I think this is getting back on track:
No offense, but I don’t really see how that’s a good answer. Why would a holiday made up of multiple religions be more palatable to an atheist than a holiday from just one? Religion is religion. An atheist would have no more belief in Roman and Celtic deities than in Jesus.
Because atheism is primarily reactive, not philosophical. It’s not the ancient Romans and Celts who are trying to force themselves on us; it’s the Christians. Just as how in practice the only aspect of atheism most believers in our society care about is the part where they don’t believe in the Christian God. That’s why nearly any argument about atheism almost always turns into an argument about why they don’t believe in that specific god (while the believers try to pretend otherwise, usually).
As the OP, this discussion and the unanimity of it has been really interesting. I always thought that atheists had to be materialists by definition, because if they believed in any kind of “woo,” they might as well believe in God, just for the mere acknowledgment of anything outside the bounds of science. If the impossible becomes possible, then anything is possible. If telepathy, then why not God? If crystals, why not FTL travel or fifty foot tall woman who can live and function? To me, it’s all the same woo. What serious, rational, intelligent, sane person would take any of it seriously?
I know many scientists are religious, but if I had two that were completely the same, except one was religious and the other was not, I’d instinctively trust the word and methods of the latter more. Maybe not by much, but significant enough.
Combined with some other discussions I’ve had recently, this has been a lot of food for thought.
I should clarify. My point was that it’s awfully rich for a Christian to complain about culturally appropriating Christmas.
I celebrate secular Christmas because it’s fun. I don’t think I need any other reason.
Religion is in a different category as a social phenomenon. It has big organizations pushing it, parental pressure, societal traditions, etc. Most woo has none of that.
From an epistemological POV, I’m with you: It’s all credulous bunk, period, and a mind that buys any of it is susceptible to all of it.
Sorry- I missed this mod note before I replied.
I won’t hijack anymore.
True, but it’s all still the same magic at its core, just like telepathy and FTL.
Not that I’m a believer in any of that woo, but at least we do know that brains produce brainwaves, and those waves are measurable. One could imagine a being sensitive to those waves being able to get the meaning or feelings or whatever. I can at least conceive of how telepathy could be possible. There is evidence of brainwaves, at least.
There could be aliens with exceedingly long lives so that the travel time between stars, even at sub-light speeds, wouldn’t be significant. A trip to Australia by me takes up an insignificant part of my life, but uses up all of a mayfly’s. Not that I believe that we’re being visited, but I can conceive of how it works. I have evidence of physics revolutions, and different life spans, which together could be evidence that aliens could visit.
People feel as if they have a soul, or some essence, so thinking that essence could live on in the form of a ghost is at least conceivable. I have personal experience of a self, which is evidence of a sort.
Those are all different to me than, say, the Christian God, for Whom there is no evidence, and believers have conflicting claims, etc.
I’m with @Alessan . I think ghosts and ancestor spirits are “small gods”. I think you might believe in, i dunno, telepathy and be a pure atheist. But i don’t think you can believe in brownies and be a pure atheist.
The OP is demanding intellectually perfect consistency from an atheist that we wouldn’t apply to any other belief. For example, if you said you don’t believe in ghosts, would I say that you don’t really not believe in ghosts because you do believe in UFOs or grand conspiracies or telepathy? No, of course not, because you’d say that all that your belief on ghosts says is that you don’t believe in ghosts, it doesn’t give you an absolute perfect credulity or incredulity that says you have to believe in everything or nothing. Why is it that only atheism is something we’ve decided must come with an accompanying set of beliefs of perfect materialistic skepticism? Atheism isn’t any different than a-ghostism or a-leprechaunism, and yet we make demands of it that we wouldn’t make demands of them. Why?
We plainly see in the real world that atheists do not claim and do not display perfect skepticism. Plenty of atheists have woo they believe in. All atheism tells you is your belief on one particular issue.
