Atheism

Osso, when I started this thread, I had in mind that lack of cohesion. In part I thought this might be a place people who identify as atheists could come to talk freely and especially to discuss how to interact with people like spendi and georgeob1. I feel like the greater population has no idea what atheism is, who we are, what we think and do. I feel like it is in our interest to be vocal about the idea that we are upright, moral, compassionate people with good values (in general).

Also, I feel like one reason the conservatives are powerful right now is because they are cohesive. They have a plan, they use a netwrok, they get their way. Liberals don't. I fear that if we continue on a free, but individual, thinkers, we'll lose more elections.

I know that democrats and atheists are only tangentially linked, but the issue at heart is similar.

I don't think we need a group, exactly.

5 Replies

@littlek,

I understand, get your point.
I generally like spendi except when he drives me nuts, and definitely listen to georgeob.
I'm not sure we need a group, but a little heartening is good. I've been active politically, but not right now.
In many ways I think it is the every day stuff, to just talk with whom you talk, which is hard to do when various sides spew tv news blips.

1 Reply

@littlek,

one reason the conservatives are powerful right now is because they are cohesive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They are in fact killing themselves by kicking out all but the narrowly define true believers out of the Replubican party in my opinion.

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@littlek,

littlek wrote:

Also, I feel like one reason the conservatives are powerful right now is because they are cohesive.

We are? I mean, We Are!

When pigs fly.

Anyhow, if you really equate conservative to religious, I guess I'll have to find a flag and wave it around till somebody notices.

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@roger,

Nods. But people think in blips.

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@spendius,

Quote:

@Setanta,

Hot describes an objective reality

I responded--

Quote:

That's just ridiculous. Hot is a human category. Like colour.

I'll expand on my reply.

Descartes and Galileo, prominent scientists, followed by John Locke, held that only mathematical attributes of objects had reality. Extension, shape and motion. Other attributes deriving from obsevation such as colour, sound, temperature, taste etc, are perceptions of the mind.

This scientific view assumes that all things are made up of minute particles in motion at certain wavelengths which affect us in slightly different ways. Some affect us as "red" or "hot" or "bitter" etc.

The "reality", the thing in itself, we can never fully know. It is a collection of vibrating particles which a scientist might give names to in order to delude us that we know what they are. That does not detract from the scientist putting them to use.

The "redness", say, or the "hotness" are merely the signs in our consciousness that a particular motion is affecting us. Such attributes are subjective and are no more "in" the things than a pain is in the flame that burns us.

Such a view is difficult enough to grasp in our scientific age. It contradicts common sense. Unsteadying one might say. So imagine it being exposed to an agrarian population in the 17th century.

One might easily see why Galileo was persuaded to restrict what he knew to a small circle of experts. One might as well criticise the Church for its gentle persuasion of Galileo as criticise our governments for having Secrets legislation and even executing some who were convicted of offending against it.

When I see someone use the Galileo incident to attack religion I know I am witnessing the emotional outpourings of a person who is on that level of scientific ignorance which believes that "hot describes an objective reality" and compounding the offence by assuming that everyone else shares his subjectivities which can only be emotional.

As the materialist can only view emotions in a similar way as he views a flame he can only safely discuss their affects as they impinge on his subjective consciousness which is an entity materialists are not supposed to have let alone display.

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@Pemerson,

Pemerson wrote:

Where do athiests plan to go 'as a group?'
I'm asking what will athiests do other than say they are athiests. I thought people would learn something more about athiests if any of you knew about Obama's plan to attend this "meeting."

Except for a handful of ranting militants who call themselves atheists, i cannot think of any reason to consider them as being the members of a group, other than by external definition. Rejecting a belief system doesn't make one the member of a club, just because those in do so have a "family resemblance" in the eyes those who resent or don't understand that rejection.

Quote:

The first Christians were killed?
I think the Cathars were considered to be Christians but I don't think they called themselves Christians. They taught and lived by the teachings of Jesus, mostly the Book of John. The Albigensian Crusade began in 1209 and ended in 1321. There were also several other religions that existed at the time. Anyone who didn't agreed with the Catholics died. Most people know that. After that Crusade came The Inquisition.

This is so fraught with misinformation, i hardly know where to start. The Cathars certainly did consider themselves to be Christians. They can hardly be described as "the first Christians," however, given that they first appear a thousand years after the cult of Christianity began, and were not finally disposed of until two hundred years later.

