re: #26 Decatur Deb

This assumes that ‘real happiness’ is some kind of cultural goal. A wide range of ideologies will work to raise a culture to hegemony, as long as they are minimally consistent with environmental and technological reality. The Egyptian, Chinese, Roman, Aztec, and British empires didn’t spend a lot on Gallup polling to see if everyone was happy.

True, but the quote talks about people demanding “real happiness” in the place of the “illusory happiness” of religion and giving up “a condition that requires illusions”.

I mean, I’d say Americans are “happy” in that most have their basic needs met and aren’t seeking to escape to some other, better country to live in. But how much of our own happiness is based on illusion that has nothing whatsoever to do with religious belief?

We ignoring the suffering of the poor, the homeless, and the addicted among us, not to mention other countries’ sweatshops & the horrible working conditions that furnish us with a steady supply of cheap goods.

We keep guzzling petroleum, the profits of which fund repressive, misogynistic regimes (not to mention extreme ideologies), the while screaming about how horribly barbaric & unenlightened they are.

We built our country on grand ideas and talk of freedom & equality, all while standing ankle deep in the blood & suffering of the countless African slaves upon whose backs were built our riches, and whose toil built our gleaming marble monuments—without ever receiving the benefits of our Enlightenment based notions of freedom.

Does none of that qualify our own (secular) happiness as one that “requires illusions”? I guess I just get tired of pat answers—people say, “If you just do/believe X, Y, Z and it will set you free, make your life better.” It doesn’t really mater if X, Y, and Z have to do with religion or philosophy or politics or economics or whatever—it’s the same spiel. I think situations and people & their relationships are way more complex than we like to admit,