Belief in God, Belief in Love

Atheists often say that God is a delusion, but we should love one another. This is inconsistent. The criteria they use to dismiss the existence of God can also be turned against love. The atheist says humans tend to believe in God because it is an evolutionary “trick”—belief in a higher power had some evolutionary advantage in the past that made us believe in something not real. This is also true of love. Atheists say you can’t believe in God because you can’t see Him, but when has anyone ever seen the feeling called love? If someone claims to have felt God personally in their heart, the atheist dismisses this as a trick of evolution, so why isn’t feeling love personally in our heart also a trick of evolution? Why should we discard one illusion—God—but not the other—love? The atheist has no answer.

Is “Love it or Leave it” a valid slogan?

A common argument in favor of capitalism is that competition provides alternatives and therefore disciplines providers of goods and services. That is, if Albertson’s has bad products at bad prices and bad service, you can “just leave” and shop at Safeway. Some extend this logic to the political world and say, “If you don’t like your country’s political products, you can just leave, so don’t complain about your country’s policies or try to change them, instead just find a new country.” In other words, use the “competition” of different nation states and “buy” your political “products” from a competing nation state. This is the logic behind the “love it or leave it” slogan that was so popular among critics of anti-war protestors in the 1960s. This analogy doesn’t work and the “love it or leave it” slogan is incorrect for the following reasons: 1. Prohibitively High Cost: In the market for everyday products, such as groceries, the costs of “just shopping somewhere else” are close to zero—it usually entails just going across the street—while the costs of moving to another country are so high as to be prohibitive. Obviously, the monetary costs of moving to another country are high, but that is nothing compared to the non-monetary costs involved. “Cost,” in the most important sense, means what you give up to take a course of action and here are just a few of the things you are “giving up” in moving to another country: your job, your friends, your family, your spouse and children and grandchildren (unless they agree to come with you and incur all of the costs themselves), your social connections, associational belonging and personal networks, a sense of connection to a place as well as rootedness and heritage, familiarity with a place and its mores, the ability to communicate (if you go to a country that speaks a different language). You’d also have to undergo the costs of selling a home and selling all of your assets. Basically, the costs of moving to a new country are all the costs of hitting “reset” on life. The “plane ticket” cost of immigration is only the tiniest fraction of the actual costs involved. 2. Closed Countries. We don’t live in a world with open borders, so even those willing to “incur” the costs of moving to a new country are still stuck with the problem that the country might not want them. Albertsons keeps its doors wide open for you if you get tired of shopping at Safeway, but Japan does not keep its doors wide open for you if you get tired of living in the United States. 3. Non-Valid Alternative. Third, and finally, immigration usually does not solve the problem: the idea of marketplace competition between countries presumes that there’s another place you like better. We can’t assume there is an ideal society ready to receive us when our society goes in a less ideal direction. If someone doesn’t like the high tax rates in the USA, it’s not a logical response to “just leave” to Canada, because Canada has even higher tax rates. The logical response is to use democratic means to change the tax rates in the USA. So, yes, complaining about tax rates and working to change them is a much better response than the “just leave” response proposed by some people who haven’t thought through the issue.