Nihilism vs. Lauren Southern vs. Nihilism.

Banas yen Lauren's southern did a video
in response to the problem of nihilism and offering you various constructive suggestions if you are struggling with nihilism or if you're choosing not to be a nihilist which include converting to Catholicism have you considered that if you are nihilist and you're you're looking to lauren southern for guidance maybe maybe you should considering nihilism is literally defined as not feeling any sense of religion or deeper purpose to life of course number four is maybe looking into religion and I think I'll let you take this away so as I mentioned before I am Catholic so for Catholics you know Christians you think of your ultimate purpose in life is obviously to get to heaven and this is tip number five is have an overarching story and narrative that you want to pursue let's just make up something you you can't actually believe in but then treat it like a religion anyway some kind of big narrative nihilism the dictionary definition anyways is the rejection of all religious and moral principles and the belief that life is meaningless Loren's Southern's video is actually titled five cures for nihilism cures and of course this is even more amusing to me because one of the cures posed is is religion itself and I think many people might see nihilism itself instead as a cure for religion but much more broadly of course it is a cure for any ideology the most fundamental thing we have to get across to people is nihilus is that yes nihilism is a real philosophy nihilism is not just an act of teenage rebellion against your high school principal nihilism is a real philosophy with zone literature and philosophers with its own analytical value with even its own ethical value and it makes people's lives meaningful frankly from my perspective it's self-evident that being a nihilist is a lot more positive than for example joining Islam as a religion I used to be a Buddhist I can say genuinely I see the advantages of nihilism even over Buddhism but when you look at a religion like Judaism or Islam that actually involves cutting off the foreskin of your penis and maybe losing 50% of the nerve endings you've got in that region of your body for the rest of your life sexually crippling you to some extent hmm and let's not even get into clitter ectomy a female genital mutilation which is also a part of the Muslim faith not so much Christianity or Judaism these days yeesh we live in a world where people will literally cut off their dicks for faith but then you you have to genuinely believe because if you don't genuinely believe then of course you'll have doubts I've gone through nihilistic periods when in my life especially through my teens and it's always when my faith is a bit wavering and Lauren southern can sit there with her caked on makeup and her bleached blonde hair and pretend it's all fun and games to sit there and kind of preach Catholicism for whatever wacky 21st century relativistic reason and then when you look back at the reality of what Catholicism has been to the indigenous peoples of South America to the indigenous peoples of Australia to the indigenous peoples of Canada what it was even for the peoples of Europe during the Dark Ages what it meant to the peoples of Eastern Europe when the church was trying to expand its power and destroy the pagans there there were Crusades within Europe people there were white on white Crusades people want to forget about that you know the unspeakable barbarity violence and just frankly stupidity that's encompassed in this religion including yes yes y'all Galileo putting a man in prison for daring to iterate the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun instead of vice versa the earth being the center of the solar system with the Sun revolving around it it was a punishable offence to take all of that and to pose it now in the year 2018 to say that religion and specifically the Catholic religion is a cure for nihilism and and at the same time to characterize nihilism as if it's an illness in want of a cure to me well this is the sort of thing that at least merits a very casual youtube video I made it reply at the end of the day I don't give up hope because I do believe in God so it's pretty much what happens when earth in the end doesn't really matter this is where the tone of the video suddenly gets much more somber and serious implicitly what these women are presenting to you in this video invites you to imagine that if you have a meaningless life if you have an unhappy life the cure for this is belief because of your existential anguish unhappiness or sense of aimlessness is a lack of belief and it's actually very important that we challenge that assumption I don't even mean on some kind of social abstract political level I mean for you as an individual psychologically if you're unhappy with your life if your life is meaningless to you why would you or anyone assume that the solution is belief now some people might assume the solution is to join a sports team that's not completely insane joining the Catholic Church with its history of genocide slavery genital mutilation you name it what do you think about it what do you think about it putting your faith in any ideology but especially a disproven mass murder based ideology of any all you the history of mass murder like Catholicism or like communism this isn't just wildly irrational it's actually a solution that doesn't relate in any meaningful way to the problem on a personal level keeping real I really lack the words to express to you how much better my life became how much profoundly better my life became what I became a nihilist because nihilism isn't just a critique of belief but when you really do start living as a nihilist and seeing the world through this philosophy you stop wanting to believe in things and so you lose all of the anxiety and agony that arises out of wanting to believe in things that just can't be true and then being disillusioned when of course they they turn out to be not what you want to be are looking for meaning and things looking seeking meaning in things outside of yourself in this world again not necessarily