Are religious funerals 'empty and platitudinous'? Ian Dunt & Andy Bannister

The Queen's state funeral was watched by billions of people and marked by deep Christian symbolism. However, during the ceremony, atheist journalist Ian Dunt tweeted that he found it "empty and platitudinous, a cardboard shield against existential despair".
Ian engages with Christian thinker Andy Bannister who wrote a response article to Ian's tweet. They discuss the royal funeral, meaning, purpose and what death means to an atheist and a Christian.
For Ian Dunt: / iandunt
For Andy Bannister: www.andybannis...
For Andy's article: www.premierunb...
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[@mkgirl1995]

Anytime I hear the intro music, it makes me so excited 🤩 another great episode!

[@kwall1464]

Thank you all!

[@KyleAButler]

Cool discussion and also loving Andy's Starfleet uniform.

[@greg5023]

Not really about funerals. A very good conversation.

[@heathergardiner8952]

I really enjoyed listening to this - I am a Christian and I am very keen to understand what drives Atheists - and I got some insights - granted that this is just one atheist with his own viewpoint.

[@paulthew2]

Try the KZbin channel 'Harmonic Atheist'. Plenty of explanations of what drives fundamentalist Christians to atheism.

[@vanoroce64]

For two theists who have dedicated a big chunk of their careers to thinking about moral philosophy, and in the case of Justin engaging with non-believers, it seems to me disappointing that neither can steel-man the case for secular grounding for meaning and morality. It is telling of how engulfing the idea that God provides firm ground is that they can't imagine *anything else*, that their concerns with atheistic grounding of morality are so shallow. Ultimately, not even under theism can we escape these thorny questions about meaning and morality. Both atheists and theists can be "moral parrots" (or as Andy puts it, "moral paralytics"). Both atheists and theists can also have moral systems and a framework for meaning strongly founded on core values and goals, can have what I would dub a "content rich morality". And no, it can't just be founded on God as a standard. Because if whatever God commands goes, then that is empty. Even IF what God commands or what God says is just and good, there has to be a way to judge it just and good, we have to make sense of these words. It is in making sense of them that we discover the subjective but massively important choices we all have to make to decide who we're going to be and how we're going to treat our fellow humans. By the way: I'd love Justin and Andy to tell me why it isn't objective to say a move that leads to a check mate in chess is a "good move". After all, the rules of chess are arbitrary and the desire for both of us to sit and play a chess match is also subjective. So I guess that means anything goes and any move is equally good?

[@teachpeace3750]

As someone who is both a hospice chaplain and a humanist, I really enjoyed this conversation. I find myself quite happy not believing in an afterlife because no one goes to hell. If universalism were my belief as a theist, then I would likely be happy as well.

[@immanuel829]

Your free will alone shows: the self that is looking through your marvellous eyes cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. "This conclusion strongly reinforces our belief in the human soul and in its miraculous origin." John Eccles, neuroscientist and Nobel laureate

[@teachpeace3750]

@@immanuel829 perhaps, but no one truly knows do they?

[@CCiPencil]

@@teachpeace3750 Jesus knew

[@dalefrazer1559]

Love you Justin...just gonna leave that there

[@helencahn7293]

Human beings do not need to get their intrinsic value from a devine father figure who tells you he created you to be like him. Our value comes from the need for community, the drive to nurture offspring and family, and the understanding that life relies on the health of our environment on earth.

[@janebaker966]

All in the same boat? Yeah but you're in an upper berth and I'm in steerage,and it makes a difference.

[@helencahn7293]

I know plenty of Christians who have such a superficial understanding of their religion, their existential sense of meaning is like a comic strip. Religion seems to replace contemplation and the drive for self understanding with insipid and unexamined wrote belief for a good many followers. As a humanist, I find meaning in interaction with life, humans, and all that nature provides. Living forever in some sterile place does not provide any sort of meaning for me. I don't live life for a reward, I live it for fulfillment for and with others.

[@mountbrocken]

I really like Ian. However, I have noticed something about atheists which I honestly find very annoying and intellectually dishonest. For instance, around a half hour into the conversation Justin is expressing his 'doubt' that one can develop a logically consistent moral framework from a purely materialistic, naturalistic model to where does one even have a right to ask if this is right or this is wrong. Ian finds this laughable (I think the term he uses is that it is a silly question). And yet, when he is discussing Descartes he clearly shows his bias towards the doubting side of Descartes and his ascent to this however displays his disagreement to the proofs for God, characterizing this position as the standard or obvious position. But it isn't obvious and MANY, including probably the most important philosopher in the past few centuries, Kant, finds the doubts of Descartes irrational. So, I have found most atheists in our day and age, possibly in general, are more dogmatic about their perspectives than even believers oddly enough, framing their positions as the standard and the opposition as 'silly.' I am sorry, but as a professor of philosophy I find this attitude intellectually dishonest, pretentiously biased, and brimming with sickening hubris.

