I used to read Andrew Sullivan for coverage of Bush’s abuses of power, but nowadays, he’s mainly good for really superficial thoughts on religion. His latest is a series of posts on how tragic atheism supposedly is. His readers gave him some nice responses, though I don’t think they get to the heart of the issue: what Sullivan is saying in that exchange is really childish. Observe:

If I may intrude, and ask a question I do not mean to be loaded, just curious: I wonder what Kevin thinks happens to him when he dies? And how does he feel about that – not just emotionally but existentially?

Two preliminary bits of silliness: of course he means the question to be loaded, Sullivan is jumping on the bandwagon of “smart atheists should at least feel bad about being atheists.” And I have no idea what “existentially” means–it conjures up words like “absurdity,” “alienation,” and “angst,” to stick with just the “a”s, but those are all emotional reactions. Of course, they’re negative ones, so maybe the question is “what kind of negative emotional reactions do you have to death?” and the point is that we should all despair over the thought that we might not exist some day.

Have I ever felt a powerful hope that I might be immortal? Yes–in the same daydreaming wish-fulfillment mode where I hope to retire on some tropical island filled with naked women. Outside the religious context, being able to deal with death is part of growing up, and obsession with trying to live forever is the stuff of B-movie megalomaniacs. Sullivan’s posts carried the implication that atheists aren’t dealing with death, but as one of Sullivan’s readers pointed out, religious belief in an afterlife is primarily a way of not dealing with death.

Belief in a perfect God is the same thing on a grander scale. Leibniz reasoned that, since the world was created by a perfect God, it must be the best of all possible worlds. This view has not been widely embraced, but the intellectual objections to it tend to border on being quibbles: there is no unique best of all possible worlds, so creating a very very good world is good enough for God, and don’t you realize that the goodness of the world is evidence for a god? But again, no matter how loudly believers insist that it is unreasonable to expect God to have created a world where fewer people are mercilessly tortured to death, outside the religious context it’s a mark of maturity to realize that the world isn’t even a reasonable facsimile of perfection. It’s also a mark of maturity to learn to deal with that fact.

I’ve remarked before that religious impulses, while extremely common, are also really weird when you think about them. This is another example of this–and in this case, all “thinking about them” has to mean is asking what you’d think about these wishes in any other context.