Caitlin Moran and her waffle chops.

Yellowhammer is on the look out for bad logic - see other critical thinking articles on this blog.

Caitlin Moran [too easy to distort the surname so I wont stoop] 

Feminist Author and general  know-it-all - gives a perfect example of many fallacies at once - problem is Im not quite sure which is dominant - help me out if you can !

begging the question , Fallacy of false cause, hasty generalization, affirming the consequent, denying the antecendent, straw man, cause and effect assumption ....:

".. believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilising mental illness. ....Only when the majority of people on this planet believe - absolutely - that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings...."

full passage

[http://fuckyeahcaitlinmoran.tumblr.com/post/20173885752/but-believing-in-an-afterlife-totally-negates-your]

Surely it is because of man's capacity for understanding one's own mortality that afterlife works as a concept in the first place.   ie it is because we realise we are going to die that the afterlife is useful to help us consider how to live well.   

To build Heaven on earth used to be one of the foundations for utopian thought - heck, Belinda Carlisle even wrote a song about it - so imagining perfection gives one a template of what end result to aim for here.

Unlike many/all other animals, we learn very early on that death is inevitable. 

Coping with that is quite traumatic for our species!  Denial of ones mortality is of course a problem, that could lead to complacency.

---But that is not to say that believing or not believing in an afterlife is the cause of complacency.  

The afterlife surely could be considered a place of comfort after a hard life of trying to do the right thing.  Some even would think it a reward for being moral. Some will be scared and thus prevented from wrongdoing - or atleast that was the Catholic churches intention at one point in history. Caitlin assumes that those believing in an afterlife do so to get them out of problems in this one, rather than an incentive.

Take some of those with a belief system including an afterlife -  Mother theresa, Ghandi etc- they all got things done because of their faiths  - would they be considered mentally ill ???? How rude.
Plenty of people who do not believe in an afterlife can be cruel and useless - take chairman mao.  This is not to say they have realised they are going to die though.

For those who have no where to go after this life then longevity becomes the key focus of purpose potentially.  This is one of the biggest mental problems modern society faces. 

A lack of logical thought and analysis is in my book a dangerous form of 'mental illness', yet she accuses those with an imagination and belief in more than the material of that very thing.

Everyone in the world is never going to believe the same thing and nor should they so it is pointless ranting about Everyone being something one person wants. Everyone in history who has tried that trips up, as in my opinion it's more how you reconcile the differences that counts, not being 'right'.

There's probably a few fallacies in my counter arguments - and of course she can write what she wants in her own book - but it behooves any author writing a book to sell, knowing young women are following every word, to go through it with a fine tooth comb.

Im sure female emancipation didn't simply mean having the right to be as flaky as some of the men out there. [eg. that means you, Dawkins]

Comments welcome as ever. 

And a final musing from Voltaire:

"If God did not exist it would be necessary for man to invent him"

The same could be applied to an afterlife generally.