[@irinagordon8455]

I grew up in the Soviet Union and accepted wholeheartedly what they taught us about religion. However, at around the age of 12 I started having many questions about suffering, evil and later on about death, the meaning of life etc. I realized atheism had no satisfying answers to the questions that were much more important to me than anything else. I thought I'd rather be a cow that happily chews grass all day than 'the crown of evolution ' that had been given a 'gift' of understanding its own misery. Why did our wonderful mother nature do it to us? Are humans just mutants? Has evolution taken millions of years to create something that would destroy it? How stupid and incongruent.

[@tonyatkinson2210]

A deep misunderstanding of evolution . Evolution isn’t goal directed . Humanity is no more evolved than a worm

[@frankwhelan1715]

Even if conseness was an illusion you would need to exist to have the illusion, Or does Andy believe they are free floating things not dependent on humans to have them?

[@immanuel829]

Everybody believes something. But I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, especially because of the striking harmony between maths and nature, DNA and free will. God bless.

[@jestermoon]

I agree my friend. From an anti-religion atheist. Take A Moment Stay Free

[@theRandy712]

You're literally just parroting back what you considered to be a pithy platitude. It requires no faith to believe merely in what can be proven through science.

[@immanuel829]

@@theRandy712 The natural sciences cannot answer the question whether matter and energy is all there is, bc they cannot measure anything else. Whoever wants to believe dust + water turned into bees, birds, and babies by unguided processes alone and that a human is JUST a bunch of chemicals, fine with me. But it's not science. Your free will alone shows: the self that is looking through your marvellous eyes cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. "This conclusion strongly reinforces our belief in the human soul and in its miraculous origin in a divine creation." John Eccles, neuroscientist and Nobel laureate

[@theRandy712]

@@immanuel829 There is no knowledge outside of science. Every thing you attribute to God could just as easily be attributed to aliens.

[@onionbelly_]

​@@immanuel829 Invoking the supernatural in the absence or lack of a scientific explanation has always turned out to be a futile enterprise. The god that you believe in might be the answer, but that's something you'll need to actually demonstrate instead of all this Kent Hovind talk and quoting brilliant scientists as if they won the Nobel Prize for their theology. Show some humility, for Christ sake.

[@dmere123ify]

If a human grows up in a world that pretends that life can be fairytale-like, at least for themselves and those around them, there is a cost involved in accepting that such a world is to some degree a deep deception. If a human grows up with a deeper sense of the harsher sides of reality they must of course deal with the disconnect with the perspectives expressed by many around them, but they don’t have to adjust to the loss of the fairytale-like view of reality later in life. Christianity, and other religions, can function as crutches to manage the culture shock involved in allowing oneself to see the world more closely to how it really is. Atheism has the cold moral high ground of choosing not to accept any worldview without closely examining it for the telltale signs of deception. We don’t yet, and may never see, a world in which humanity largely sees itself as it is from a atheistic humanist perspective. So for atheists who have been deeply imbedded in a religion there remains a deep sense of loss of connection to their former more religious world view and the sense of community it held. Balanced against that is the sense of community in facing up to the reality of the challenges inherent in living in this rapidly changing age, and seeing the possibility of uniting to create a world in which progress is real and future generations might not live with a dread that the world is about to be destroyed in ways that will make life for our grandchildren a much more bleak existence. Having grown up, many of us, with a sense of permanence to our worlds we are now living with the deep uncertainty of what is to come. A situation that many in previous generations and in darker places have had to face before us, on a day-to-day basis.

[@CCiPencil]

Atheism offers zero ability to explain and communicate morality outside one’s individual experience

[@dmere123ify]

@@CCiPencil It’s interesting that the basics of morality are fairly universal. People of very different religions and cultures share similar values. Many of the same basic moral values are shared with other mammals and in particular with other primates. They are the kind of values that would be expected from natural selection as we evolved as social animals. Religions like Christianity claim they have a God given basis to their moral principles and use that idea as a control mechanism. It’s interesting to observe the evolution of particular moral codes over time within religious communities. They often adapt over time to the cultural changes in their surrounding cultures. Attitudes towards divorce and racial and sexual equality are examples. Many things that were once regarded as serious sins have become accepted as normal. Acceptance of non heterosexual identity is an example that it still in progress. Many older people are still very uncomfortable with the issue, whilst most younger people don’t see any moral problem. So moral codes are largely cultural and our basic moral values are a product of our evolution.

