It always does.
Yeah, fair, my bad, I’ll get back on topic.
OK, back on topic, I don’t understand what atheism has to do with materialism at all. They seem to be on different conceptual axes.
Do you believe in God or gods? Please check yes or no. (Those who check no are atheists)
Do you believe in spirits, remote healing, auras, leprechauns, crystal power, ghosts, or any other pseudoscientific stuff? (Those who check yes or no tell you nothing about whether they believe in God or gods)
I remain convinced that most atheists, those who don’t argue about it on message boards, just don’t have any belief in a deity, they don’t think about it, it’s not part of their consciousness. Large swaths of the global population basically lacks that belief, completely orthogonal to whether they’re scientists, gardeners, parents, stamp collectors, mediums, mechanics, etc.
Apologists, and others, need to add things to atheism so they have something to argue against while they’re avoiding their burden of evidence.
There’s a general trend between people who are atheists and people who are materialists, skeptics, and/or critical thinkers. It correlates more highly with atheism because many people reject theism using that same toolset. People could reasonably say if you have the skeptical tools to shake off religion, you should have the skeptical tools to shake off ghosts. And that’s reasonable, but it ignores the compartmentalization that people are capable of, and that there are reasons for being an atheists that aren’t a principled skeptical rejection of religion. So they’re using a heuristic that has some truth behind it and far overgeneralizing it by demanding that people by perfect materialists, but there’s really no compelling reason they have to be. Just like not everyone who believes in ghosts believes in telepathy or vice versa, particular types of magical thought are separable.
I’ll say as an atheist I’m always a little more disappointed if a fellow atheist believes in magic or grand conspiracy theories because I expect better than them compared to religious people, because religious people have already proven they deeply internalize one type of magical thinking (thereby lowering my expectations) and it’s always a little disappointing to find out the atheist is being selective about it.
I have more respect for the intellectual integrity of a religious person that can be skeptical about every other magical claim than an atheist who doesn’t beleive in God but believes in every psuedoscience, magic, and conspiracy you throw in front of him.
All of you saying that you saying you’ve never met one? I have. He’s my best friend. He hedges it a bit, but he and his family are avowed atheists but they love to get involved in spiritual things. I let him do a tarot reading for me on my birthday.
He was skeptical of it, but did a thing with the Secret to find a girlfriend, and well, technically got it when we dated for a couple months. And he’s just mildly into some spiritual stuff.
He’s still mostly skeptical, enough that it doesn’t bother me any more than my type of Christianity bothers him. But he tends to believe there is something else there, but isn’t sure how much of it is just human cognition or how much of it is actual spiritual stuff.
Yeah. I am atheist. I also don’t particularly care about material assets other than those that help keep me alive.
I obviously prefer to be warm and comfortable, but that is survival instinct, not materialism.
Plenty of religious ascetics surrender materialist “value”; plenty of religious bodies (hey, hey, Catholic church) are very materialistic.
It’s because as I said, in the great majority of cases arguments for “theism” are in reality claims of the existence of a specific god, typically a version of the Christian god who isn’t material and can ignore physics. Materialism has no room for the existence of such a god, so believing in it makes you an “atheist” towards the only god that matters as far as the theist is concerned.
Now, you can certainly postulate a materialist “creator god” who is a superhuman being that created our universe from outside it using exotic but physics-obeying abilities. But that isn’t the specific “God” the theist side wants to believe in, so even if it was proven to be real they’d just denounce it as false. Only one god, their god is acceptable.
It always comes back to issues like this because fundamentally, atheism is defined by its opposition. We’ve never bothered to create a specific word for somebody who doesn’t believe in vampires or goblins or anything like that, because nobody is going around trying to force everyone to believe in their idea of goblins and vampires. Only “God” gets treated that way, so only “God” gets a specific word for disbelieving in it. And as a corollary much of what gets labelled “atheism” is really just disbelief in various assertions of Christians, because that’s what is trying to force itself on people.
Different definition of “materialist”, and not the one being discussed in this thread.
Materialism is not a unique chuch, and I have a mindset that follows the (bizarrely long word) antidisestablishmentarianism, which is effectively a form of anarchism
Yes and one could argue that atheists who also believe in astrology or whatever are actually doing us a favor.