I think you cannot really have this dilemma unless you have in smuggled assumptions and challenges about “atheism” as a term, group, and philosophy that should not be smuggled in and cannot be justified. That’s the whole crux of this issue and why so much of the content of this thread has been people saying why atheists are mis-attributed, mis-categorized, straw manned, and required to hold perfect intellectual consistency in a way that lack of belief in other supernatural claims are not.
Not even conceivable. We know that brainwaves exist because their signals are picked up by machinery attached directly to the head. Telepathy involves receiving those signals from a distance (and interpreting them) and there isn’t even a hint of a way the human mind could act as a receiver of signals that are not even transmitted over the air in the first place.
My point is, there is evidence of brainwaves, evidence of brains, evidence that brainwaves can be received, at least by a machine. Someone could put that together into believing that some extra sensitive people, more sensitive than the machines, could receive and interpret those waves. And still be an atheist.
There’s no evidence of, say, the Christian God.
So Christians are Hindu atheists?
I don’t think there’s any real sort of philosophical work being done by that statement but just linguistic work based on the ambiguity. Christians are not atheist. Are they atheistic towards a deity they don’t believe in? That’s really an issue of language rather than philosophy – how we phrase it, what exactly we’re defining and declaring - because we all know what it means, it’s just an awkward idea to express in one sentence.
I don’t think denying at least one god while believing in at least one other makes you an atheist in any meaningful sense. It’d be like saying “I’m not a football fan, I’m a manchester united fan” – okay, but that kinda has to mean you’re a football fan, too. Though I recognize this analogy is imperfect. Maybe you really love their logo and the community around the team rather than the actual sport they play – this is actually sort of analogous to the “cultural Jew/Christian” position we were discussing earlier.
The ambiguity is all in the language rather than the concepts" – if you had to pin me down to one specific answer I’d say “as written, no, because ‘Hindu atheist’ is a category error, but it really depends on how exactly we’re defining our terms and using language here”
But I think most of the compression comes down to trying to simplify a concept that needs more explanation rather than a real philosophical tension.
For one thing, I really think that at that point you have to back way up and define what you mean by “god”. I mean a pretty wide range of things by it, but I wouldn’t include either ancestor spirits or brownies. Even as “small gods”.
But for another — I think I’ve already said someplace on these boards that I’m atheist about the TriOmni, but I’m only agnostic about the Small Gods. Maybe some of them are there in the conversations running through the interconnections among the mycelium and the roots.
Let me ask you: what is the difference between taking part in a seance with a medium, and praying in church with a priest? In both cases, you’re trying to commune with an entity that you cannot prove exist, who does not follow the laws of physics, in search of answers or guidance. Both involve an intermediary and rituals, and both only work if you believe. Spiritualism is just less-organized religion. Astrology too - not for nothing does the Hebrew term for “pagan” translate as “worshippers of stars and zodiacs”. It’s all the same thing.
Whether it’s some form of religion probably depends on how you define religion. But it doesn’t necessarily involve anything I’d remotely call a god. If I thought the medium could put me in touch with my mother, that wouldn’t mean that I thought either my mother or the medium was a god.
Atheist has a specific meaning, someone who lacks belief in God or gods. Not someone who lacks belief in ghosts or someone who lacks belief in woo or whatever.
Believing in ghosts is a lot more rational than believing in God if you ask me. Like I said above, I have a real sense of self, a feeling that I have a soul (to be clear, I don’t believe in souls, but that feeling is real). It’s easy enough to imagine that essence surviving death and hanging around.
Ghosts are more believable than God in a big way, and “mentalists” and “mediums” do a good job of faking that communication, which gives people real “evidence” of a sort.
Anyway, someone who doesn’t believe that non-material things don’t exist is a materialist, not (just) an atheist.
Since I brought it up, I’m not sure I understand how a materialist would feel about concepts like hope, love, loyalty, or whatever, that certainly exist but are not material in the way that I understand material.
I agree, which is why we’re discussing what a god is.
And some people feel just as strongly that the universe has a purpose and a guiding hand, and that nothing happens without a reason.
But a ghost isn’t a god. Words have meanings.