Some Personal Cost By Daniel Farrell Essay

Daniel Farrell is a former Catholic who had left the seminary because he stopped believing in God. In his essay, “Life without God: Some Personal Costs,” Daniel Farrell discusses what it means to be an atheist to him and the results of losing his faith in God. He also tries to answer two questions which are “why is the world not enough for some of us” and “what does believing in God do to mitigate this sense of the world’s not being enough on its own?” (63). While reading his essay, one can find connections between his ideas with ideas from Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Daniel Farrell spent six years of his young life in a seminary. At the age of nineteen, Farrell left the seminary because he had stopped believing in God, which resulted

For example, not hurting anyone and treating others fairly comes as what appears to be an objective value for myself, but why? According to Farrell, this is because the society I’ve been raised in (following Christian tradition), says this is objectively good according to god. John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, has interesting ideas on this in the fact that his definition of conscience is defined by what society overall teaches us at its base. However, at the same time I might see smaller issues as subjectively different than what society sees as a whole. I might not advocate consumerism or eating meat, but purely because I choose not to. This creates an interesting discussion in opposition to Farrell’s argument concerning the true value of certain things religion teaches us and our ability to pick and choose beliefs. Perhaps it is not all bad that one follow basic religious beliefs as they seem to lead to a point society is comfortable with, but at the same time as Farrell seems to say it is extremely important to have subjective values and feelings rather than just blindly following what “advisers” and religion tell us to do, lest we end up in the seminary for six years and ultimately decide it is not for