You’re right Godless, I had the foolish notion that atheists would automatically be skeptics.
So when does this ensoulment commence? Conception, birth, confirmation, (holy communion, bar/bat mitzvah)? Adulthood?
Is your soul your conscience, your moral guide? If the soul comes from outside, then what is the source of human morality.
An atheist who believes in a soul is not thinking thru the logic.
Just a wee suggestion. Don’t try to put labels on what you believe or don’t believe, because it will change almost daily if you are truly researching and learning about life. If you don’t label it, it won’t be necessary to explain why you changed labels.
Go, do, be and don’t worry about belonging to any group or organization. Live life to the fullest.
Love
Leroy
The term used a few times above supernatural is giving me a few problems…
Is there any way to believe in supernatural without believing in a creator being. I ask because I cannot think of a way something can be called supernatural if it is generated by and part of the natural universe. And without some creator being, then how can anything be created except as part of the natural universe. This does not in anyway dismiss the ideas of souls etc., it just means calling souls or indeed anything supernatural from an atheist point of view seems misleading. What we might call supernatural in the normal sense of the words usage, either doesn’t exist, or exists and is a natural (though not understood) phenomenon.
We humans label things we can’t understand supernatural, but I believe in the greater knowledge, all things are natural. Just because they don’t fall into our systems of belief or supposed laws of the universe, don’t mean they are not real.
Okay pay close® attention this time around.I would not knwo anything about when a soul might conceptualize since I do not believe in such things.As I said I am a skeptic AND an atheist.
There are, however atheists who DO believe in souls(just not gods).They are not(obviously) necessarily rational or critical thinkers.Some have never heard a god-claim to believe in.Some do not accept gods for emotional reasons, more than logical ones.Some atheists DO lack belief based on critical, skeptical reasoning but forego such reasoning when it tells them that bigfoot or ghosts are not rationally justified.
This is your brain = >"*"
This is your brain on skepticism =>" ?"
Any questions?
Bullshit.What you call “labels”(re:“atheist” adn “skeptic”) are merely responses to specific questions(namely Do you believe in any gods?" and “By what sort of reasoning do you doubt supernaturalist claims?”).They are not worldviews/encapsulating philosophies.If YOU cannot answer whether you beleive in gods or whether you put more stock in “faith” or reason"(or something else?) then that is fine.You are not obligated to.
There may be variations on this but the working definition for me of supernatural is “Any existential claim which, if true would violate what we know from the last 2, 000+ years of observation and experiment.”.In other words if an entity or phenomenom would systematically ignore or violate physical/natural laws then it could be called supernatural or paranormal.
I personally make a distinction between ‘paranormal’ and ‘supernatural’ that is sort of based on degrees of how extraordinary the claim in question is.‘Bigfoot’ for example I would call ‘paranormal’ becuase if it turned out that sasquatch does in fact exist, it would not unravel all scientific knowledge we have obtained and throw our existence into a solopsist or idealist nightmare.It would simply force us to re-examine a few things in biology/zoology.
“God” is a supernatural claim becuase if it turned out God existed then we could not know ANYTHING about the universe.We could not tell whether we were feeding or dismembering our own children at any given time or even if we had any children.Knowledge would unravel like a fraid sweater whose lose thread has been yanked.
The thing is, by this reasoning we cannot say that Wile E. Coyote is not an actual coyote who si able to systematically violate every physical law in the universe and who routinely orders Rube Goldbergian devices from A.C.M.E. to chase Roadrunner rather than simply order food.Since we cannot rule anything out as ‘impossible’ we must evaluate claims based on their likelihood.SUpernatural claims are thus so highly unlikely as to be safely considered as close to impossible as things get for us.
In other words I get worried about a stranger crawling under my car with wire and bolt cutters in hand but I will not lose sleep over gremlins causing brake failure.
The default status of ANY existential claim is FALSE until it is proven otherwise.
