My Religious Mother's view on why this generation is so depressed. What do you think?

I am an atheist and I don’t believe in gods or spirituality or other magical nonesense. My mother is a devout Christian. According to her, this generation (especially the young) is so depressed because they’re entitled and constantly want things and not content with what they have in this life. Religious or not, it’s prevalant among the young today. The religious want salvation, forgiveness, and for God to bend the cosmos to make their lives better. As a believer, God shouldn’t bend to you, you bend to God. You serve Him, He should not serve you. The atheists believe that there is nothing but the physical world and fear that an existence with meaning would demand something from them. According to her, atheists will always be stuck on their ego, that they are entitled to recieve their hedonistic and phyisical perspective on “freedom”.

Well according to her, true freedom isn’t in the idea of God saving you from hell or getting what you want while you’re alive in this phyiscal world. True freedom is to stop wanting anything at all and be contented with what you have. If you’re Christian, serve God no matter what He thinks of you. Serve God because you want to serve God, not because don’t want to burn in hell. If you’re atheist, be content with being alive and what life has handed to you, don’t demand more from this world and give up the idea of “Me, myself, and I”. That way, you can achieve true freedom and happiness.

What do you think?

When I was 16 years old my father asked if I thought that his generation complained about my generation’s music, hair, and clothes. I told him, yes. He said his father said the same thing to him - and he predicted my generation would say the same about the next generation. He was right and its been the same complaints for every generation since. And my generation listened to the Beatles, cut their hair like the Beatles, wore clothes like the Beatles.

Your mom is just doing what every generation does - complain about the next. She thinks she has a solution, but so did all these other generations and yet here we are. So take a lesson and try not to be as judgemental about your next generation.

5 Likes

I will know that I am finally getting old when I hear myself begin a sentence with "Back in my day . . . "

God wants us to burn in Hell. There’s very little anyone of us can do about it, apart from being content with nothing.

Will she still agree if you change “God” to “the King” (as in a very human, authoritarian monarch in an absolute monarchy), “Christian” with “serf”, and “atheists” with “opposition”? The Christians are there to serve the self-interests of the King (disregarding their own interests), and think the opposition (from those that have not bent the knee for the authoritarian ruler King, kissed his ring and sworn lifelong allegiance) are totally out of order, and are just selfish because they want to be free from the tyranny of the King?

Go back just a few millennia or centuries (or, in the case of imperial Japan, less than a century), and you had kings and emperors that were in that position, claiming to be some sort of deity (or descended from a deity), and expected to be treated as such. The only difference between the two situations (a god versus a king who is a self-proclaimed god-like king) is the mythology. Given that there could exist an alternative, I somehow doubt that your mother would be happy serving as a serf under some Russian tsar, a Japanese emperor, or some ancient selfish king in an absolute monarchy.

And this all brings us to the current situation, where you actually are in the process of inserting a god-like king on the throne in the US. Would she swear allegiance to your new king, believing him to be inserted by a mythological deity?

Submitting voluntarily to a supreme higher authority (or perceived higher authority, whether real or not) without questioning why you should do that, gives witness that you’re not really thinking it through. If you question the authority, and wonder why you should submit, you have at least given it some thought.

Hah! I’m routinely doing that with my own kids, for shits and giggles. And they invariantly reply with things like “Dad, you’re so OLD!” or “How was it possible to live without X?”, where X is cellphones, computers, Internet, etc.

OK, not just for shits and giggles, but also to expand the perspective of my kids, so they are aware that things were different before, and that perhaps not all change is for the good.

1 Like

She’s entitled to an opinion I suppose, but I think she doesn’t understand what atheism means, and doesn’t understand what ego means or how it works.

She may have a point about people having a sense of entitlement, but it is of course preposterous to imagine, and without any hint of objective evidence, based solely on her own subjective bias about atheists and what they think, that atheists generally have more of a sense of entitlement than theists. The evidence suggests she is wholly wrong in that assumption, as well.

1 Like

I agree with you that not all change is good, but I do think we are heading (mostly) in the right direction.

Gay marriage is an example. And the Internet seems to be contributing to a rise of secularism, although I concede that this rise of secularism and declining church attendance has triggered the religious right and has made them more aggressive in the political arena.

