everybody on ilx complains about reddit

I've simply chosen to live an unexamined life

Cuz Netflix

I like "secular sort of dude"

secularmingle.com

It's funny that saying "I'm an atheist" and "I don't believe in gods" can give much different impressions yet it takes the same amount of energy to say either. And since it doesn't make anything easier in conversation (or even if you'd just like to have the opinion printed on a mug) to call yourself an atheist, you're lumped in with the "atheist movement" with a very set of shared non-beliefs ("ism" doesn't help) just by using the word.

It isn't the fault of the word though, really. People make jokes that there isn't a word for a non-golfer or something, but when subscribing to a belief in gods is such an ingrained aspect of humanity for so long a word to describe the minority category is deserved. The word doesn't exist to describe a church of anti-divine authority activists.

I've considered myself an atheist since I was like 12, why stop now

Just like Christians, Muslims, et. al., there are atheists you can hang out with and there are atheists who doing it wrong.

just like there are people who can write in the English language and then there are people who me.

the thing about any belief (and even a "belief in non-belief" doesn't escape from this) is that once it is asserted it will automatically carry along other beliefs. we are all occupied with securing a coherent system of beliefs which agree with each other. this can be tricky of course since most of us will find, if pressed, that we are incoherent in some respects.

atheism is no different. if you say you dont believe in God you are implicitly endorsing a whole host of other beliefs. you've created a "belief system" and that system will have vulnerabilities.

now, i think there's a particular tradition of atheism which derives from TH Huxley, Robert Ingersoll and those types and has been revived by Hitchens, Dawkins, et al. This is primarily what people are targeting when they criticize atheism today.

you can, of course, say that your atheism doesn't belong to that tradition. I would say this about my own atheism (such as it is). you could be a buddhist atheist! or anything really.

but in my opinion you can't simply say "i don't believe" and leave it at that because that's a very quick way to adopt a whole lot of unexamined assumptions. your beliefs will organize themselves into systems with or without your consent. what bothers me about this "opt out" style of "passive atheism" (i've just coined that word) is that it's bad at examining its own implicit beliefs--whether or not i would agree with those beliefs or not.

reverse-img-srched the persecuted atheist pic

first hit?

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neckbeard‎

the thing about any belief (and even a "belief in non-belief" doesn't escape from this) is that once it is asserted it will automatically carry along other beliefs. we are all occupied with securing a coherent system of beliefs which agree with each other

except for when not

^ expand to fit yr whole post actually

i get the feeling this brand of atheism is like a fundamentalist or authoritarian atheism and can appeal to a certain type of person who has an uncertain or threatened status in society. not unlike the tea party or other movements like that.

when i "went atheist" at 14 i never got caught up in this shit. but the system of beliefs that followed were existential questions and all that hoo ha. i could give a rat's ass if anyone believes in god or not.

my own atheism went the Darwinist route before also becoming quite existentialist. sort of like my own personal mental journey from the mid 19th to mid 20th century.

one thing that annoys me the most about the "atheist movement" is that there's this sneering going on at the lesser mortals whose intellect is not powerful enough to grasp that god does not exist.

but I think, to maybe support what darraghmac says in some sense, that for me religion was inherently a fraught question. it's never been something I could just shake off--so I'm definitely not a "secular dude" in that respect since I see the religious question as a "live question."

ryan do you see this as a live question primarily for existential reasons or because irrespective of its basis, religious faith is a fact about human beings and their world? or some other reason?

one thing that annoys me the most about the "atheist movement" is that there's this sneering going on at the lesser mortals whose intellect is not powerful enough to grasp that god does not exist.

yeah i felt like this about people who could eg do maths better than me too, it does kinda grate doesnt it, oh well, if it's any consolation i'm sure you're very good at religion

i don't think smug superiority is a good pose even if you are the Emperor of Mathsland tbh

I think for me the reasons it remains a live question have shifted over the years. but if there's a common thread I think religion in a very formal sense is sorta the ur-type of a kind of movement that takes us beyond ourselves despite being irreversibly trapped in our own heads. the "beyond within" to use a mystical phrase.

