<hijack>Bab5 is a source for some of the greatest quotes there are.
Tenets, anyone?
I thought the impossibility of space colonization was atheist dogma. After all P. Z. Myers, a noted atheist, has been saying that for years We are not going to escape to other planets
So has Charles Stross.
(And the only Tennant in my atheist mythology is David. Part of the Holy Trinity of the Who, the Amy and the hmmm…let’s say Rose.)
And two of the most prominent doubters of artificial intelligence (John Searle and Roger Penrose) are atheists.
Well, I can see where he got it from. Since the Enlightenment, the process of seeking knowledge through reason and evidence - formalized as the scientific method - has been progressively debunking truth claims about the universe derived from authority and dogma. From the perspective of the established religions, science is clearly the enemy, the “non-overlapping magisteria” notion is feelgood hogwash. The great majority of testable truth claims about the universe in (for example) the Bible have been shown to be false. And science is an enemy that can only be defeated if you don’t grant the premise that the use of reason and evidence is a qualitatively different way to knowledge about the universe. From the religious perspective, accusations that science is just a competing faith or mythology are commonplace. And in order to be remotely credibile, since science works, this narrative obviously can’t focus on well-established scientific knowledge or existing technological achievements, it must focus on the Gaps.
As said, “never” is a long time. Humanity might never colonize other worlds because it is replaced by something else, turns into a worldwide, hyperrepressive permanent dictatorship or because technological civilization permanently collapses; but barring those scenarios it’s nearly certain humanity* will, *at some point. Chance essentially guarantees it will; at some point the right social variations will occur to make it happen, given enough time.
Hardly. Green plants were far more destructive; they killed nearly everything else then alive, turned the atmosphere permanently poisonous & corrosive, and nearly froze the planet into an iceball.
For one, I never said that this would take place in our lifetimes. I’m thinking a minimum of 500 years - by which point, if we still exist, humanity will probably be able to build machines the complexity of which you and I would find unimaginable. Compare the most complex machine of 500 years ago to the most complex machine that exists today, and extrapolate.
Second of all, that’s the fun thing about Von Neumann machines - you only have to build one!
I’ve never said these concepts are exclusively atheist - they are ideas pervading the entire cultural fabric of today’s society. However, it is the atheist discourse that such concepts play a crucial role in, the same as foundational tales and origin myths function in traditional communities.
Despite the current secularization of society, it is at least naive to believe that modern humans are not subject to mythological thinking. Their elements may not be entirely novel or unique but new myths are constantly formed and spread on the public arena, where ideologies clash under the form of modern mythologies and atheism is no exception: “the word ideology might indeed be replaced, in much contemporary discussion about politics, by the term mythology.”
The Dalai Lama said that if science contradicted Buddhism, then Buddhism would have to change. So not all religions. Catholicism seems to have managed to accept science, though it took them a while.
If by religion you mean fundamentalist religions (not just Christian ones) which accept as true things that have been disproved, they deserve to die.
Michel Mayor spake thusly:
This is from Stephen Kane, another astrophysicist dude:
This is a comment from yet another astronomy dude:
Effectively all three gentlemen are just saying that it is not feasible to travel to the stars in the near future, which should already be blindingly obvious to everybody. The distances involved are too great - even for a trip to Proxima Centauri. Propulsion and shielding alone are humongous problems. Another 100,000 years of technological evolution later, maybe yes, but not now.
Space-faring science fiction is painted as some kind of human ‘dream of the future’ and is considered more acceptable than other kinds of myth-making and wishful thinking. The masses are gullible and think we are on the cusp of becoming an interstellar civilization or something, which is just hilarious.
Hindu non-dualistic metaphysics has a neat layer of indirection above the whole question of science and religion: the transcendent is never-changing, and the phenomenological is ever-changing, and the ever-changing is never different from the never changing. Thus, one can have endless scientific and technological evolution in the phenomenological space. This does not contradict the core truths Hinduism teaches - in fact, it is to be expected. This is the nature of the phenomenological space - endless evolution, and subject to beginnings and endings. This is truly neat - what one would call a highly decoupled architecture in software design. 
Yup. We covered it pretty well here on the Dope a few years ago:
Cite? I’ve never met anyone who thinks this.
