This post right here, the content is the exact kind of thing that drove me to rethink the things I believed and forced me to be a skeptic. The reasoning has no credible center.
"Accept your lot it will all be okay in the next life/lives" always struck me as transparently self serving.
I strongly agree. There are so many moral pitfalls in the "long view" argument that I really don't know where to begin. Or to end, so that this remains concise enough to read.
Most importantly, Scorpion's homemade religion seems to borrow incompatible tidbits from various movements and traditions without any interest in reconciling them. Scorpion alluded to dharmic traditions in the post Axxman300 answered. Dharmic animism is entirely incompatible with spiritualism that offers spirit guides, mediums, and necromancy. This is why the doctrines Scorpion comes up with flip-flop between incompatible positions. In the dharmic traditions, the essence of life is not individualized. The enlightenment achieved by repeated incarnation is to merge with the Brahman. And since the Brahman is undifferentiated goo, that's where the notion comes from that one's individualism becomes less relevant as it goes. In fact, the animism in dharmic faiths does not involve individualized spirits. That's how the spirits of past tulkus can be split and reincarnated in multiple successors.
In contrast, all the meidumship claims require highly individualized spirits. Grief predation presumes the spirit of the departed is still the same person she was in life. The appeal of the medium is the story that grandma is in a happier place, free from pain, and thinking fondly of the people she left behind. No one wants to hear that grandma got poured into a homogeneous vat of spirit-goo. Or that she got broken up to incarnate both a trust-fund baby in Malibu and the unwanted child of a prostitute in South Africa. And the spirit-guide claims don't work unless the guide is a character with a compelling backstory -- an Indian shaman or a little Victorian girl. Mediumship simply doesn't work with the dharmic animism model, and no amount of desperate theorizing about karmic daemons patches the plot holes.
A hybrid between dharmic reincarnation and Abrahamically individualized souls raises the issue of individualized justice. Now you have this ongoing cycle of life that simply isn't going to turn out well for everyone for reasons that have nothing to do with their wishes, abilities, or actions. Yet, the dharma initiative (sorry) demands progression. Hence some platonic deity that keeps order and ensures justice. It has to be a fair system, because how else can it be morally superior to atheism? Even worse, when the unfolding of events makes us rightly question the wisdom and justice of the deity, the claimants just redefine justice. The deity is so much more profoundly wise than we that we just can't see how tragedy and horror are really somehow good justice. Or, as we've seen, we just defer all the moral questions.
Those who advocate the "longer" view fancy themselves to be deep, enlightened thinkers because they embrace more than what is immediately visible. Oh, the silly atheists and their limited, closed-minded ways of thinking! But as the examples posted by others show, all this does is defer moral responsibility to a later time and place it upon another party. And it creates problems for the present life. Is the person you see suffering working off karma? Or is she suffering needlessly now, to be recompensed later? Moral rectitude in this system is defined not by the effects of conduct upon others, but some simplistic dicta of inherent worth. To correct the obvious moral hazard, the deity is shorn of his prior omnipotence. But this just flips it back to the dharmic model, which doesn't care about redress for individuals.
No, atheism doesn't pretend that the universe is fair. It doesn't even promise that it can be made fair. What atheism tells us is that the only justice we will enjoy is what we make. And the process of making it is how we progress, both as individuals and as a species. it isn't by blindly following circus sideshows or bored housewives who pretend they can talk to dead shamans. If we understand that war is horrible in the short term, only then are we properly motivated to to avoid it in the short term. It is precisely because we cannot do anything to remit the tragedy of a child murder victim that we must take judicious steps to prevent it.