Right on, GodlessSkeptic… that’s exactly my answer.
lekatt, I don’t use the word “atheist” to try to belong to some group or organization. I use it because it most closely represents my beliefs as they exist today. It is one way I have of identifying my beliefs. I really don’t care to belong to any group, I’m simply looking for the best way to describe my beliefs regarding supreme being(s). Right now, one way I can do that is to use the word “atheist.” It’s a word, not a label. Look it up.
Bippy, you raise a good point about the word “supernatural,” which has been poorly-defined here. When I use it, I’m using it to describe the set of things which I believe exist, but are not defined by the natural sciences… yet. Basically, the word means anything which exists (or may exist) that is beyond the current range of science to describe. As such, it changes as the capabilities of science expand. Also, to me, a belief in the existence (or at least the possibility) of supernatural phenomena does not necessarily include the existence of a supreme being. Hopefully, that helps.
And now, I’m off to watch “Dead Like Me.”
<brief hijack>
I wouldn’t necessarily call it agnosticism, being an avowed agnostic myself. The term was coined to connote a sense that the question of the existence of God is not answerable (at least not at this time), not whether one believes in any particular system of rituals and beliefs.
</bh>
Back to the OP:
Remember we are talking about the unproven and the potentially unproveable here, so conisistency in this area is in the eye of the beholder to a great extent.
What gives us the idea that there might be a soul in the first place? One source is obviously a cursory observation of the dead and the living. The dead seem to have “something missing”.
This can lead eventually to the idea of an entity separate from our bodies that defines our life, and brings up the question of “where did it go?” which leads to “where did it come from in the first place?” and “what is it like in either place?”
IMO, it is on this foundation on which every religion is built. But you don’t have to like the superimposed architecture just because you recognize the foundation as such.
From my experience, most atheists (myself included) are materialists, and therefore disavow belief in any and all supernatural substances, events, phenomena, and essences.
However, I agree that one could be an atheist and also believe in spiritualism. You would have to propose some mechanism by which the spiritual forces worked, since without a guiding force like a god behind those forces they would have to act of their own accord, so to speak. There would not be a mind guiding them any more than my mind tells gravity whether to work or how to work. The spiritual force would have to be exactly like the force of gravitation, or electromagnetism, adhering to certain rules that remain to be discovered.
Which is to say, on the topic of the soul: if we all have one and if god didn’t put it there then it must have arrived by some causal mechanism that delivers a soul to a suitable occupant upon certain preconditions.
Now, as you say, the reason I became an athiest is my natural skepticism. There is no evidence of any gods, so I do not believe in them. Under that same approach, I hold the same unbelief with regard to supernatural forces. But just because the process which leads to one belief may lead to another does not mean that one must logically hold both beliefs. As neither form of unbelief is necessary to support the other, nothing is stopping you from holding both, with a little suitable tweaking.
All words are labels, symbols, they are not the real item. People who don’t believe in God are labeled Atheists. When the word Atheist is said to someone they think “someone who doesn’t believe in God.”
Why try to complicate things?
Yes, I know God is there, want to make something of it? :dubious:
I liked your post, but billions of people would disagree with you, and say there is plenty evidence of God. Also I don’t think anyone is naturally skeptic. It is a learned behaviour. Children are into everything, their natural curiousity is abundant. That need to learn is stifled by parents, teachers, and other authorities who want the child to grow up believing as they do. If you want to find out what truth is, it is necessary to read and research all views equally, something almost no one does.
They’re not mutually exclusive. Although sentientmeat raises a good point, the fact that since you believe in certain supernatural elements doesn’t mean you have to believe that one is really powerful, even though you could.
I would also disagree with RexDart- I think most atheists, while of the opinion that an all powerful old fella up in the sky is a little much, certainly accept that there are forces in our universe that are beyond our understanding. Not supernatural, perhaps, just things in nature we haven’t quite figured out yet.
Where ancient men thought up God(s) to explain why that big orange ball came up and back down every day, we like to believe that anything we don’t understand is magic.
I have suspicions rather than beliefs so I think ther is an 88% probability that the system works on reincarnation but only a 75% probability that there is a God.
Of course those are guestimates. The data is of highly questionable reliability.
Dal Timgar