Another Comment

As I have mentioned, I used to overlook the obvious problems that materialism poses for free will, inherent rights, equality, and morality, out of a clearly misplaced hope of leftist solidarity, hoping that the greater good would provide "some new equation" - to steal from Emily Dickenson.  But that was only putting off the problem.

Added to that, the exigencies of preventing a nuclear extinction motivated by the struggle between capitalism and the pseudo-socialist regimes and keeping the United States out of third-world wars to prop up anti-communist despots, as well as giving material to domestic fascists, led to pretending that the results of materialism as a political ideology weren't horrific, massive and clearly visible.

And now, as I read Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, etc. I see that the moral and political defects of materialism are gaining currency among the pseudo-left and available for the use of those same domestic reactionaries.  There isn't much of a difference between the two.

Well, looking at history just during my lifetime makes me more confident than ever that the metaphysical bases of liberalism are true and essential for survival and a decent life and that those are incompatible with an ideological system that starts off denying that those can be real. The choice to believe in those metaphysical bases informed by experience and history, is a far more rational act than the willful assertion that they are impossible.  Looking at the most thinly veiled nihilism being preached in the last years of the 20th and first years of the 21st centuries,  the refusal to take the lessons of recent history is one of the most irrational, selfish and irresponsible acts possible among an alleged intelligentsia.

I'm a gay, socialist leveler.  I will not acquiesce to a shoddy, threadbare, pseudo-scientific ideology that denies the superior information from the real world about human societies and life that history provides,  on behalf of scientistic hubris.  It is an entirely irrational act to deny that information consisting of piles of bodies, lakes of blood and hundreds of millions of enslaved and degraded lives.