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NancyLebovitz comments on The Meaning of Life - Less Wrong
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Is the hole really biological? I was raised in an atheist family and never took religion as a serious possibility. It may be the reason that the phrases "meaning of life" and "purpose of life" were almost incomprehensible to me. Any suggestions that "meaning of life is X" I have interpreted as "you shouldn't just enjoy your life, since you must do X", and I have always felt quite strong negative emotions when the topic was discussed (which wasn't too often, fortunately).
Of course, my anecdote doesn't disprove the general existence of a biological god-shaped hole, but it would be good to investigate how much atheists who are not interested in philosophy really consider the question of "meaning of life" as meaningful or important.
Not all human cultures include a triple-omni God, so far as I know. Some have gods, possibly with a remote Creator behind them that (I think) doesn't generally interact with people.
I'm tentative about metaphysics, not just because I haven't studied religions in detail, but because it's not easy to get at the background beliefs of people from your own culture when you're talking with them, so I assume that there's going to be much more guesswork about people from more distant cultures or when there's only texts and art to make deductions from.
Even if the triple-omni God had to be invented, the popularity of religions which include one suggests that there's a strong want for one even if it isn't a biological need.
Maybe it is only a desire for perfection and inability to cope with infinities, not particularly concerned with god? All scales have something at the top, and for goodness, power and wisdom, the top rank is occupied by god, by coincidence. You know, the logic of Aquinas' fourth argument.
I have a strange tautological feeling from the statement, which I am probably not able to formulate precisely at the moment, but let me try. If the need isn't biological, then it had to be memetic, which may, or may not depend on religion. Since not all cultures have invented an omnimax god, the memetic structure which creates the need is probably dependent on having the omnigod religion, or alternatively said, it is the religion itself. So, your statement in principle reduces to "omnimax-god religions are self-propagating/memetically successful", which is a statement about the religions, not about the mind itself. If it had to be interpreted as a statement about the mind, then one could say "the mind is vulnerable to special type of religions", but doesn't that postulate a biological need, if any?
(I apologise for being a nitpicking theologist-like sophist here, but sometimes I can't resist. I still haven't decided whether a notion of a non-biological god-shaped hole makes even sense, so I want to start discussion which can clarify it a bit.)
No apology needed. If what I'm saying seems vague, it may be because it is vague.
I'm not sure what counts as a biological need. Do people have a television-shaped hole?
The whole thing is very weird for me, possibly because I don't have a God-shaped hole.
I've just been reading somewhat by people who hate a great deal of what the Catholic Church is doing, but they're still Catholics because they can't imagine being anything else. And these are smart people.
Perhaps they do. But more likely the adoption of the "God-hole" term is a mistake. Adoption of concepts made by theists is a mistake relatively often.
I don't think the human psyche has a "god-shaped hole", but I do think there are a bunch of other things people need which religions provide, including weekly community gatherings (services), an inducement to concretely specify desires (prayer), a person to talk to about sensitive topics confidentially (confession), and a moral framework. All of these can be had elsewhere, but lacking any one of these is a big deal and non-religious people often end up missing one.
The way I've seen it phrased here before is that people do not have a god-shaped hole, rather they have a hole-shaped god.
A very important (and often overlooked) one is a setting in which it is socially acceptable to express strong positive emotions and very high levels of enthusiasm.