are you an atheist?

I'm a big fan of the Bart Ehrman theory that Jesus was an apocalypticist Jewish rabbi that believed he was living in the End Times, and all of the nonsense about Heaven and Hell and most of what we know as today's Christianity came from future followers who had to bend over backwards to explain why the prophecy of the new "Kingdom on Earth" wasn't fulfilled.

but hell even without that, I see no evidence of the Judeo-Christian God in my own life (though haven't thought much about any other type of spiritual presence).

the worst thing about the yay-science atheist books is how fucking excited they seem to be about bleak shit, like the vast scale of the cosmos that renders human life less than insignificant or worst of all the fact that humans evolved due to evolution. of course i believe what they believe, but i don't think it's anything to celebrate, at least not as unequivocally as dawkins seems to.

lol "evolved due to evolution." but yeah, natural selection is kind of a brutal, amoral process and its not flattering to our conception of ourselves as ethical subjects and this is a real problem for people. it's not that they just don't get how cool it is.

I do hate smug and cloying atheists, but I actually find the lack of a clear, defined collective purpose to our existence to be more fulfilling and exciting than the idea of having to adhere to some rigid dogma. like some folks would ask me "isn't that sad, to think that we're here for no reason and that everything happens for no reason", and like, I don't think that at all. I've always felt like it was my job to figure out my individual purposes in life, and that they don't have to be some static thing.

(spoken as someone whose mind was almost wrecked by a Fundamentalist church in his late teens).

i think any version/vision of evolution is no less bleak than the notion of a creator who allows/compels vast swathes of its creation to damn themselves or condemn themselves to oblivion

All that shit is awesome, go get a teddy if u need comforting

xp neanderthal, i feel like that most of the time, but not when i am close to losing someone close to me. i think at the moments before death i am going to wish i remained catholic... i am not really unequivocally against all forms of catholicism and think my mom and grandfather had principled religious beliefs even if the institution of the church is not something i can get with.

although i also totally get the idea that i wouldn't want to worship any creator who would create a world with as much pain as our world has. but still, that's an intellectual position and it doesn't do much for the person in crisis who feels like they need something to hold onto.

Any ideas as to why this tendency to see atheism - agnosticism - theism as existing along a spectrum has persisted? Can't say I've met anybody who's belief (or lack thereof) has actually functioned in that way. There doesn't seem to be any system of classification that succeeds in splitting the difference where knowledge and belief are concerned.

the thing is that most religions broadly defined arent about validating your sense of yourself as a "subject" or individual and they sure as shit aren't about giving "meaning" to your own myopic existence. they are more often about trying to understand the universe/god on its own terms. they're pretty much the opposite of individualism! the idea that religion = i am a special snowflake is a relatively new idea, i think.

atheism isn't even necessarily opposed to a form of religion that pushes back against the individual self, but i think as atheism as currently practiced is pretty much an extension of individualism/selfhood/etc.

or mine is, at least. I dunno, years of being in a fundie church really fucked with me. I'd worry I was going to hell cuz I liked "Reign in Blood". We had green workbooks which contained such lovely logic as "Good people could not have written the Bible because they'd be lying (good people never lie, amirite?). Bad people couldn't have written the Bible cos then they'd be condemning themselves. Therefore, the Bible is a divine work.". I wrote so many criticisms in the margins of the workbook that the group leader pulled me aside to see if I wanted to talk about it.

Nice people, but really stunted my intellectual growth. I don't have quibbles w/ religious folk in general, I don't like to shit on other people's beliefs, but fundies are a whole other ball of wax. And sadly, in FL, we have a lot of them (and also a lot of these "best of all worlds" Unitarian churches).

they sure as shit aren't about giving "meaning" to your own myopic existence

Yeah, gonna call BS on that. Whether through dogma-influenced invoking of Jesus to save your personal soul or church-based community charity work or even the ultimate evil fundamentalist imperialist us-vs-them drama, pretty much everything involved with your broadly defined religion provides meaning to the people involved.

Fundamentalist Christianity doesn't do itself many favors by using 'sheep' and 'flock' language and all, but social systems providing individual meaning while simultaneously oppressing selfhood is IN NO WAY limited to religious organizations.

The ppl choosing to remain involved, you mean i think?

I am not aware of any mainstream religious tradition that claims to secure meaning in-and-through a personal self. a "soul," id argue is quite different, particularly as it comes down from Socrates/Plato.

things get more complicated with Protestantism ("sole fide" and all that) but in its early forms it drew a strict line between individual religious experience of faith and any access it may have to a grounding in a larger religious truth. (Jonathan Edwards' "Treatise on Religious Affections" is the masterpiece of this sort of thing.)

i've always liked Jacobi's famous line “God is, and is outside me, a living, self-subsisting being, or I am God. There is no third.” even though it is, of course, quite extreme and reductive, i think it gets at quite a double bind faced by modernity. incidentally the second option is how he defined "nihilism."