Because atheists are often caricatured as a “worldview”, with a whole bunch of beliefs tagged to it, because the soundness of not believing a claim without good reason (and the unsoundness of god punishing people for not being convinced of his existence), is much more difficult to argue against.
Finally in the full disclosure: I have the wacky woo belief that there may be an afterlife. In my case, it’s because I don’t think that physicalism, or even materialism, necessarily rules it out. So maybe I am not a true scotsman atheist 
I like the idea of walking around and being judgmental and telling people they’re closed minded a-leprechaunists that are just as dogmatic as people who think that leprechauns are the source of all mischief in life. We could debate whether people are “strongly a-leprechaun, weakly a-leprechaun, or agnostic” – and this sounds like a joke, and it is, but it has exactly the same logic as the real thing. Which means the real thing is also a joke.
Edit: I think this is still on topic, at least loosely, unlike previous rants because it discusses the expectations about the rest of the worldview of atheists and that how people think of “atheists” is a massive overreach compared to how they would think of a-leprechaunists, and dissecting the logic of that is very much material to the question of whether an atheist must be a materialist or if that’s a false packaging of the concept.
Sure; an atheist could believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation; this seems to be the position in certain types of Buddhism. However Secular Buddhism seems to have largely abandoned the reincarnation aspect;
This seems a shame, since the rebirth aspect of Buddhism seems particularly intriguing. Could you have reincarnation in an atheistic universe? I can’t really see why not.
Maybe there is only one soul in the universe, which goes backwards and forwards in time so that we all share it, one after the other. No gods or God involved. Disclaimer; that idea is one that I first encountered on this board, and it seems somewhat attractive, even if it is difficult to imagine in a strictly materialist universe.
Some atheists claim they dont want to “believe” in things without evidence - thus no belief in gods, or ghosts, etc.
Right-
Like hatred of organized religion?
Sure; that’s basically the Riverworld setting. Souls are artificial, there’s no sign of a god, and all of humanity is reincarnated by aliens via technological means along the bank of a world-spanning river.
When I was young, I didn’t believe in any god. My parents didn’t take me to any church or temple things, never drilled any religious belief into me, since they are also non-believers, as were my grandparents (for various reasons – for example, my grandmother grew up in Soviet Russia, so any religious belief was frowned upon to say the least). So, I grew up lacking any belief in any deities.
I didn’t think through the options and discard anything. I didn’t apply any sort of scientific method, nor did I require evidence for any claims. Until I got to high school, all of those concepts were pretty alien. I wasn’t a skeptic, etc. I just lacked any belief.
I think there are tons of atheists out there just like that, especially those who grow up in more secular societies like China and much of Europe. It just never comes up in your upbringing, so you never develop any belief in anything like a god.
That wouldn’t stop me from believing in ghosts or mediums, if weird coincidences kept happening and I had the right group of friends to start using ouija boards or something.
The one-electron thought experiment – I hesitate to call it a hypothesis – came up in 1940. Electron.. soul… are they so different?
Then there’s this from the last episode of The Good Place. Eleanor is sad Chidi will be leaving.
Elanor: But, this is sad, man. You got a John Locke quote or a piece of Kantian wisdom you can throw at me?
Chidi: Those guys were more focused on rules and regulations. For spiritual stuff you gotta turn to the East.
Elanor: I’ll take anything you got. Hit me.
Chidi: Picture a wave… in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through and it’s there, and you can see it, and you know what it is – it’s a wave. And then it crashes on the shore… and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. That’s one conception of death for a Buddhist: The wave returns to the ocean… where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.
Elanor: Not bad, Buddhists.
Chidi: Not bad. None of this is bad.
But one can hate organized religion while still believing in a god, so I think this kind of antitheism is orthogonal to atheism.
Definitely. You think that there are problems with organized religion (or any big organization) and believe or not believe.
Yes; it’s even easy to justify. “God is good, organized religion isn’t, therefore I hate organized religion as befouling God’s name”.
The two things are simply entirely separate. God(s) existing or not and the desirability or lack thereof of a particular type of organization are independent issues.