The true atheist must stare into the abyss of amoral purposelessness

Evidence

Note also that Kant’s argument here applies equally well to the neopaganism of God’s Gardeners as it does to “righteous non-believers”, for Kant absolutely refuses the equation of nature with beneficence that the Gardeners preach. On the contrary, Kant argues, God is necessary to make good a nature characterised by amoral purposelessness. The true atheist must be able to look this “vast tomb”, this “abyss of purposeless chaos”, full in the face — whereas I suspect that most (of us) non-believers manage only to look away from it. But Kant’s moral argument is less easily dismissed than it would appear, because it is far harder to eliminate belief in a providential structure of the universe than we first imagine — precisely because this kind of belief lurks far beneath anything that we would admit to accepting. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 273

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to the standing interests in death and ritual; connects to Fisher’s reading of Freud and the Frankfurt thesis about religion’s enduring functions.