You're making a distinction here which is disingenuous. There were no other Christians in Europe other than the Catholics, with the exception of the Greek Orthodox Church and its adherents, who didn't consider themselves to be much separated from the Catholics, except on certain minute points of theology. When the Protestants appear after the Reformation, they just as eagerly killed Catholics, and one another--they also burned witches in appalling numbers. I smell a Protestant rat here, and suspect that you are in the grip of typical Protestant anti-Catholic hysterical paranoia--so no, most people don't necessarily "know that." To me, of course, it's all one. Christians are dangerous and murderous, and they continue to prove that right up to the present day.

The inquisition was an office of the church the purpose of which was to inquire (hence inquisition) into allegations of apostasy or heresy--it was an investigative and prosecutorial office of the church. It existed a long time, and it did not suddenly spring into existence after the Albigensian crusade. The inquisition to which i suspect you refer is the special office of the inquisition granted to the dual monarchs of Castile and Aragon, Isabella and Ferdinand. In 1492, they accomplished the reconquista, the driving of the Moors (descendants of North African Muslims) from the Iberian peninsula. Most people would think "Spain," although Spain as we know it did not then exist.

Having succeeded in their military campaign against the Muslims, they undertook to drive all Jews out of what we now think of as Spain, and then in 1502 began the expulsion of the Muslims. To that purpose, the Pope allowed them to establish a special permanent office of the inquisition in Spain. This is hardly to be wondered at, since the Pope, Alexander VI, known to the Italians as Rodrigo Borgia, was himself Spanish. But the inquisition did not suddenly spring into existence. Historians generally recognize several inquisitions, and all proceeded from an existing papal office for the investigation and suppression of heresy and apostasy.

It sounds to me like you're retailing Protestant bigotry. And like all bigotry, it demonstrates that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This doesn't mean, though, that i'm calling you a bigot--i do suspect, though, that you hold your beliefs largely unexamined.

1 Reply

@littlek,

littlek wrote:

I don't think we need a group, exactly.

Agreed.

I don't, however, make the political associations which you do. I've known people who are atheists who are also political conservatives. A friend of mine to whom one must never mention religion, because he become positively apoplectic, is an admirer of George Bush, and both a social and political conservative.

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@littlek,

littlek wrote:

I feel like the greater population has no idea what atheism is, who we are, what we think and do. I feel like it is in our interest to be vocal about the idea that we are upright, moral, compassionate people with good values (in general).

And I' m sure you are. However, I find your suggestion that "the greater population" doesn't understand atheism or atheists a bit strange. In my experience of life I have found that "the greater population" is usually far more astute and aware than self-designated elites, particularly secular academic types, generally realize. There is nothing about atheists that makes them harder to understand than any other group or class of people, except perhaps for the fact that they don't conceptually accept familiar religious restraints on their behavior - though in practical fact that usually doesn't make much difference.

littlek wrote:

Also, I feel like one reason the conservatives are powerful right now is because they are cohesive. They have a plan, they use a netwrok, they get their way. Liberals don't. I fear that if we continue on a free, but individual, thinkers, we'll lose more elections.

I know that democrats and atheists are only tangentially linked, but the issue at heart is similar.

I think the links, however tangential, have to do with with the ambition to perfect the lives of others through secular human intelligence, organization and administration - even to Plato's philosopher kings. The 20th century offers some rather ghastly examples of the potential consequences. What could have been more benignly rational than the Marxist utopia, promised by that atheist political doctrine? What could have been worse than the resulting reality?

Do you really think that conservatives are more powerful than "liberals" in American politics right now? Given the liberal/Democrat numbers in our legislature and their cohesive pursuit of their agenda in the face of fairly widespread and vocal opposition, I find that view quite remarkable. Indeed it is the liberals, not the conservatives who have a "plan": the conservartives are simply united (to the degree they are united) only by their opposition to it - "the party of no".

In the domain of intellectual approaches to politics, atheists are distinguished by the conceptual absence of any supra human restraints on their plans and actions. In practice, believers are too often distinguished by their ability to easily overcome these restraints, indeed, even to pervert them and use them to rationalize awful deeds. However their conceptual rejection by atheists is not without its salient dangers as well. The human spirit is not well-adapted to ant hills, however well and brilliantly they may be designed by the latest self-appointed philosopher king.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

What could have been more benignly rational than the Marxist utopia, promised by that atheist political doctrine? What could have been worse than the resulting reality?

