It doesn’t speak well to a person’s intellect to just declare one day,“no need to even ask the question, god did it all”.
Darwin, quit wondering why animals have differences, god made them that way,
Hawking, quit trying to understand what happened in the first n[sup]th[/sup] of a second after the big bang, there was no big bang, when god made the universe it looked just like it does right now.
What answers does religion offer other than god?
Why is the sky blue? god
How did we get here? god
and on, and on.
Religion doesn’t offer answers to the great questions, it refuses to even ask them.
Don’t believe me, just go ask Galileo!
I’m not sure I can agree. Atheists do not lack imagination, they just refuse to allow thie lives to be run by it.
As far as Randi and company goes, that is simply a flat challenge to put-up-or-shut-up. As far as some skeptics being “divine” as you put it, they would be the first ones to laugh at you if you accused them of it.
I suppose you could define atheism as some type of religion. Atheism is based on logic, reason, and the evidence of human senses. How about yours?
I have to wonder if you’re being facetious, Scylla.
If you’re seriously just curious, and not trying to be snide, it might be more fruitful to start a thread in another forum. (I’d suggest Great Debates, since that’s probably where it’ll end up eventually, but a carefully crafted OP might last in IMHO.)
I’d also like to say that Miller’s “Because they’re our friends, dumbass!”, is one of the best responses to a question I’ve seen recently on the boards. It manages to get right to the heart of the matter, adequately answer the question, and amuse the reader all at the same time. (Although for the record, I do not believe Scylla is a dumbass.)
Oh, and I now must say it’s funny to see that a scientific worldview is ‘intellectually lazy’ but saying that an Uncreated-God created the Universe, because everything needs to be created except the God you posit, is the very spitting image of intellectual rigor.
And I guess now we get that added benefit of going beyond the old “How can atheists possibly have morality without religion?” to “Atheists don’t really have emotions, do they?”
Don’t think of this as a combative challenge. I’m asking because I don’t understand.
De nada.
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Scylla.
My understanding is that funerals are not for the dead, they are for the living. Atheists feel the same regard for their neighbors, friends, and relatives as you do and show up to console the survivors and mark the passing of a unique individual. I suppose you can claim that atheists are some kind of unfeeling monsters but it would be a false position and very difficult to make it stick.
Well, that’s the problem about rallying atheists. I suppose everyone could sit around and drink and party and bitch about the theists, but it seems a bit pointless.
I don’t care for the title of “atheist” as it is a negative description and I’d like a positive description. The “Bright” organization has given it a shot but I think they picked the wrong term to describe themselves.
So what does Saint Rationality look like? Is it a he or a she?
As far as who’d change, I dunno. I did and I’m fairly certain there are quite a few on the board that have gotten free of religion. Who knows, maybe someone else would like to give reason and rationality a try.
While it’s certainly possible (even certain) that there are quite a few assholes who are fans of James Randi, and while it’s also doubtless true that the role of professional skeptic and disprover of people’s beliefs is one that naturally leads to arrogance and condescension, your claim of equivalence is still completely false.
Do the Followers of Randi (FOR) gather weekly and do things together, in a community, which becomes the center of their social environs? Do they have rituals associated with being FORs that help them get married, die, make day-to-day ethical judgments? Do they have a feeling of continuity and connection to the FORs of the past, and FORs in other places? Is being an FOR one of the prime tenets of their identity?
If these aren’t true, then they’re not really comparable to a religion at all.
Remember, in the OP, I didn’t say that atheists were BETTER than religious people, I just said that atheists, as a group, are NOT COMPARABLE to members of a religion, as a group. Now, atheists who are fans of James Randi are obviously a subset of all atheists who have some things in common, and some of those are even vaguely comparable to some parts of a religion. But the same is true of atheists who are fans of Tarantino movies, or atheists who are very interested in golf, or (for that matter) atheists who read the dope. That still doesn’t make them a religion in any even remotely meaningful sense of the word.
And, to be very precise about it, there’s one FRICKIN’ HUGE difference between the FOR and a religion, which is that the FOR has, built into it, the method for its own falsification. In fact, it’s entire existence is built around this method. (Unless, of course, you think that it’s all such a hoax that they would never let the prize be won, even by someone with genuine and undeniable paranormal abilities.)
Only if you use both “atheism” and “religion” in specific and unusual ways.
I tend to refer to myself as an atheist. I did it several times in the OP. What do I believe? I believe that the world can adequately and elegantly be explained without God. Therefore, by Occam’s razor, I believe it to be more likely than not that God does not exist. Therefore, I choose to live my life under that assumption. However, I realize that the universe we live in is 100% indistinguishable, more or less by definition, from a universe that was created by a benevolent and intelligent creator who set up the rules by which it works and put everything in motion, and reasonably indistinguishable from one in which that same God continues to pay attention and occasionally nudge things around a bit.
So, if by you’re definition I’m not an atheist, feel free to mentally copy/paste all uses of “atheist” in anything I’ve written this thread with whatever other word you’d prefer to use… and I bet a bunch of other self-ascribed atheists would feel the same way.
