People who hold beliefs will argue with people who hold different beliefs. Somehow this makes atheism wrong, which means that God must exist.
How are you defining supernatural? Taoism as far as I understand it doesn’t have supernatural elements. The Tao isn’t supernatural, it’s natural. It is the primary core essence of nature. That which IS.
Umm…ok.
Perhaps.
I think you’ve placed the bolded words in his mouth. He is not asserting that atheism is a religion therefore god exists. He’s saying atheism is just as much a religion as thesitic religions are. At least that’s what I gather.
Maybe that’s because you’re not making it very clearly.
Look, if you simply want to argue that people in society will have rituals, you’ll find no one is arguing agianst you. I don’t see what this has to do with atheism. Atheism is the doctrine that there is no such thing as a God. That’s it. Your ranting about what societies do has no bearing on this question.
If something reproduces asexually, one cannot say the organism is having sex even though there might be some similarities (results in an offspring).
Similarly, atheism cannot be called a religion, even though, to some people, there are similarities.
If you divide the world into two groups - those that believe in ghosts and those that do not - you are going to find more similarities between the groups than differences even though the groups are diametrically opposed to each other on the issue of ghosts.
Well, he’s wrong about that.
ETA: that is, his saying that depends on a highly personal and idiosyncratic definition of religion which goes against the plain meaning of the word as commonly used and defined in dictionaries.
Or maybe because you won’t allow it past your cognitive biases. Either/or. Whole bean seems to get it and I wouldn’t even need to explain this on another forum I post on where religion is taken more seriously. I wouldn’t even need to explain it to the handful of atheists that post there.
Ok, maybe whole bean doesn’t really get what I am saying. I am not arguing that atheism is a religion. I am arguing that if atheism were to become the dominant thought-form of our culture, then it would have to establish common forms and ceremonies and a belief in some sort of higher power to maintain asabiyah. And as such, if it were able to maintain a common cultural cohesion, then that cultural cohesion as developed would be pretty much indisguishable from religion for all practical purposes. My argument is that atheism is not value neutral. It is just as much a totalitarian ideology as any religion, and that accomplishing the extinguishment of religion isn’t actually the end of anything, but merely a renaming.
Never mind, saw your last post.
Interesting.
Perhaps you should go and re-read the OP for some context.
Your “assexual” analogy would be spot on if only we were disucssiin areligionsim.
Truth be told, a lot of this could be avoided if we could concede that atheism is like theisti religions in many ways, including the existence of a fundamentalist faction.
whatever, has the same qualities. I will admit that it appeared more to me that your were defnining religion broadly enough to include atheism as a non-theistic form of religion. whether you do this or simply say that atheism is like religion save the supernatural, just splits hairs.
So, do you think that all ideologies are totalitarian to the same degree and with the same goals/morals?
Do you have any preferences for a particular religion in that regard?
If you have any preference, is it because of the morals, the goals or some other reason? For instance, do you think that one particular religion is “correct” with regards to their supernatural beliefs, and the the morals or goals don’t matter? The other way around? Some mixture?
If atheism is a totalitarian ideology, what are its goals and morals? What does it hope to achieve? Does it matter whether atheism denies the existance of gods or not?
Most people call a tomato a vegetable even though it is a fruit. It doesn’t make it a vegetable. Does it really matter?
Essentially yes. Except that atheism is in a sort of nascent form right now, and is only at this time establishing organizations and common forms of belief.
Nonsense. Religion is wrong. It’s illogical, it has no facts to support it and it ignores physical laws and objective fact in general. It is destructive to society. None of those are “cultural” arguments against religion.
Considering that any education that teaches logical thinking and adherance to reality is by nature anti-religion, so what? That’s just schools doing their job; the only reason it’s anti-religion is that religion is dependent on ignorance and irrationality. Why should parents be allowed to deliberately cripple their children?
Your point of view is hardly difficult to understand. You are determined to defend religion, and like all such defenders you care nothing for the facts, or logic, or the consequences.
Back to the non-answers again, eh. It’s a pretty straightforward analogy; if hating “broad swathes of people” for their ideology is wrong, then hating Nazis and racists is wrong.
Same thing; the two are enemies by nature.
Oh, please. Religion isn’t deep, it isn’t hard to understand. It’s self indulgent fantasy, a tool of control, and a collection of idea that are better at spreading than they are at being true or constructive.
Pure nonsense. Religion is about lies. Religion is about faith, which is a pretty word for the denial of reality.
Garbage. Religion is the enemy of community. It teaches the valuelessness of people and the real world, in the favor of souls and afterlives. It teaches people to hate each other, even their own family if they are not religiously correct. Religion produces the atomization of society, and the replacement of a real society with a top down hierarchy where the believers do what they are told. Up to and including assaulting or killing their family or neighbors. If your son is gay, beat him; the Will of God is more important than the fact he is your son.
Well, there will always people who do not understand the argument, so you’ll have to go over it again for them. Defining new words won’t help with them.
But your whole interchange with superfluous parenthesis was, well, superfluous. I am guessing that you each exactly understood the other’s position from the start but you had to go through the whole ritual of proposing and dismissing hypotheticals before you could acknowledge that. You could have said sollipsi-gnosti-theist, agreed to disagree (as you have each done a thousand times before in similar discussions) and then both turned on der trih or mswas which is where the real action is.
But perhaps even Der Trih understands the difference between the formal use of the word “know” (“I can prove”) and the informal use (“I am pretty sure”)…?
I would venture to say that most of these types of debates usually ARE about areligionism. I don’t think most atheists would care if people believed in god, but did not adhere to a religion. It is the forcing of beliefs (that are impossible to proove) on other people that gets folks riled up. You don’t see these types of debates going on between people who believe in ESP and people who do not. However, I think you would see frequent debate between the ESPers and nonESPers if the ESPers wanted to create social policy based off of their belief in ESP.
What properties would a fundamentalist atheist have? How would I recognize one?