It means that you don’t believe in a specific brand of claptrap. It doesn’t mean that you don’t think the world is run by telepathic Communist lizard people from the interior of the Hollow Earth; it just means you don’t believe in gods.
That doesn’t really address my argument for two reasons.
First, you wrote “can” instead of “do”. It is reasonable to assume a person wearing a wedding ring is not interested in dating. If you wear a wedding ring, can you go out on dates? Of course you can. But I reasonably assume you are spoken for.
Second, collecting stamps has nothing to do with collecting coffee mugs. Just because a person collects stamps says nothing about whether that person collects coffee mugs. Beliefs about ancestor spirits existing/receiving offerings/influencing the world are traditionally dependent on theistic beliefs. The beliefs are adjacent. Collecting stamps has no relation to collecting coffee mugs, to my knowledge. The practices are neither beleifs nor adjacent. Therefore, the stamp/coffee mug analogy is disanalogous to asking whether a Chinese person of who disclaims belief in gods likely believes ancestor spirits exist/receive offerings/influence the world.
~Max
An atheist is someone who lacks belief in God. It could be because they reasoned their way to that position, but it also could be that they were just brought up without religion.
Someone brought up without religion probably doesn’t know about ancestor spirits either. I certainly don’t know anything about Chinese religions and I lack belief in those gods or ghosts or whatever.
I’m not sure what your point is. Someone who lacks belief in God might still believe in ghosts. They could believe their ancestors are watching over them if they were brought up in that culture, but I guess they wouldn’t believe the ancestors were communing with God on their behalf.
This seems so simple to me, but I’m obviously not making myself clear.
On the stamp collecting analogy, being an atheist only tells you one thing about a person - they lack belief in God. They don’t have to have anything else in common with other atheists, just like people who don’t collect stamps only have that in common with others who don’t collect stamps. There’s nothing else you can imply about them.
Like I said, I was brought up with no religion, it just wasn’t part of my life. We celebrated religious holidays in a secular way. So, I didn’t have to derive my lack of belief from first principles, or reject some belief that was instilled in me. I never had any belief.
Okay, let’s approach this another way.
Someone tells you they don’t believe in ghosts.
Do you think their non-belief in ghosts is insincere or inconsistent if they believe in demons, alien UFOs abducting people, flat earth, or homeopathy? If not, why not? Why does atheism require perfect skepticism but not believing in ghosts (let’s call it a-ghostism) does not?
I’d take it to mean that they don’t believe in ghosts, period. Nothing else. Just like if someone else told me they didn’t believe in gods. I wouldn’t presume either was an atheist, though.
Isn’t that the very definition of atheist? “I don’t believe in gods, but I’m not an atheist” doesn’t make sense to me. What definition are you using?
I think, on this board, it’s typically defined as lacking a belief in God or gods.
That question seems to be what this whole thread’s about. My position that someone who says, “The universe has a plan for us” or “The spirits of my ancestors will guide me” or something like that, may not believe in God or gods, strictly speaking, but still isn’t an atheist. Even an innocent statement like “Everything happens for a reason” is disqualifying to me, as for there to be a reason, there has to be a reasoner.
That is not my impression of what this thread is about. The OP seem to assume that atheists are always extremely rational for some reason, and so wouldn’t believe in “ghosts, telekinesis, souls, etc.” No mention of these weird edge cases, where some belief may also imply a belief in god.
@Leaper, what definition of atheist did you have in mind?
My basic instinct is indeed to question the atheism of someone who doesn’t believe in gods, but does believe in other (apparently) non scientific things. I frankly didn’t consider the edge cases, I’d never heard of the phrase “small god,” and I’m honestly not sure that I agree with the idea some have expressed of, “oh, you’re basically describing a god on a lesser scale.”
I’m also not sure that the discussion couldn’t naturally encompass the idea, though.