Also, there are at least two things that are unsatisfactory about your definition of a religion. First of all, a religion is not just a set of beliefs, it’s a set of beliefs and the culture and communities and rituals and guidelines and people who follow those beliefs. There is close to zero of any of that in atheism. Secondly, as many, many other people have pointed out, defining something by an absence is just silly. Supose we took all the people in the US and divided them up by what football team they root for. Now, there’s a group of Raiders fans, who have their own little rituals and ways of acting and being. We also have the group of Packers fans, with their own rituals, etc. The Raiders fans and Packers fans might each claim to be better than the other group, and might bristle at the suggestions of any similarity, but to the outside observer, it’s pretty clear that they are very similar groups. But what about the group of people who don’t follow football and are undecided. Is that group ALSO very comparable to the Raiders or Packers fans?
“quite often”? It certainly does happen that atheists act like assholes and shove their beliefs in people’s faces in inappropriate settings, and in rude fashions. It happens on the dope with some frequency. But the next time it happens, note two things:
(1) Is this the same asshole atheist who has done this before and will do it again? In other words, is there a relatively limited set of SDMB atheists who act this way?
(2) Is there ever a case where there are NOT several people who immediately chime in saying “I’m an atheist, and I apologize for what an asshole this guy is”? Seriously, what percentage of SDMB atheists do you think act like this?
Another important distinction is that at least some of the unpleasant things that religious people do are officially sanctioned and endorsed by the religion itself. So suppose 5% of all people are assholes. Then 5% of the atheists are assholes. And 5% of the Christians are assholes. They all do assholish things. BUT, there’s also some portion of the Christians who are not necessarily assholes but who are donig shitty things like opposing gay marriage because their church tells them to. (As well as some percentage who are doing good deeds and helping the poor because their church tells them to.)
How often do atheists actually object to personal displays of religion? How many people walk up to Christians on the street and berate them for wearing a cross around their neck?
And as for the public thing, well, yes, many atheists obejct to publically funded displays of religion. But even then, the vast, vast majority do so in a polite and conversational way, not by running into courthouses and urinating on the 10 commandments monument.
Again, how many examples ever can you come up with in which someone was privately practicing their religion, and an atheist complained of being oppressed?
There is certainly a tendency towards condescension and arrogance in some atheists. But it’s not really that many. Really, it’s not! Count and see some time! And if I could flip a magic switch which made all the Christians in the world stop objecting to my cousin marrying her lover but start being condescending about matters of faith, I’d flip it in a heartbeat.
If nothing else, I hope you will concede that there are no simple definitions of atheism and agnosticism that everyone can come even close to agreeing on.
It seems that the discussion is once again led into a hair-splitting contest on the difference between atheists, extreme atheists, and agnostics. Aside from that, here’s another question I’d like answered;
Why are theists of various flavors so intent on defining atheism as another religion anyway? What’s the point?
Is it just so the theists can say “See, you have a religion too, even if you don’t know it or acknowledge it!”? So what? Even if you define it as a religion, it is a very tortured use of the words and doesn’t affect my beliefs (or theirs) in the slightest.
Is it an attempt to claim that atheists also believe something they can’t prove? How does that work? AFAIK, atheists don’t claim to have all the answers. I certainly don’t. Speaking personally, I would make the claim that science and logic and observation can determine anything that can be known.
Is it an attempt to claim that the “religion of atheism” does things that are worse than what the theists do? We’ve had a few people in the thread that have already claimed that atheists shouldn’t care about the death of friends and family members. Likewise the Stalin and Mao responses that constantly come up, claiming that atheism leads people into mass-murder. My own thoughts are that some of the communist monsters killed people, theists and otherwise, because they saw them as a threat to the power of the state.
Debates between the annointed and the godless heathens can be fun and maybe that’s the whole point of this but I do wish the theists would just own up to there being nothing but belief at the core of their religion and stop trying to debate it.
Well, if I understand you correctly, your point is that atheists have a religious position toward God and that therefore atheism is some type of religion. Would that be fair? (Not being snarky, honestly trying to summarize.)
The question I was asking is; what difference does this make? Regardless of whether the above point is true or not.
Cecil just state that stali win the contest of “largest mass-murder”. Not that more people have been killed by regimes promoting atheism than by regimes promoting theism.
This discussion is becoming completely non-sentical… But of course it has to be, given that your premise (Staline’s crimes were motivated by atheism) is non-sentical.
So, if we don’t know the answer to a question, we must make up one, or else we’re intelletually lazy?
Was God always “just there” like “turtles all the way down”?
Since when “I don’t know” became an unnaceptable answer and “I just made up an explanation and I called it god” a sensible one, proving one’s intellectual ability?
I think Scylla and Shodan are in a place, intellectually, where rationality is going to have no impact.
The responses to the kind of substance dualism they offer are long and well documented. Apparently neither of them have bothered to read them.
This argument becomes almost pointless. There is no middle ground. All I am seeing is (from the theistic side anyway), constant and deliberate misrepresentations of what it means to be an atheist.