[@CCiPencil]

@@dmere123ify exactly my point, if morals or ethics are based on culture or evolution than you have zero method of justifying your particular notion of morality. You can believe it but you can not conclude it’s true. The only way to justify the position that objective universal morality is true is from the Christian worldview. It is objectively and absolutely true that the holocaust is evil or that rape is evil; it’s very hard for atheism to conclude that

[@dmere123ify]

@@CCiPencil Yes. We’ve been conditioned to believe that morality is objective and that things and actions and people are objectively evil. You cannot prove the Christian worldview’s idea of objective universal morality is true, or similar ideas from the worldview of other religions. When you examine the morality of the bible it comes down to these things are evil except when God does them or commands them. Eg Genocide is evil except when God commands it. What is and isn’t evil comes down to the what a perfect God might want done. So if you believe a particular group of people are responsible for lots of evil in the world you can claim that God wants them exterminated and your actions in doing so are not then evil. What sounds like an objective system of morality comes back to a subjective system. There are many actions that by our nature and cultural conditioning when consider wrong. But if we believe we have good enough reasons to do them, we consider them acceptable. That sounds pretty subjective to me. By pointing to actions at the extreme end of the spectrum we can say everyone agrees these things are evil, therefore objective morality exists. But we would expect that if morality was only ever subjective, that pretty much everyone would still subjectively agree that certain actions are morally unjustifiable. So all the religious worldview of morality can provide us with is a nice neat story about morality that cannot be objectively proven. One that can be used to convince people and control their behaviour and thoughts in ways that benefit the religion. Religions can say for example that particular sexual activities are morally wrong. Then offer to provide a path of redemption for those who they convince to feel guilty about them. As adults we can recognise that we humanly make bad choices at times and can choose to try and do better. We don’t need to believe something called evil caused us to not do what we consider would have been a better option. Objective morality may be a comforting belief but it is not a belief that can be objectively proven. Sometimes it’s comforting to believe things that are unlikely objectively to be true. That’s part of being human in the reality we find ourselves in. But if we are able to live believing only the things we have good reasons for believing we can be free from mind controlling systems of religious belief that seek to keep us in child like states in which we are made to feel comfortable and safe.

[@CCiPencil]

@@dmere123ify I’ll take Christ over your worldview that can not claim something like child rape is objectively evil.

[@janebaker966]

That atheist speaker is very middle class entitled I must say. Everyone can choose the way they live. No. Only if you're a white,affluent middle class man. And woman only from about 1970. You can choose to live in a hut and be celibate (and bore the socks off us), or you can choose to be sexually adventurous and really live. Well I didn't CHOOSE to live a solitary isolated lifestyle ,like a 13th century anchorite. It just happened. Mainly because I seem to have been born with the secret of invisibility. Aged 17 and trying hard to "fit in" and be "the same " as everyone else because orange hair notwithstanding being different is dangerous. It can get you killed. I live in the city where the Persian man who loved gardening got killed. It seemed perfectly justifiable to ALL his neighbours. Yes,the two most ugly,stupid ones that no one liked anyway have been jailed but they were all complicit. He was different and his growing flowers activity proved he was different and thus a threat. It's dangerous to be different. So I lost my virginity in a painful and unpleasant experience and no,it wasn't "how it's supposed to be" next time,as Dr Hook promises Better Love Next Time Baby,because it was the once and only. I'm mentioning this because HE told everyone anyway so I've worn the Scarlet Letter for 50 years but it shows the lies the atheists tell. We're not mean and judgmental like the Christians ,and all other religions of course. I knew I shouldn't have done it before I did but the whole force of the age told me my instinct was wrong,that I should be rational and our society wasn't ruledd by outworn old mores any more and if you didn't like sex you were a selfish nasty person. Liberals are the most intolerant and illiberal out. And PUTIN IS THE GOOD GUY. Yeah,let's hand over all that rich land to capitalist corporate USA hegemony. You Stupids.

[@danmar007]

They're deadly boring.

[@theRandy712]

This might be the most boring video I've ever seen on KZbin

[@Rob_Sausage]

I skipped the bald atheist bits in this discussion.

[@briendoyle4680]

Since gods do NOT exist ... Obviously Yes!

[@Rob_Sausage]

The majority of the population of the world disagrees.

[@terryschofield1922]

The church used the queen's funeral as a marketing, recruitment and money raising exercise, just because the Queen was allegedly a believer. Nauseous.

[@josuefabianmaronamamani5267]

Thanks for commenting although we don't share your view :)

[@terryschofield1922]

@@josuefabianmaronamamani5267 I enjoyed the processions and all the ceremonious stuff Josue, but candidly no god played any part in it. Fine it was what the queen wanted but because she died she would not have been aware of any of it. It just seemed to me to be an opportunity, which the church took, to influence especially young minds to believe in the supernatural without examining the evidence. I guess if you are a believer you would see things differently but can you demonstrate that any god exists? Theists have spectacularly failed to do this in my opinion. The bible is the claim not the evidence, what do you think?

[@wm5000]

@@terryschofield1922 The Queen planned the funeral to the letter.

[@terryschofield1922]

@@wm5000 Exactly, the Queen did, not god.

[@wm5000]

@@terryschofield1922 Agreed. The Queen organised her own funeral exactly how she wanted it and everybody carried out her wishes. Therefore it is not logical to say as you do "the church used the queen's funeral as a marketing, recruitment and money raising exercise."