What is happiness?

I've started going to a book study on Sunday nights that is about Richard Dawkins' God Delusion and Timothy Keller's The Reason for God. It's run by two guys from a local church who want to reach out to the local college kids. Our first meeting was really diverse and we had an interesting discussion but I think two of the non-religious people were getting annoyed because they wanted to have a debate. Oh well. This past Sunday, there were only two of us that showed up, and since everyone in the room was Christian we had more of a Christian-slanted discussion. We read a couple paragraphs from the preface to Dawkins' book and the conversation just took off from there.

In the preface Dawkins says "You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled." So we asked, what would the list for a Christian look like? "You can be a Christian who is..." And we came up with: justice, love, servitude, redemption, and purpose. You could argue that those things could fall under Dawkins' list - for instance, purpose can be included in intellectual fulfillment. But I think that's stretching it a little, and these are meant to be very broad categories.

Then we started asking "What does it mean to be happy?" Happiness is a word that I never really liked that much but I could never articulate why. What's so wrong with wanting to be happy? Nothing. But is happiness the goal of life? What actually is the meaning of life? It's a question we all laugh at because it's so trite but we also laugh at it because most of us don't know how to answer it. Foucault would essentially say there isn't any meaning because humans can't shape history, there is no such thing as 'human essence,' there are no origins, blah blah blah. But then he also says that meaning is created through relations. The point is, Michel Foucault's ideas are silly and depressing as shit. (I know I'm really eloquent). Anyways, that was just a tangent for me to express my displeasure of writing an essay on Foucault's ideas that I completely disagree with. SO, you have to distinguish between the two kinds of happiness that we're concerned with. Happy can be used to qualify a mood but happy can also mean existentially satisfied. When you first have a discussion on what it means to be happy, you have to make sure that you're speaking about the same kind of happy. We focused on the latter kind because to only want to be mood-happy means you're only living from moment to moment. Pursuing only mood-happiness is a pursual of the next thing that will make you happy. So we finished that discussion pretty quickly and moved on to existential-happy.

What's the difference between an atheist who is existentially satisfied and a Christian who is as well? Take an atheist who has lived a compassionate, fulfilling, happy (both in mood and existence), self-sacrificing, mother theresa, type of life. And then a Christian who is the exact same as that atheist but happens to be a Christian. That atheist could most definitely die a perfectly existentially happy person and never know the Christian faith. Absolutely possible. But a Christian would define true happiness as knowing God and having a relationship with Him. So from the Christian perspective, though this atheist dies perfectly happy with his life, he hadn't actually attained true happiness because he didn't know God. Well how the hell does one tell an atheist "excuse me you think you are existentially satisfied but actually, uhm, you're wrong. you're missing something honey." We talked about how in a discussion like this one, an individual has to be willing to make the jump to thinking about God, to thinking about the possibility that true happiness only lies in God, to put aside his/her own personal beliefs, because if this person is completely closed to the Christian idea, then the conversation basically stops. Both parties have to be willing to entertain the other's ideas. I know it sounds really basic but I think too often people try to have discussions like this purely from one side and then all you have is two people making two separate points to a brick wall. So what's the difference? The difference is that the Christian says that this atheist had never actually experienced true existential satisfaction/happiness.

Then we talked about indoctrination because Dawkins' hates specifically childhood indoctrination. And we also talked about the question"What does faith do for me?" and whether or not it's a selfish question to ask. But now I have to go to cognitive neuroscience, and I will finish this post later.