Jacobi's big misstep came with his blithe assumption that "me" and "I" are definable.

ryan, mainstream religious traditions in their early incarnations might have been interested in describing the universe "on its own terms", but they certainly gave humanity, and human moral life, a central place in that universe. the idea of a god who loves individuals personally might be new, but the notion that our individual actions have cosmic significance is old. i realize that the latter seems stressful and undesirable to us, but still, i get why certain people aren't willing to let go of that paradigm, and i also see why it can help people feel more at peace with death.

the notion that our individual actions have cosmic significance is old

what im trying to say is that there is a difference between an individual life having meaning because it is individual as opposed to to because it part of some cosmic/divine narrative or hierarchy. that's an important distinction, imo, and it's one that gets lost in the current ethos of "you're special/meaingful because you're unique." by contrast, what is of value to me in the religious tradition is the "you're special/meaningful insofar as you're part of a larger picture that goes way beyond you."

so i want to agree, but only to the extent that "our individual actions have cosmic significance" insofar as they aren't significant because they're individual but quite the opposite!

so im saying religious traditions do provide a means, and have historically done so, for evading the modern supposition that individuality is meaningful qua individuality.

Can you give an example of any social organization that says individuals are significant because they are individual? Any clubs or subcultures or cults or companies or sports or anything ... Because "you're special/meaningful insofar as you're part of a larger picture that goes way beyond you" doesn't seem to be something strictly limited to religion but built into pretty much any social/cultural system.

Funny enough, the idea that our individuality derives meaning being part of a larger picture seems to be a big theme among atheist/agnostic/materialists.

adam do you think hitler's relation to atheism is relevant here?

you could start here: http://www.amazon.com/Political-Theory-Possessive-Individualism-Wynford/dp/0195444019/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382913201&sr=1-1&keywords=possessive+individualism

there's also stuff like a nietzchean "will to power" (meaning derives in and through the individual) or even Heidegger's "being towards death" (every death is singuar/unique, "my" death).

but you're also right, in that there's an enduring tension in something like the atheistic movement due to the fact that atheism is evolving into some kind of communitarian ethos. i actually think earlier atheistic movements, like existentialism, probably grappled with this issue more directly.

that's the thing about "individualist" philosophies though, they're basically inherently paradoxical. Derrida's critique of Heidegger's early attempt to ground the singularity of Dasein in "being towards death" basically boils down to noting that, well, everybody is being-towards-death--so the very means of singularity is in fact also the very thing that is the most universal irrespective of particularities.

Can you give an example of any social organization that says individuals are significant because they are individual?

america

Also the no god thing

Can you give an example of any social organization that says individuals are significant because they are individual?

This is very close to the defining feature of Objectivism.

why do i have this thread bookmarked?!

maybe you're waiting for the answer to the thread title?

maybe.

I kind of wonder if perhaps the reason I made a smooth transition to agnosticism and later, atheism, after temporarily being a Fundamentalist in high school, was because I wasn't raised in a strict religious household? We went to church and all, but neither parent forced it on me, and acknowledged its shortcomings (Hell, my father didn't really care for organized religion). Though perhaps it was also due to my rational mind clashing with the stunted logic of the Fundie church - the four years (!!!) I spent there largely warped my brain, sent me into constant Hell-induced panic attacks. It was probably easier to let go because Xtianity wasn't presented to me in childhood as the "default" option, so there was none of that false-binary bullshit (ie "Xtianity is" or "Nothing is").

what also contributed was a few tragedies I indirectly witnessed. Like a heartbreaking tragedy a few years back when a theatre friend of mine and his wife lost their daughter, who was not even one year old, due to not previously diagnosed health complications. just seeing everybody's post after the child tragically died, despite their 'prayer chains', their candlelight vigils, etc, posts like "we know Jesus was always in control and this is what he wanted". Like, I don't want to shit on anybody's belief system (and I didn't, just offered support to them), but it was kind of disgusting to me how the tragedy erupted into Jesus-cheerleading among his friends. Yes! This is what he wanted! Sorry your baby died and I didn't get back to you, I just really need her to help me put up some wallpaper in Heaven!

while skimming i only read the first & last sentence of ^ post and it was hilarious. recommended.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/is-atheism-irrational/

H8 theists, such arrogance!

Wow, sure glad they got a Christian to clear that up for me, it was all so obvious.

AP: One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.

It always comes down to the anthropic principle, doesn't it?

Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.

I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.

Yay, ritual filicide! Nothing evil about that.

In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Even that cloying blowhard Dawkins considers himself an agnostic.

no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

This is a really poor analogy for god/no god

a very clever sophist, this guy

He takes the position that a belief in god is the rational default and any flaw in the atheist argument results in the default position prevailing. That's not a very impressive trick. It's the sort of thing high school debating teams indulge in.

Also he apparently believes in a cartoon God that can only do good, so he may as well be talking about Santa Claus rather than anything beyond the scope of human experience.

This is a really poor analogy for god/no god

Agreed. I think if you put the even/odd number of stars analogy on one end of the spectrum and the teapot-orbiting-the-sun analogy at the other end, the best analogy would probably lie somewhere in between.

I think it's more like a teapot orbiting alpha centauri. I can't really know that there aren't tea-drinking intelligent life forms on some planet near alpha centauri who shoot pointless things into space for their own amusement.

(or if there's some good reason to believe there's no life at all near alpha centauri, then just pick a further-flung star)

you also can't really win the argument the way he sets up the rules, because without a clear definition of what god is, how can you point to evidence of its absence?

I just like that Mr. Sophist does not even consider the possibility of a spontaneously-arisen orbiting teapot.

I think his definition of God is pretty much the traditional definition from Christian theology, which is why the existence of evil is a problem for him. He pretty clearly wants to defend the possibility of that type of God existing- he doesn't seem to be making an effort to start purely from the evidence and try to come up with the best-guess model based on that.

xp

For me a better analogy is something like: Do right and wrong objectively exist? I.e., something that will probably never be resolved by science.

That would be a good analogy if he were arguing honestly