A Failure To Convince Me That Any Gods Exist

Atheism is older than ANY religion, let alone Judaism and Christianity.

but this is absurd, art, for how could atheism exist without something to deny?

And I see your type of atheism, which is after all hardly a rare or exotic outlook amongst the secular intelligentsia, exactly as a reactionary movement against mainly Protestant dogmatism.

This is why secularism is so much like the religion it is reacting against.

If you were completely indifferent to the idea of God, you would never have started this conversation, would not be persisting with it, and would have nothing to say on the matter.

So how could it not be reactionary?

If you say so. But I will give you this, you're a good conversationalist.

Incidentally, the original intent of skepticism was a spiritual philosophy, very close to Buddhism. Might start a thread on that topic.

Failures Art wrote:

Atheism is older than ANY religion, let alone Judaism and Christianity.

but this is absurd, art, for how could atheism exist without something to deny?

but I think where your argument fails is to presume that a worldview divorced from any 'sense of the sacred' is a normal worldview. I don't think it is a normal worldview, except in the context of modern western society.

I think there is a strong religious instinct in the human species, and for various reasons, it has been suppressed or denied.

jeeprs wrote:

This implies that the above was meant to taken as things being innately sacred.

Religion is learned thing. Babies are not born in Cleveland, Cape Town, and New Delhi with some sort of default religious nature that supports the idea that religion is instinctual.

The worldview us moderns have is actually highly artificial and completely unrealistic. This shows up in various indirect ways, most often, in ordinary society, as a sense of lack, which people try and restlessly deny or fill up through various diversions or addictions. So if you were able to show me a magnificently well-adjusted populace without obesity and addiction epidemics, and a harmonious and peaceful economy where everyone contributed and we were all working towards the common good, then I might believe that we are not missing out on something of fundamental importance about the nature of existence.

But as it happens, I don't.

but I think where your argument fails is to presume that a worldview divorced from any 'sense of the sacred' is a normal worldview.

So if you were able to show me a magnificently well-adjusted populace without obesity and addiction epidemics, and a harmonious and peaceful economy where everyone contributed and we were all working towards the common good, then I might believe that we are not missing out on something of fundamental importance about the nature of existence.

I think it is quite possible for the atheist to lead a happy and fulfilling life, provided he/she is motivated and balanced and so on.

But how many people are like that?

The reason the religions have a job to do is because humans are not naturally inclined towards sweetness and light.

There are very basic facts about the human situation which they generally don't want to know.

The only way to package these truths in such a way that people can understand them is to tell them in stories and symbolic accounts and to work out ways to enact them.

And you will never convince me that a spiritual hunger is not a deep and ever-present drive in the modern world. It is there in almost everyone, generally unrecognised.

Certainly values can be transmitted from Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or even from the colorful pages of a Captain America Comic. We need not portray these events as true for their significance to be valid, nor is the act of storytelling inherently religious.