We have seen the suggestion that we have no moral basis (how many times has this been dealt with?). Not caring about our friends and families? WTF. When my father and daughter died, of course we had a wake, a memorial. I would say that, as an atheist, this is somehow a much tougher event than for a theist. We know they are gone forever. The End. The theist can claim they have gone to a happier place (in which case why not celebrate their deaths as a good thing?).
Your quotes here suggest an agnostic approach rather than an atheist view. I am all for that. “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer.
Concluding that there are holes in existing religions and therefore that is sufficient proof that there is no God is a lazy approach. The miracle of life, the universe, and everything, is still unexplained and that is a huge issue that atheists somehow just brush off.
I admit that my definition of God is probably bigger than most people’s. I certainly don’t believe that God personally delivered to Ten Commandments to Moses. However, that means little. The primary problem is still there. There are huge thigs about the universe that we don’t understand. Some all-powerful creative force is certainly a possibilty.
I mentioned this briefly, earlier and have been thinking about it and would like to elaborate. Mind you, this is just a WAG. I don’t there’s a theist cabal that sits around and plots this, it’s just a meme that’s convenient for the (domestic) debates about faith and religion in the U.S. It’s certainly a non-issue in Europe, AFAIK.
LEt’s first say that theist, for the purpose of this debate, are people who define themselves as Christian. These people feel that the diea that “In God We Trust”, “So help me God” ASF are valid statements, being part history, lore and tradition, and that removing them (as happened with prayer in school) is further persecution against their beliefs and that this is part of the dismantling of “traditional” (i.e. WASP) values that made America great. Roe vs. Wade, same-sex marriage, removal of God… they’re all pointing towards a modern Sodom and Gomorra and if America breaks, it will be because the punishment of God, due to the wicked ways of those trying to take away those “traditional” values*.
Now, they need someone to blame for this, but don’t want to blame the Founding Fathers, who wrote that pesky constitution (mind you, I don’t think the FF had anything but different flavours of Christianity in mind when they wrote it). So they need someone else: Activist judges, the liberal media, whatever boogey-man they can think up to pin the blame on. One of these groups are “the atheists”, and by using the same kind of smear tactic, they make “the atheist” out to be an interest group. Making them up as being a religion (saying that they have a beliefset about god, or YHWH even), is a way of pushing the group (as the theist see them) to the fringe. If they are succesful, then it’s easy to discredit them:
“Well, we don’t have to remove ‘In God We Trust’, because the only people who want to do that are The Atheists and we have freedom of religion here in the good ole USA. Why should they have a bigger say in this than we do. There are over a hundred million Christians in America. Why should some fringe group get to set the agenda with their beliefsystem? It’s just another opinion.”
*Mind you - I think that the people who oppose SSM are genuinely afraid and to just paint them as homophobes is not gonna help the people who want this to happen. I’ve seen the wind change in my own country over the past 20 years and it’s taking longer in the U.S. It’s a bigger country, where people in general are more religeous than they are in western Europe. You’ll just have to be patient and wait and eventually you’ll get the critical mass that’s needed for the laws to change. By that point, it won’t matter and will be a non issue.
I know this is little comfort to the people who are living through this right now, but sometimes, you just have to be patient.
In the meantime, I suggest that all GBLT adopt a homophobe. Nothing works wonders faster than making people realize that we’re all just people.
“A wizard did it” is about the most lazy and irrational approach you could ever adopt for an unanswered question. Your “creation problem” is a strawman. There is nothing about the existence or the origin of the universe which requires magic to explain it. As long as the existence of the universe can be completely explained by non-magical processes (and it can) then there is no reason to presume that they exist. Magical and non-magical explanations for observable phenomena are not equally valid possibilities which deserve equal consideration. Supernatural hypotheses are to be resorted to only if and when all natural explanations are unequivocally ruled out. As it stands, scientific exploration of the universe has never found a single thing to merit the consideration of the supernatural. It is no more arrogant or lazy to presume the non-existence of sky gods than to presume the non-existence of hobgoblins. There is absolutely no empirical reason to give either of them any consideration.
Some atheists do that, many don’t. You’re overgeneralizing. Atheism is a single, simple idea. You’re attaching ideas that are not held by all atheists.
Anything is a possibility, especially when it’s something with as many definitions as God. The question is whether there is a reason to think that’s actually what happened.
Holes in existing religions only shows that these religions are wrong. But the complete lack of evidence for the existence of a god is sufficient to dismiss the existence of god, in the same way the complete lack of evidence for anything else is sufficient to dismiss its existence. You do exactly that all the time.
But for some reason, you don’t want to apply the same rule to one particular concept : god. If I tell you that I’m secretly controlling the thoughts of the US president, you won’t call that a “distinct possibility”. You’ll just think I’m a looney. And you won’t think for an instant that you’re “intellectually lazy” for not investigating my unsupported claims. And if I admit that there’s no proof to support them, you won’t think you’re “intelectually lazy” because you don’t take them seriously.
Pick your answer :
a) The miracle of the existence of god is still unexplained and that is a huge issue that theists somehow just brush off.
b)The final answer to the miracle of life, the universe and everything is 42. Don’t dismiss it but give it a lot of thougts because it might be true and you can’t prove otherwise.