religion the fundamental error that all of these belief systems engage in is precisely looking in the world outside you for a relationship of authority instead of regarding those worldly authorities as merely authors as merely people who struggled in their own way to create something meaningful starting from a blank sheet of paper as you to you yourself in your own way must start from a blank sheet of paper and create something meaningful in your life so the first solution is philosophy and self-knowledge of course Brittney and I are not experts on these issues you know the questions we have to deal with are how is it possible that we live in a world where so many people are willing to kill others and even kill themselves for the sake of a belief how is it that belief has such a tremendous power to tyrannize whole societies and to tyrannize an isolated individual even when there is no priest watching you when there's no authority figure looking over you what is this what is this relationship between a human being and an imaginary object whether or not it happens to be God whether it happens to be a more complex system of beliefs like communism that can't be boiled down to belief in just one thing atheism ultimately can only take you so far atheism only concerns the problem of God and the solution to that they pose is that there is no God or there are no gods it's very fundamentally different to approach the same problems be they big or small from the standpoint of nihilism you know there's this there's the same from Latin equal this like no from any block of wood and Idol may be carved you know you can have this religious mentality it doesn't necessarily fasten onto what God it doesn't necessarily fasten onto a statue of Jupiter or Zeus or Jesus or some other you know religious tradition but the point is to say there is nothing to be believed in well I I can remember what it was like to live when I was really looking for meaning in the outside world and in my case it wasn't primarily religion it was philosophy and even political philosophy and even say disciplines like economics but I was looking for the meaning of life in the world outside me looking for things to believe in looking for things to have faith in and the fundamental shift that took place when I instead you know started to simply regard these authorities as mere authors as what they were doing not as setting down truths for me to relate to but as mere authorship when I instead could look in a detached and sympathetic way at a book whether the author was someone who died over a thousand years ago a great and famous name or someone from you know our own century or what have you when I could I could sympathize with their struggle filling up a blank page and when I saw my own life also as a blank page that I stood in a creative relationship towards you know instead of you know thinking of the world outside me as let's say so much earth burying the truth that these philosophers were digging up that they weren't you know discovering and and presenting something objectively real that I was beholden to that we had to serve the truth and so on of instead seeing these other philosophers these other authors these other political leaders these other authorities as mere authors as people who themselves were struggling with a creative tasks you know not a task of discovery not of discovering something that's already there but a task of sitting down with a blank piece of paper of trying to create something meaningful something meaningful that matters to themselves and that matters to other people and again of course this is the ultimate irony when you're a nihilist it's not that you regard the Bible as something good or evil it's not that you regard the holy texts of Buddhism as something good or evil you simply do not regard them as something to be believed in in the same sense that we can look at literature etc etcetera all these things are just the products of human creativity because when we've overcome belief itself we've overcome not just faith but the desire to have faith wanting to have faith then all of these texts equally are really just works of art they're really just so much literature for our delectation they cease to add this power or to tyrannize us they cease to have the power to create whole societies and drive other societies to its extinction they certainly lose the power to drive us to mutilate our own our own genitals as I say even Judaism and Islam to the largest and Christianity millions and millions of Christians are still engaged in circumcision as so many of those religions still do to this day so first things last when I encounter people with this misconception when I encounter people who think that nihilism is just an act of teenage rebellion against the high school principal to me people have this kind of supercilious and dismissive attitude or pursue presume to talk about curing nihilism as if it's a disease what do I tell them atheists present a critique of God they disprove the existence of God however you'd like to put that ok nihilism also rejects the Christian God however what nihilism does is that it is a critique of belief itself so the problem that atheism is posed to solve or counter is God and thus belief in God but what nihilism addresses is belief belief as such and belief is at the root of such an unbelievable range of aberrant human behavior why would it be so hard for people to see that belief is something that needs a cure when belief leads to you know people literally cutting off their own foreskins when it leads to the unbelievable excesses and atrocities of the whole history of human religion and when frankly it just leads to the enforced mediocrity of the dark ages in Europe we don't have to look so far beyond our own history we don't have to look beyond the 17th century in the history of England England 1632 1650 that short period of history trust me start on Wikipedia tonight belief itself I wouldn't go so far to say that it's an illness but certainly when I see someone like this offering to cure nihilism I really have to ask instead why is it that so few people are talking about a cure for belief about us yen