xp i wouldnt necessarily read mordy/dmac intersection on religion as a particularly genuine battle of mortal enemies, idk if that needed saying

i will pray for your soul, dmac

(lol jk we don't pray for souls in judaism yr just fucked!)

voila

nah darragh i wasn't saying you were being smug and superior, i was suggesting that the pose is quite enough to make people take the piss out of a certain kind of proselytising atheist irrespective of personal religious beliefs

i mean on the other hand i have noticed that a benign tolerance and respectful request to disagree doesn't always shoo the Mormons/JWs away from my front door on a Saturday morning at god knows what time

my point was really just that the two axes don't align - i've known smart + dumb atheists and smart + dumb theists. it seems to have no correlation at all.

oh yeah, obv, of anyone of any belief, im not an atheist cos i dislike smug catholics or cos i want to be smug about catholics, tho, i just yknow i dont feel god

well yeah plus i would want to extend "smart" and "dumb" to include things like people skills, rhetoric etc

it seems to have no correlation at all.

there's a huge correlation with what yr dad told you, other than that it's random afaict

http://m.washingtonpost.com/externalimage/image_600w/www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2013/11/masked_rageface-1024x576.jpg

this is a dumb complaint but

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

should be renamed http://www.reddit.com/r/Helpmewriteapaper

thats what I get for thinking I would learn something useful on reddit

xp

my dad (and mum) were much less religiously-inclined than i was as a kid, apart from my dad thinking that the 10 commandments was a top notch moral code. he was actively a bit concerned/piss-takey when i went thru my "interested in reading the bible cos it is a big interesting book" phase

shurely that reddit thing should be "AskSoi-DisantHistorians"??

atheism is no different. if you say you dont believe in God you are implicitly endorsing a whole host of other beliefs. you've created a "belief system" and that system will have vulnerabilities.

What... naturalism?
Like, "the belief in gods is not supported by any evidence" Theist: "that's because the evidence for gods are outside of what you can detect"

strictly speaking, "only certain kinds of beliefs should be regarded as meaningful"

yeh, agnosticism rly covers all the ground you need for asserting that you don't believe in god, once you're claiming atheism you're beginning to construct a more generalised theory of what counts as knowledge.

yeah i use "agnostic" as code for "atheist w/o being weird about it"

For me there are three distinct categories here:

Agnostic theism: I believe in a higher power but I don't know what it is.
Atheism: I don't think there's a god.
Agnostic atheism: I don't believe or not believe in god. Either could be true. Who knows.

As an atheist, my gut feeling is that there isn't a god. That doesn't mean that I can't be wrong, but it's different from agnosticism.

I'm a different type of agnostic theist I think. I don't know if there's a god, and I don't think it's knowledge that can be known, but I choose to believe anyway.

I have a fear that most people think agnosticism means you think god or spirits is kind of a 50/50 chance. For example, I would be conveying a dishonest impression if I said, say, that after you die "who knows what happens". In fact I'm actually pretty gnostic about it.

Maybe it's semantics but I don't think belief is really a choice.

i described myself as atheist Taoist for a while, now i will settle for "shit is complicated" i think

Don't you evaluate ppl's trustworthiness + chose to believe (or disbelieve them) all the time?

I identify as communist

lol i used to do that too, now i identify politically as "shit is complicated"

on fb my religious status is listed as amor fati

yeah i use "agnostic" as code for "atheist w/o being weird about it"

ditto

yeah mordy that's the kind of agnosticism i'm thinking of too, i think. you have the basic principle that knowledge of whether or not there's a god isn't the kind of knowledge we can have, and from there you can go towards some variety of theism or some variety of atheism or some wacky thing in between, or instead you should do what most self-proclaimed atheists should probably do and just decide it's not really a question that interests them so why bother having an opinion on it.

"agnostic" to me just gives too much credit to a belief that I'm pretty confident is astronomically less probable.

xxp that choice for agnosticism seems evidence of a weird set of projected beliefs about what atheism must necessarily be, imo