“Atheist Mythology”? Is that anything like “Jumbo Shrimp” or “Christian Scientist”?
No, it really doesn’t. This is an unsupported conjecture and doesn’t even really pass the smell test.
Those guys are not doing a good job of justifying their profession’s existence.
What’s the point of studying the stars if we don’t intend to go there eventually? Don’t say “knowledge for the sake of knowledge”. There’s no such thing. There’s knowledge we have a use for, and knowledge we don’t have a use for yet. What they’re saying is that there will never be any use for their knowledge, in which case, why bother?
The atheist mythology thing is poorly stated but entirely reasonable. While it’s absolutely 100% true that atheism isn’t a religion or philosophy with specific tenets (well, most self-identified atheists would be self-proclaimed skeptics which is a philosophy), it’s undeniable that within anglosphere culture self-identified atheists generally share a community that is subject to the same self-reinforcing behavior as any other group.
Now, there are multiple subcultures at play here, there’s a rift between, e.g., feminist and social justice leaning skeptics and far-right youtube skeptics (“asshole atheists”), and British-left TERF skepticism they all ultimately derive, subculturally, from a neo-skeptic movement that (while it’s been around in some form for longer), really took off and gained its culture in the mid to late 2000s, primarily on the internet in the skeptic blogosphere and internet forums (such as this one!).
There’s one good illustration in this found in the article Who Will Debunk the Debunkers featured on 538 which illustrates how people who are nominally skeptical of myths often swallow seemingly “skeptical” stories that purport to debunk a common bit of fishy-seeming wisdom, but ultimately perpetuate an urban legend themselves. Now, skeptics are probably less likely to have these sorts of community-wide myths, but can have this same issues.
Self-identified atheists also frequently share a love of sci-fi and some can have some science cargo culting and fetishism (especially an obsession with rigid taxonomies, see that TERF article above). I don’t think the OP’s examples per se qualify, but it’s definitely true that self-identified atheists often have a personal bias towards utopian technocratic ideals that may not match actual science, or the actual likely direction technology will go in.
In fact, if we want to invoke a popular skeptic, Richard Dawkins, what I’m really saying is that the self-identified atheist subculture has its own subcultural Memes, some of which do not reflect reality yet are important beliefs and shibboleths within the wider community. In fact, I’d potentially argue that “atheists don’t share any common beliefs” is one such meme.
Obviously the OP evokes Soviet-style atheism which had its own issues (Soviet state atheism was in many respects a state religion with enforced and endorsed tenets and beliefs from the top down) and US/UK skeptic-atheism is an entirely disparate culture with its own cultural traditions, so it’s inaccurate on that front to compare the two, but the general thrust that atheists “believe” certain truths is not faulty.
Note that I use “self-identified atheist” to mean a particular subculture (that includes most atheists on this board to at least some degree). Obviously it’s technically true that “atheists” as a purely descriptive term don’t share any belief other than not being theists, but I feel like it’s deliberately missing the point and people are willfully misinterpreting “atheist” as the broad descriptor and not taking it to mean “people who proudly hold atheist ideals and communicate with fellow atheists”.
We were never going to sail around the world.
We were never going to need computers with more than half a meg of memory.
IANAAtheist, but these guys make me wonder if my childhood dream of moving to other planets within our own solar system may not be closer than I thought it was. Give us a few generations more and we will come up with that self-rebuilding ship. Why? Because the universe is out there and it’s making faces at us. Atheism has nothing to do with that.
Also to preempt an obvious objection to my post that unlike, say, Christianity, atheist doesn’t have any written down “sacred” foundational myths…
I mean, neither does Christianity, really, not in a strict sense. Saying “Christians believe in the Bible” is a tremendously meaningless statement and thoroughly ignores the sheer amount of extra-Biblical cultural memes that lead to wildly different cultural beliefs and traditions even among American denominations let alone the world. The Rapture (Premillenial dispensationalism, more specifically), for instance, is absolutely a tenet of certain sects of Evangelical Christianity despite being something some dude made up in the 1800s and then some other dude popularized like 50 years ago. The Bible is at best slightly more relevant to modern Christian belief than influential texts and writings (and videos) in modern skepticism.