are you an atheist?

in a long discussion about this a few years ago i realized why i have trouble calling myself "an atheist": it's not because my views on the limited question of "do you believe in god" are at odds with atheism, it's because i don't think that limited question is really very interesting. i have trouble identifying myself with a label that mostly just says what i don't believe, and nothing at all about what i do believe. i'm not any kind of theist at all, a- or otherwise. i mean, there are lots of things i don't believe in, but i don't go around calling myself an a-unicornist or whatever. whether there's a higher intelligence, a supernatural force, a judgmental deity handing out gold stars or damnation, none of those things intrigue me. i think scientific and philosophical questions are much more rewarding and challenging than specifically religious questions. microbiology, astronomy, theoretical physics, ethics, those things are fascinating to me. "does god exist," not so much.

yeah but who goes around introducing themselves as "hi I'm an atheist!"? the word only arises in a conversation about whether you believe in God or not

yeah but who goes around introducing themselves as "hi I'm an atheist!"?

surprising number of sex-starved libertarian truthers

I don't like Hawkins' militantism -- it ought to be a big tent and basically if on some level you appreciate there's BS going on then I feel you can ride the atheist train.

xpost

yeah I meant to elaborate that as "what sort of civilized human being introduces themselves as etc etc"

After reading William James, I can't help but feel like human beings lose a lot of really incredible phenomenological experiences by ditching this long historically embedded way of interacting with each other and the world (through spirituality/religion/etc). That said, if you make your religious/emotional decisions intellectually instead of emotionally, losing something like that might feel less important to you. But for me, since it intellectually seems like a wash (along the lines of tipsy, I just don't see the value of arguing about whether God exists), I make my decision using an emotional topography. Does it give me rituals and ways of understanding things like marriage, life, death, community, etc to believe in God? And in my case it does -- I love reading the Bible for archetypes + ways of being in the world. That doesn't mean that I feel compelled to follow strict religious jurisprudence, but more like it means more to me to learn about the individual and community from reading about Joseph in Egypt than it does to read about Antigone + Creon (tho I love reading both). And it helps me understand where I came from, and who my ancestors and people are and what they believed, and keeps me in touch with a broad history of common human experiences.

nb I'm the guy on the conspiracy theory thread who said he loves conspiracy theories because they seem to be a really important part of the human experience. So YMMV.

whether there's a higher intelligence, a supernatural force, a judgmental deity handing out gold stars or damnation, none of those things intrigue me

I don't really understand this. If you thought there might be a grain of truth in any of it, I couldn't imagine anything more intriguing. Even as a study of historical/cultural behaviours/philosophies/traditions, religion is a helluva subject. So are hobbits, though.

well for one thing how could you really grasp conceptually an intelligence greater than yr own...? defies logic in many ways

there is no overarching consciousness controlling it all.

To me, this is like denying your own role in the perception & creation of this quantum dance of energy we call reality.

― Adam Bruneau, Monday, 7 June 2010 16:39 (54 minutes ago) Bookmark

I don't see that- it's a denial that the dance is being directed. It's a moshpit, not a waltz.

You can't have either a waltz or a moshpit without music. The music in this case being your own consciousness, combinations of materialist subjectivity, ages-old cell-embedded psychological history, the effects of planetary/solar/astronomical gravity & radiation, and the constant influence of unseen dark matter, particles & waves that are too extreme to be detected by current scientific instruments.

I think the idea that YOU are the one directing the dance is not incompatible with the idea of an infinite and eternal consciousness creating the universe. In fact they are both, on some level, the same thing.

"ditching this long historically embedded way of interacting with each other and the world (through spirituality/religion/etc)"
but atheism is a part of this tradition, too. if you re-read chronicles of jesus with jesus-as-atheist in mind, it makes for a richer reading.

bruneau u crazy

Even if you can somehow create a secret history of atheist-Jesus, the fact still remains that much of human history involves participation in religion, religious experience/sentiment/affect etc. Even if there's members of human history who never really bought into it.

I can never, ever dig the "you create your own reality" scene. Part of this is just having known too many ultra-jerks who were into Seth Speaks/Jane Roberts, including that most formative of people, the high school boyfriend.

It's so solipsistic.

re: secret agent jesus, You don't have to construct a secret atheist backstory -- just reread the gospels with the idea that these are the actions of an atheist seeking to break apart orthodoxy.

I believe there are ways to deal with the world even if you've jettisoned ritual, but there's nothing that more details the feelings of loneliness and sadness than covering up your mirrors, taking off your shoes, and sitting on the ground when a loved one dies. Tearing your shirt when you first find out. Having all your friends and family visit you for a week to share with you about the dead and talk about life and remember things with you. Like that completely captures the experience of dealing with this horrifying and frightening experience of dying that I don't know how I'd understand if I didn't have that ritual to grab onto. Or every Saturday having friends come to a table together to sit down and eat bread and talk about the world and the things that are bothering us and tell over stories that we heard from our parents and grandparents -- these traditions are really important to me, and often the presence of God never even matters in light of the presence of the other human beings.

Seth Speaks/Jane Roberts

? never heard of this. off to google I guess...

my only real problem with the "you create your own reality scene" is just that, damn, pretty sure I could come up with a better, less depressing reality than this one. like, it's true on some levels and def. a trip to think about, but on the crude material plane you still have to deal with shit like gravity and other people and death and the passage of time and stuff like that.

xp to Philip about atheist jesus -- I don't know the Gospels as well as I know the Old Testament/Prophets, but it seems pretty clear to me that a simple reading of them requires God-believing Jesus. If for nothing else than comments like, "No one comes to the father but through me," and historically situating him requires putting him in an era where true atheism would be an anachronism.

