atheist in church is lonely.

J and I have been talking about meaning, how to find it, where. That's how we got on the subject of existentialism. J is reading The Denial of Death. I've requested The Myth of Sisyphus from the library. It's interesting how one thing leads to another.

Something I find remarkable about the quote is the whole idea that someone could choose atheism. Is seems to me that being an atheist or theist is in your bones. I never experienced choosing it.