1 Like

This is an almost Buddhist thing for her to say and it is compatible with all religions I’m familiar with, and with atheism – in the sense of, letting go of ego / grasping / striving and seeking contentment rather than the ever-nebulous “happiness”, being selfless and other-centered. Of course it, like anything, can be taken too far, into self-abasement and neglect and passivity.

She’s also correct that one can do the right things for the wrong reasons – once can serve a god simply to escape a feared punishment and not out of any sort of desire to elevate their character and be kind to others. Christianity in particular often loses sight of that in my experience. It lacks humility.

As with many such issues, there isn’t a single cause for depression. There are a host of psychological and social reasons. To the extent the current / upcoming generation is “more depressed” I would say it’s because they have no hope for themselves and no sense that their efforts in life amount to anything. Sure, in some cases what they want might be unrealistic or selfish, but – how many intelligent and self aware 25 year olds seriously think they are going to retire comfortably with a gold watch one day, and in the meantime, live in safety and prosperity? Most are shambling through life just barely getting by in a world that wants the last farthing of their strength in exchange for little more than just enough to stay alive and keep working. To me, that’s the real crux of the matter, to the extent it can be condensed into a paragraph.

That in turn is largely a function of rich fucks hoarding the fruits of everyone else’s labor, and creating a society where there’s no permission or will to level the playing field, and no one but the uber-wealthy have any real rights or worth. And in this country, a huge swath of Christianity is right on board with that, often in very un-self-aware and self-defeating ways. And THAT in turn is because of the authoritarian nature of the belief system, the idea of groveling before an all-powerful monarch and serving him without question.

So it’s great that your mother has found a measure of wisdom that works for her, but she’s not fully thinking it through.

For example, in what way is the triumphalist message of evangelicalism NOT teaching people that god is in your corner, has you in his back pocket, will protect and care for you because you belong to him by faith and not for any reason of personal worthiness but just simple trust? What does that do but make credulous children like I once was think that if they just have faith that it will happen, they will be safe and happy and blessed and protected?

The Bible is chock-a-block full of such “promises”. It depicts god like a mother hen, and his children finding safety beneath the shelter of his wings. It even invites people to “taste and see that the Lord is good”, to just try him out – believe him for things and see if the very windows of heaven aren’t opened and you aren’t showered with his largesse, “shaken down, pressed together, in good measure”.

So Christians are contributing to your mother’s perceived problem at least as much as anyone else. They are fostering sky-high expectations in a world that, in fact, doesn’t give a fig about individuals or their needs except in the limited circumstances where it transactionally benefits the system in the short term.

Finally there’s the whole romantic fantasy that special relationships should be easy, even effortless – when the reality is that everyone is just another imperfect asshole and once the bloom is off the rose it’s a lot of hard, often buzz-killing work to foster a mutually healthy relationship and keep your head above water. So not only doesn’t God have you in his back pocket, your life partner and immediate family often don’t consistently have that sorted on your behalf, either. That whole thing goes back at least to 11th century Arthurian legends and fantasies of pure yet unrequited courtly love, so I can’t really blame it on religion, apart from how religion often condones and reinforces it. My point here is just that to whatever extent young people think that they will find happiness in finally meeting “The One” just sets them up for failure there, too, and there are few things more depressing than a jilted or disappointed lover. I think that has reached new heights as society doesn’t have a consistent framework that informs people of their proper roles and supports them in it – and Christianity’s patriarchal system never was anything but lipstick on a pig there, anyway.

Hell, even I can’t remember what it was like to live without those things. Everything prior to the Internet era and even to an extent prior to the smartphone, seems like a completely different planet that I can scarcely believe I once lived on. Especially since I’m a software dev myself.

A couple of years ago I set up a Z-80 emulator and booted up TRSDOS/LSDOS 6 and played around with it for awhile. It’s even cruder than I remembered. I thought it would be a fun exercise to write some software for my first OS, knowing what I know now. But the best compiler I could find had been mostly tested for game devs and was full of bugs when it came to sophisticated memory management or file I/O. Plus no networking, no file sharing, no multi user, no sub-folders and certainly no Internet. How i ever got anything done on those damn machines beats me. Still, I got my first paying jobs writing for that system (most notably, a typesetting system, done in a combination of assembler and compiled BASIC).

1 Like

This sounds ludicrous to me, forget curing disease, or eradicating poverty, childbirth mortality - just be content with everything, and stop trying to improve it.