I still kind of want to hear about someone who believes angels exist, and explains that he’s dedicated his life to carrying out the task he received when, lo, one with a big fine halo appeared unto him, descending from above with wings unfurled while brandishing a flaming sword and delivering an important and prophetic message about What’s To Be Done — and when you reply, Wow, A Message From God, he replies that, uh, no, he doesn’t believe in any of that ‘god’ stuff.
All over Western Europe, people are growing up with no religion, with parents who have no religion. Just regular people, broad spectrum of the population, without any specific science training or reason to be skeptical of any woo crap.
They just grew up without belief in God because it wasn’t forced on them as kids.
For a lot of people it is “Whatever definition causes extremists to leave me alone.”
Ha, that would be funny in a story.
“You…you must be testing my faith. Yes, that’s it! And I am a True Believer in God, and declare his Truth even in the face of angelic tests of that faith!”
Angel #2: “See, I told you that never works, telling the mortals there’s no God just makes them go off on tangents like that.”
If you define an angel as a messenger from God, then yes, somebody who doesn’t believe in god isn’t going to believe in that kind of angel. And that is a part of the usual meaning of the word.
But I never heard of anybody defining brownies or fairies as messengers from god, though; let alone yetis or telepaths. I don’t see how ancestor spirits would have to be either; apparently in some religious beliefs they might be, but in some religious beliefs so are rainbows, eclipses, floods, or plagues.
Yeti is just an animal. Nothing supernatural about it. Believing in yeti is kind of like believing in any other animal you haven’t personally seen. Either you trust the sources that say it exists or you don’t.
True. That’s why I included yetis in that list: because I think somebody earlier in the thread included them in a list of things that they categorized, along with a belief in god(s), as scientifically unproven things which they thought all belonged together, and that anyone who believed in one was likely to believe in the others. It’s a long thread, though, and I didn’t hunt back to check my recollection; I might be wrong about that.
I would disagree with this characterization, because the evidence available to people points in very different directions. To believe that blue whales are not real, we’d have to believe in a global conspiracy of experts faking evidence, skeletons, video, etc. To believe the yeti or bigfoot is real is the opposite - you’d have to go against the proponderance of evidence or lack thereof, the consensus of experts, etc.
But you’re right that there are separate tiers of unevidenced belief at work. Tier one is basically magic and requires everything we know about the natural world not to be true. Ghosts, the afterlife, reiki energy healing, etc. And then there are a second tier that require a massive implausible conspiracy or an implausible lack of evidence and these would include things like the grand conspiracy theories about moon the moon hoax, bigfoot, UFOs as little green men who anally probe people that the government is systematically covering up, etc. The second ones aren’t impossible as we know it but implausible. Flat Earth kind of falls in both categories.
There are plenty of people who think Bigfoot and the Yeti are extradimensional, and wander from reality to reality like Scott Bakula. They are almost certainly wrong.
But if they were right, and there really are other dimensions or manifolds that can be accessed via some sort of supernatural ability, would that be a ‘non-materialist’ phenomenon? And if so, do you have to be a theist, or a deist, to believe in extradimensionality?
Not at all. Belief in extra-dimensional yetis is orthogonal to belief in gods. Both are probably wrong, but belief in one does not imply or require belief in the other.
Plenty of religious people reject ghosts, extradimensional yetis and extradimensional non-human intelligences in flying saucers.
Religions (beyond just theism) are sort of a prescribed set of supernatural beliefs, which sometimes amuses me. Sometimes I remember a scene from Lost where Hurley was telling his very religious mother that he was cursed, and she said “we’re Catholics, we don’t believe in curses” – just demons and exorcisms and transubstantiating the flesh of Jesus for ritualistic human cannibalism.
But yes, it wouldn’t surprise me of religious people were less likely to believe in ghosts, UFOs doing cattle mutilations, etc. Because they kind of get a package deal with their supernatural beliefs, the menu is chosen for them.
Although… it’s always a little weird when a religious person who is, say, a Catholic believes in astrology or some other sort of non-Catholic magic. You have to wonder where the power for that comes from if it’s not God.
Marduk, probably.