How about the reality created by that Roman Catholic Adolf Hitler?

georgeob1 wrote:

In the domain of intellectual approaches to politics, atheists are distinguished by the conceptual absence of any supra human restraints on their plans and actions.

They can be, however, quite open to the conceptual presence of human restraints on their plans and actions. Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill were all deists -- not much different from atheists in their views about super-human constraints on human actions.

I think your post just confirmed the point of littlek's that you tried to refute: You don't know all that much about atheists.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Thomas. Yes, how about it?

However you are not addressing the central points of what I wrote at all: merely throwing some dust in the air.

I did think some of littlek's statements were fairly revealing.

1 Reply

Your post was very revealing, also, O'George. It seems that you cannot escape a religious prejudice to the effect that man is essentially sinful, and needs the active intervention of the deity--or his representatives on earth--to restrain their base impulses. As you point out yourself, it can't even be relied upon to achieve its purpose, so what value can be attached to organized religion?

But, as Thomas points out, you seem to prove Lil Kay's points. Most glaringly, in your assumption that an atheist cannot have an ethical or moral system of values without resort to the bogeyman superstition which is religion.

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@Setanta,

I made no assertions about the nature of mankind except that our nature has not proven to be very compatable with various attempts to organize us into man-made utopias. You are merely attacking a straw religious man of your own imagining.

I most certainly did not assert that atheists cannot have or observe systems of moral values. Neither did I suggest that atheists were as a rule any better or worse behaved than believers.

I did note that in the realm of intellectual constructs for political action, atheists do not acknowledge some external moral restraints that might limit what they do or propose. I also noted that the presence of these restraints has not been a guarantee of good outcomes. However, to use littlek's phrase, "the greater population" may have good reason to wonder at their absence.

1 Reply

In my personal experience, almost every time a person discerns that I am atheist, I get a knee-jerk reaction. I get either a look of disapproval followed by getting ignored, or a full blast of indignation. I don't think people are as cognizant, re atheism, as some on here suggest.

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To me, there is a disconnect between conservatism and fundamentalism. There are a good many conservative atheists, at least privately. But the fundamentalist is the one going berserk over the concept. One of the strongest atheist voices I can imagine was in the writing of Phillip Wylie, who was very conservative, politically.

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I don't see atheists in general pushing for utopia. Justice and understanding, yes.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

I made no assertions about the nature of mankind except that our nature has not proven to be very compatable with various attempts to organize us into man-made utopias. You are merely attacking a straw religious man of your own imagining.

I most certainly did not assert that atheists cannot have or observe systems of moral values. Neither did I suggest that atheists were as a rule any better or worse behaved than believers.

To put it politely--nonsense.

You wrote:

There is nothing about atheists that makes them harder to understand than any other group or class of people, except perhaps for the fact that they don't conceptually accept familiar religious restraints on their behavior - though in practical fact that usually doesn't make much difference.

and . . .

You wrote:

In the domain of intellectual approaches to politics, atheists are distinguished by the conceptual absence of any supra human restraints on their plans and actions. In practice, believers are too often distinguished by their ability to easily overcome these restraints, indeed, even to pervert them and use them to rationalize awful deeds.

You are alleging that there ar no constraints upon the plans and actions of atheists (and one reasonably infers that this is because they are atheists), and then you are pointing out that these restraints do not, in fact, restrain the religious

I guess when we get right down to it, you're not really saying anything at all, huh?

1 Reply

You are alleging that there ar no constraints upon the plans and actions of atheists (and one reasonably infers that this is because they are atheists), and then you are pointing out that these restraints do not, in fact, restrain the religious

Hehehehehehehehehe he he he he he he he he he he he - okay. bye

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

You are alleging that there ar no constraints upon the plans and actions of atheists (and one reasonably infers that this is because they are atheists), and then you are pointing out that these restraints do not, in fact, restrain the religious

I guess when we get right down to it, you're not really saying anything at all, huh?

You are conveniently ignoring questions of degree that don't suit your prejudices.

I am suggesting that a subset of athiests, those with liberal (in the sense used in American politics) political views and inclined towards the perfection of the lives of others, may be less likely to be inhibited by external moral restraints.

That wasn't too hard, was it?

1 Reply

@edgarblythe,

And you guys write posts about somebody not having said anything at all, obviously due to a typo, and pass by posts that do say something.

Very good, very mature, very intellectual, eh eh eh?

0 Replies

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