It’s a typical type of apologetics, like people who don’t care about fucking up the climate, because it’s all part of god’s plan.

2 Likes

In fairness I don’t think it’s meant in that way, although it may be misused as “be docile and don’t rock the boat”. I think it is properly and usefully the concept of letting life pass through you rather than being constantly vulnerable to it wrecking your peace of mind in every moment. Things will never be ideal, so don’t be ever waiting for them to be before you can be “happy”.

That still leaves room for acknowledging that there are problems and working to solve them; in fact, it provides great meaning and purpose to be doing so.

Of course what some guy’s mom meant by it, I cannot say. I can only comment on what I feel is a legitimate use for such thoughts.

1 Like

I understand, it’s been a long day, and my feet are competing with my back for my attention…on the other hand kerching $$$…

You know what it works… :face_with_raised_eyebrow: :wink:

I am of course being facetious, a bit anyway…

Yes of course it makes sense not to have unrealistic expectations, and if I might add, to try and find pleasure in the simple mundane unavoidable tasks, but who is to say what is a reasonable expectation from life anyway, surely this is subjective.

On this we can definitely agree. Time to feed my aching feet and back an unassuming Australian Shiraz… :innocent:

1 Like

Ultimately, yes. Some people thrive on “challenges” or what I might refer to as “pain and suffering”.

It’s just that the sky-high expectations that were inculcated in me as a child and young adult were SO unreasonable that anyone not in thrall to it would see it as absurd. I was taught for example that god is so hung up on the evils of divorce that he would somehow make even a bad / wrong marriage right if you had enough faith. Also that he had special benefits for “the husband of one wife” like not being disqualified from church leadership. This was most of the mechanism by which I stayed in my first marriage of 15 years (to a “good Christian girl”!) about 14.5 years longer than I should have … ignoring for the sake of argument that I probably shouldn’t have tied the knot in the first place, given that her Christian psychologist warned me I was in for a world of hurt. I wouldn’t listen; I knew better. I had more faith than that charlitan!

That is the kind of thing that transcends subjectivity, at least for people who have more than 2 neurons communicating with one another (and are free to use those neurons).

2 Likes

Stop being concerned with what anyone else thinks true freedom is for you - that’s a version of freedom.

Fixed that for her.

That sounds a lot like what is told by the haves to the have-nots.

1 Like

Sounds pretty crazy to me even compared to other religious ideas.

Its pretty crazy to say believe in this or burn in hell, its even crazier to say believe in this or burn in hell, and btw ignore the burning in hell threat, you should just want to believe and grovel for the sake of it.

I find any sort of statistics or statements about happiness pretty suspcicious.

One sentiment i semi agree with is not chasing pleasure without sacrifice for all your happiness.

Drinking alcohol, getting fat and lazy, expensive watches and cars arent things that would make me happy for any length of time.

Achievement through some sort of sacrifice and having a laugh with people you like are the most sure ways for me to be happy.

2 Likes

Not surprised that she doesn’t believe in mental illness. Most Christians don’t acknowledge it.

I would say that “nearly all fundamentalist Christians don’t acknowledge it”. Liberal Christians are pretty good about it.

I certainly was taught that it’s the devil’s substitute for “trusting God” or prayer or whatever. The most you could get in terms of “therapy” would be to go to your pastor for “counseling” (in general they were poorly or not at all trained in that kind of thing, though some had a knack for it). Or perhaps a questionably-credentialed “Christian psychiatrist” – or at least one using questionable hybrid methods of talk therapy and bible study and prayer.

I credit this attitude with enabling my first wife, who had very severe mental health issues, to deny any sort of mental health standard of care. In the end she had to become so delusional and unstable that I took the kids and left her and then after a year or two the men in the white coats came for her. She’s now a Thorazine zombie somewhere in Michigan … although in fairness, that’s not much of a fate, the real problem is the inability of a triumphalist cult to accept less than ideal results, if that’s all that’s available.

1 Like

Indeed, it’s thanks to Christianity, that our species wasted fifteen centuries with useless and dangerous cant about “demons” in relation to mental illness. Some morons are still stuck in this Dark Age mindset, as this hideous case demonstrates.

Quite simply, the sort of people responsible for this sort of atrocity, can FOADIAF.

1 Like