Hey, don’t worry. Your functionally-everlasting soul won’t be able to join mine in the technological singularity, but at least as a Christian you’ll have a thousand different varieties to choose from. For, while there is but one, monolithic and unholy atheistic anti-church, there are as many forms of Christianity as there are seats in the pews. And for that matter, plenty of believers who don’t even go to Church. You can believe anything you want, just so long as you label yourself a Christian! :thumbs up:
ETA: Why, in many respects, I envy your freedom to choose to believe so many things that us atheists must simply accept or reject on faith.
Wouldn’t that mean that I have to be baptized separately into every different christian variant in order to be properly ejected from atheism, then? I mean, the mormons aren’t going to accept a catholic baptism. To become eligible for all the different variants i’m going to have to be baptized possibly multiple dozens of times. And I don’t want that; that’d make me all wrinkly!
Aren’t there some symbols or narratives in patterns of thought that I can repeat a bunch of Hail Roses over, and get back into the cabal?
Best I can tell, New Atheism involves atheists who have the nerve to not stay in the closet, and the greater nerve of writing books that lots of people buy. The the greatest nerve of all in saying that religions are most probably wrong and that god is very likely to not exist.
The myth of atheist evangelism (which I’ve never seen) is mostly spread by people in megachurches who buy tons of TV time and ads to push their beliefs, and who get very, very upset when someone challenges them.
The other group who hate new atheism (and write reviews of atheist books in the Times) are those believers who are moderate and who absolutely do not believe that the kind of people who wrote to Dawkins saying he was evil in writing about evolution.
Back in Usenet days I had an alt.atheism number and the black helicopter brought me my anti-Rapture beanie and my irony meter, but since then I haven’t seen any atheist social groups succeeding, despite some attempts. Care to point some out?
I live in a reasonably non-religious area, and we don’t have social groups even here.
I also don’t know of any shared atheist values, besides not believing in any gods, which is hardly a value.
Well… a few years back there was an attempt to link atheism to activism for third-wave intersectional gender feminism, but as you might imagine the cats had no desire to be herded. To this very day the supporters are bitter at the “dictionary atheists” who insist that atheism is just a lack of belief in gods and not inherently tied to a set of progressive beliefs.
This type of approach shows another typical attitude, a stereotype in itself, where the ‘God-less’ person can never be wrong because he is always free of cliches whereas the ‘God-full’ person can never be right because he has a fixed an oversimplified image just about everything. My opinion is that atheists and believers are the same in that they can all be prone to weaknesses that the entire human race shows.
But if you have to know, I grew up in an atheist state and raised by an atheist family. I have never believed in the divine or supernatural of any kind or belonged to any religious group. However, I am not a militant atheist - I can probably be called a 'friendly atheist."
People don’t need to have formal meetings to form a social group. Also, if a layman like myself wants to learn something about a social group or phenomena the person to trust is a sociologist, not a member of that particular group or a participant in that particular social phenomena. As I have already said, I am not a sociologist, but I do remember these simple things from school.
But since some postmodern social theorists claim that the laws of physics are social constructs, how can you be so confident that if all the non-atheists were thrown out of NASA, we couldn’t rediscover our own truth, including some new laws of physics that fly us to the stars?
I know certain people decry nowadays hyper-specialization (which can actually lead to higher business returns and superior customer satisfaction) while advocating for an era of integration but the fact is few atheists on this board have studied the firmament themselves to conclude the universe came to being as a cosmic inflation rather than the result of a six-day effort.
I think you are asking the wrong person. I usually refrain myself from hypothesizing and I haven’t made any conjectures in this thread because I know whether or not human beings will ever wind up colonizing the outer space is a pure speculation.
Within reason, however, people can expect certain things to happen or not to happen based on what they know, and can discuss probabilities. Indeed, I may have a problem with likelihood because even when something is really likely to happen doesn’t make it a fact. And I dislike it when people regard the existence of the multiverse, the existence of aliens, the future conquest of space by mankind, or the future creation of conscious AI as facts rather than speculation. Who do you think these people tend to be?
When discussing atheism, it is probably unavoidable to talk about the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. This is exactly the reason why I have quoted that paragraph from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The existence or non-existence of any non-observable entity in the world is not settled by any single argument or consideration. Every premise will be based upon other concepts and principles that themselves must be justified. So ultimately, the adequacy of atheism as an explanatory hypothesis about what is real will depend upon the overall coherence, internal consistency, empirical confirmation, and explanatory success of a whole worldview within which atheism is only one small part. The question of whether or not there is a God sprawls onto related issues and positions about biology, physics, metaphysics, explanation, philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of language, and epistemology. The reasonableness of atheism depends upon the overall adequacy of a whole conceptual and explanatory description of the world.(my bolding)
I am entirely aware of the fact that everything I hold as true is a cultural construct and sometimes, in my internal forum, I try to imagine what my ‘truth’ would be like if I lived in a completely different social environment. But in the meantime I tend to stick to what we can rationally agree to be true in an effort that I hope will resemble the Socratic Method.
I never claimed atheists were perfect. All I really said was that simple math makes the idea of space colonization virtually impossible, and you haven’t acknowledged that.
Hey, I’m friendly too! So if you come from an atheist environment, why aren’t you citing your parents as examples of atheist culture? Did they tell you every Sunday morning “Sleep in champ, we don’t go to church?” Did you pray to nothing before dinner?
So you’re “speculating” about the atheist culture in which you were raised. Talk about an identity crisis…
My fellow atheists, I think we maybe have this wrong. We apparently all have a shared atheist mythology because we don’t (as atheists) have to share any values or beliefs.
I think we have a Russell’s Paradox situation here. We (atheists) make up a social group with a shared culture of values and beliefs […] because we aren’t a social group with a shared culture of values and beliefs.
Which means we don’t make up a social group with a shared culture of values and beliefs. Did I miss a step here or drop the ball?
Meanwhile, populating exo-planets. There’s no rush. Or, if there is, we’re not going to make it. I vote for something more like Elysium or the Axiom* as more likely options.