One of my problems with it is they* say you literally choose everything, like if you got raped, you 'chose' for that to happen on an unconscious level, or if an earthquake kills 8,000 in Guatemala, all 8,000 of those Guatemalans simultaneously 'chose' to die. Not that I'm saying anyone here is espousing that.

*they = say, Jane Roberts again, or the people in the "What the Bleep movie," those type of hardline New Agers

(sorry for interrupting this other secret Jesus conversation)

Magical thinking is totally bogus imo. Not just intellectually, but emotionally it feels very false to me. The world doesn't feel like I can just choose to have whatever happen happen. And a lot of my experience in life is figuring out how I can make things work, and get things done, using the limited power and influence I have. Why would I abandon a way of looking at the world that gets things done for me, and that gibes with my gut feelings about how things are, for a system that promises much more but ultimately feels much emptier of meaning? I want a world where tragedies are capricious and mysterious and where I can't always control everything. I don't want a world where I ask the Universe for a cadillac and then try to figure out why my asking wasn't powerful enough to get it (or how I might be secretly undermining myself). Just too utilitarian an approach (and then on top of that, it kinda seems intellectually insane).

Okay maybe I mis-used the term. The world doesn't feel like I can just choose to have whatever happen happen. is not at all what I meant by "magical thinking." And congratulations for making me look it up, because I didn't know it was a specific "thing" and I will now have to stop using it at all, ever.

I just meant the idea that there are things beyond one's ken, a sense of fitness in the existent Universe, that there is a way things should work together that is more than cold logic. I need some poetry and some mystery, you know?

Oh yeah. I agree with that. The world is a confusing, mysterious place!

(Laurel = Bruneau, I'm assuming?)

How dare you.

Laurel's not saying "you create your own reality"!

afaik

Oh, sorry. Didn't see that you were continuing something you were discussing an hour ago. My bad!

"pretty clear to me that a simple reading of them requires God-believing Jesus."
It's not "unreliable narrator" that I'm suggesting, but something close to it, like sloppy journalism? Where you can see that a quoted person has a different agenda that what the reporter thinks -- like when that fake yoyo guy punked those TV morning shows, or when Dishwasher Pete sent his friend posing as him to the Letterman show.
If you read it that way, things like "No one comes to the father but through me" can be read as a rejection of the rituals and dogma of prior religions with an emphasis on fairly religion-neutral set of desired behavior and ethics.

Is this like imagining Ferris Bueller's Day Off happened only in Cameron's mind?

Nope I'm not Laurel.

One of my problems with it is they* say you literally choose everything, like if you got raped, you 'chose' for that to happen on an unconscious level, or if an earthquake kills 8,000 in Guatemala, all 8,000 of those Guatemalans simultaneously 'chose' to die. Not that I'm saying anyone here is espousing that.

I don't see how any of those things listed above are impossible. Also instead of saying 8,000 Guatemalans 'chose' to die, what if you simply 'chose' to see a news report on it.

Ok, I'm not going to have a conversation about this. I'll just end up saying shit I regret.

Is this like imagining Ferris Bueller's Day Off happened only in Cameron's mind?

^This is really funny tho!

They both seem like things that are fun to talk about after a few drinks, but I don't think either interpretation (Christ as atheist, Cameron as saddo hallicnator) holds up in context.

hallucinator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAB-1M1ZeYE

I'm w/ Abbott on this, tho even after a few drinks (or lol, other conversation enhancing devices) I'd rather to talk about something else :P

for real

I do believe that we all constitute the universe 'participating in itself' and I do believe in some kind of all-mind but i also believe in solids i.e. a rock is a fukkin rock.

(my answer to thread q is 'no'.)

xp Adam, I agree with you that reality is a slippery creature, and each of us constucts his or her version of reality according to a complex stew of (internal) cultural/psychological factors and (external) physical/chemical stimuli. But it's wrong IMO to make the jump into assuming that all reality is formed by individual, or even collective "choice" - ie those Guatemalans did not choose to die, on any fucking level.

There is the Spinozian pantheism, where everything in the Universe is all a part of God, and then this Chassidic/Kabbalistic panantheism, where God is both everything and above everything. According to some Chassidic explanations, the highest level of the human soul is Yichud, which is this level of total unity where difference/exception doesn't exist, and comes from a high level of Godliness. So there have been historical interpretations that a human being is actually God being played out in this world, but is just an extension of this higher form -- the analogy is that we're all monopoly pieces being moved around by one player, but we all think that we are moving ourselves. (But the better analogy is that the monopoly pieces move themselves around the board and simultaneously the player moves them around the board, because they are both moving with the same consciousness and will.) This is also, secretly (lol), the Chassidic way of dealing with free-will and determinism.

Wasn't Einstein saying he believed in Spinoza's god a polite way of saying he was an atheist?

There's a lot of scholarship on what Spinoza believed exactly, but I think it seems clear Einstein believed in some form of the divine, just not a personal god.

jeez I really need to read Spinoza, don't know how I've gone this long avoiding it

Einstein was definitely not an atheist

Spinoza is super important, and next to Abraham Joshua Heschel (and Shneur Zalman of Liadi), is the most formative theologian in terms of creating my own feelings about God + Judaism.

I'm aware of him, read plenty of stuff that references him, but for some reason never gone to the source. To the library!

"Einstein was definitely not an atheist"

I will trade you Bill Maher for Einstein. Well, basically you can have Bill Maher for free. But we are very interested in Einstein playing for our team.

Who in their right mind would want Bill Maher on their team?

Wow so it sounds like I might be a Spinozian Pantheist!!!