Depression is a serious problem within the greater atheist community and far too often, that depression has led to suicide. This is something many of my fellow atheists often don’t like to admit, but it is true. I know a lot of atheists, myself included, would all like to believe that atheists are happier people than religious believers and in many ways we are. But we also have to accept the reality that in some very important ways we are not.Rosch's diagnosis of the problem, however, seems a bit off to me. He writes:
There are of course many valid reasons why atheists are sometimes more prone to suicide than religious believers. Interestingly enough, one of those reasons is religious believers themselves. We live in a world dominated by people who often fervently believe ancient superstitions and who many times demonize, harass, ostracize, and disown those who lack belief in those ancient superstitions. Atheists on the receiving end of this treatment are understandably stressed and isolated. They often experience anxiety and depression as a result.This may be true in Muslim cultures, but I have a difficult time believing in our post-Christian, secular West - Europe and North America - that atheists experience much persecution from Christians. And even if they did the kind of mistreatment they receive is as nothing compared to the horrific persecution of Christians at the hands of atheists throughout the twentieth century. Yet we don't read of persecuted Christians as having had a suicide problem.
I think Rosch is closer to the mark when he writes this:
Imagine you are a young person who has just come to the realization that God is imaginary. You have just realized that everything your religious tradition and your parents have taught you is make-believe. Your whole world has just come undone and for the first time in your life, you now have to wrestle with the great existential questions of life on your own and without any support networks. What does it mean to live a meaningful life without a supernatural deity? Without an afterlife to live for, what is the purpose of life?If a sensitive, intelligent young person comes to the realization that all of our thoughts and emotions are just collisions of chemicals in our brains, that all of our griefs and joys, sufferings and pleasures are ultimately extinguished in death, that all of our hopes, dreams, and ambitions are destined to amount to ephemeral satisfactions at best, that our lives are just meaningless flickers in a vast meaningless universe, then it's little wonder that they'd ask themselves why they should go on living when their lives are filled with hopelessness, pain, and rejection.
This is why the atheist character Kirillov says in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, "I don't know how anyone can know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot."
Rosch, however, demurs. He writes:
As a community, atheists should be reminding each other about the wonders around us. It is far too easy to get lost in our day-to-day struggles and problems. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast sometimes and if you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you just might miss it. We only have one life. There are no do-overs and no magically perfect kingdoms awaiting us when we die. This is it. Life’s too short to waste. If your life sucks, work to make it better… if not for you, for those who come after you. Again, there is a vast cosmos out there and we are links in the chain of human achievement.Unfortunately, this is not much consolation for the person experiencing the existential angst he talks about in his article. In the first place, the more one reflects on the wonders around us - life, the starry heavens - the more one feels either completely forlorn or drawn closer to the Creator of those wonders.
The more closely one studies life and the heavens the more these wonders cry out that they're not a just a fortuitous cosmic fluke - they're intentionally designed.
Secondly, why on earth should anyone who believes that after this life there's nothing but annihilation care about the state of the world after they die? The happy talk about being "links in the chain of human achievement" is just so much whistling past the graveyard.
Thirdly, Rosch seems implicitly to be making the moral claim that pure egoism - caring only about one's own happiness - is wrong, but what grounds does he have for making any moral claims at all? If there's no objective moral authority then morality reduces to nothing more than subjective preferences. Rosch can say that he doesn't like it when people don't care for those who come after, but why should anyone think they should govern their life according to what someone else likes or dislikes?
To the extent that atheism has a suicide problem - I'm taking Rosch at his word that it does - it does so because it simply cannot offer people the spiritual resources to help them cope with the existential predicaments of life. Nor can it provide satisfying answers to the most pressing metaphysical questions of life. Young people in pain who think to peer into their souls find, if God's not there, that all they can see is a huge aching emptiness.
That discovery is almost inevitably a recipe for despair.
