Apostasy

“Lucretius anticipated David Hume in saying that the prospect of future annihilation was no worse than the contemplation of the nothingness from which one came.” As you might have guessed, dear reader, I’ve been flipping through Christopher Hitchens’s latest book. It isn’t a startling argument that most people are possessed of a religious impulse to worship in order to allay that fear of nonexistence, to survive death and achieve immortality—that they, however brilliant, will choose to eschew reason for the illusion that “there exists a god who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

So here I am, appropriating Hitchens’s appropriation of Lucretius (or Hume) and presenting it to you, dear reader, third- or fourth-hand. My purpose is not to discuss religion, but faith of a different sort. A realization. I never considered myself “prone to that solipsism…which imagines that the universe is preoccupied with one’s own faith.” In spite of this, I surprise myself in the past year by the willingness to which I ceded over my confidence and faith to just this fallacy: my dependence on love from some external source, without which my happiness would be incomplete. Nothing but my own willingness to examine all of the evidence will have me understand that I have been alone all along, it seems.

Once loneliness holds no terror, it is easy to see: (1) the love that I imagined may not and likely does not exist except in abstract. To borrow and vulgarize Kant’s ontological argument (as stated by Betrand Russell), the Darcy that I merely imagine have all the same predicates as a real Darcy. (2) what’s more, I don’t need him.

This is not to say that ending this will be painless. In fact, it will probably be worse than I can now anticipate. All I can do is remind myself that I haven’t gained or lost a thing. It’s all been a dream…