Are atheists inevitably pessimists?

[David Mo]

Sounds like a personal problem.

Don't think the desire to live a human life is a personal problem.

 

[dann]

Are atheists inevitably pessimists?

No, atheists have reasons to be cheerful:

The Number of Americans with No Religious Affiliation Is Rising (Scientific American, April 1, 2018)
The Guardian view on irreligion in the US: a rising tide (Guardian, May 19, 2017)
Irreligion Rising: Why More Americans Are Becoming Secular (Aug. 7, 2015)

 

[Oystein]

Yep. The world, considered as the deliberate work of a super-intelligent being, seems pretty fourth rate.

That is exactly what I dislike about the Fantasy genre: When things get difficult, dangerous, even impossible to solve or escape, you can always conjure up some magic or some superpower to lift the hero out of misery and prevent death and the premature end of the story.
That's intellectually lazy.
I very much prefer the courageous hero who is limited to actual, natural resources, but puts cleverness, wit and courage to creative use to solve a quagmire.

 

[Lithrael]

Don't think the desire to live a human life is a personal problem.

You mean engaging with all of our moral and meaningful quandaries? I'm only even able to do these things because of the luck of the draw of what I am. While it's an ideal I aspire to from time to time, I'm not obliged to do anything the cat is not obliged to do. I have lots of empathy so I'm motivated to want to help others, but meaning? It's just not in my wheelhouse.

 

[JesseCuster]

If you solve the problems of existence as an animal I don't know what to say. It doesn't work for me.

Humans are not separate from animals. We are animals.

'Fancy animal' I imagine was Lithrael's of referring to his humanity in a wry way. Humans aren't even that fancy as a species.

 

[Irony]

Having no underlying spiritual beliefs to mitigate suffering, are atheists inevitably seeing the world through a glass darkly?

The way I see it, religion is rather like an addictive drug whose nature its users are unaware of. They convince themselves that it's necessary to cure some inherent disease of humanity, never realizing that the "cure" is in fact the disease's source.

 

[David Mo]

You mean engaging with all of our moral and meaningful quandaries? I'm only even able to do these things because of the luck of the draw of what I am. While it's an ideal I aspire to from time to time, I'm not obliged to do anything the cat is not obliged to do. I have lots of empathy so I'm motivated to want to help others, but meaning? It's just not in my wheelhouse.

Humans are not separate from animals. We are animals.

'Fancy animal' I imagine was Lithrael's of referring to his humanity in a wry way. Humans aren't even that fancy as a species.

We're different animals. No cat poses moral dilemmas or writes a book about them. Empathy alone does not solve moral dilemmas.
No cat feels that the world is absurd and that one must give it meaning or fight against injustice.
No animal is defined by a project. Man does. It is the project that gives meaning.

No animal is defined by a project. Man does. It is the project that gives meaning.

 

[JesseCuster]

We're different animals. No cat poses moral dilemmas or writes a book about them. Empathy alone does not solve moral dilemmas.
No cat feels that the world is absurd and that one must give it meaning or fight against injustice.

The fact that we've walked on the moon or can contemplate our navel is no reason to divorce us from what we really are.

Has anyone suggested that 'empathy alone' can solve moral dilemmas? I might have missed that claim in this thread.

 

[Lithrael]

That's kid of the rub, really. I don't know if moral dilemmas are solvable, and they're certainly not solvable by me. And why should they be solved by me? We give the cat a pass cause it's incapable of operating on such a level. Why not give myself a pass too? I'm not THAT much better at it than the cat is. I'm gonna go ahead and flip the bird to the idea that the ability to do a thing implies an obligation to do it.

It's not unlikely that the closest we can get to The Truth is already out there and just doesn't have any traction - in which case what good is it really? Besides participating in collective action I'm going to get a lot more positive mileage out of personal level, empathy based actions, than out of trying to figure out The Truth.

Again though not dissing philosophy in general, just saying it's not really for me.

 

[Scorpion]

We're different animals. No cat poses moral dilemmas or writes a book about them. Empathy alone does not solve moral dilemmas.
No cat feels that the world is absurd and that one must give it meaning or fight against injustice.
No animal is defined by a project. Man does. It is the project that gives meaning.

No animal is defined by a project. Man does. It is the project that gives meaning.

You have obviously not read the books of Lobsang Rampa. I think it was the fourth book in the series which describes cat legends which cats apparently tell each other. I threw out his previous three books when I read that. It strained even my credibility.

 

[Darat]

You have obviously not read the books of Lobsang Rampa. I think it was the fourth book in the series which describes cat legends which cats apparently tell each other. I threw out his previous three books when I read that. It strained even my credibility.

Another source rejected.....

 

[Thor 2]

You have obviously not read the books of Lobsang Rampa. I think it was the fourth book in the series which describes cat legends which cats apparently tell each other. I threw out his previous three books when I read that. It strained even my credibility.

I'm surprised. I thought you might run with the idea of cats chatting, as you told us that all animals have souls in another post.

Your credibility seems to be remarkably robust and I wonder what yardstick you use, to establish the truth or reliability of a source of knowledge. Do you just feel things in your chakras, or is it the spirits talking to you? As I have gleaned from your writings, you seem to need mediums to obtain the messages from the spirits, so how do you establish if the medium is genuine or fake?

 

[Scorpion]

I'm surprised. I thought you might run with the idea of cats chatting, as you told us that all animals have souls in another post.

Your credibility seems to be remarkably robust and I wonder what yardstick you use, to establish the truth or reliability of a source of knowledge. Do you just feel things in your chakras, or is it the spirits talking to you? As I have gleaned from your writings, you seem to need mediums to obtain the messages from the spirits, so how do you establish if the medium is genuine or fake?

I need mediums to get clear messages from the spirits and the quality of the message you receive tends to be the only measure of whether a medium is genuine or not. If they tell you enough factual things they could not have known, it indicates they may be genuine.

 

[Thor 2]

I need mediums to get clear messages from the spirits and the quality of the message you receive tends to be the only measure of whether a medium is genuine or not. If they tell you enough factual things they could not have known, it indicates they may be genuine.

You're not underestimating the cold reading ability and research efforts of some mediums are you?

Do mediums refer clients to each other? Do mediums have a network and compare notes perhaps? ...... "I had a client the other day who may be coming to see you. I can give you some facts about this guy, like his penchant for parrots climbing on his glasses."

From what I read there seem to be a couple of different types of mediums. You have the ones that listen to the spirits and past the message on to you - like the John Edwards type. And then there are the ones that lend their voices to spirits who talk directly to you. The later type usually claim no knowledge of what message was conveyed. What sort of medium do you go for?

 

[Pixel42]

What the marks think a medium could not have known, and what a medium could have found out/intelligently guessed/got right by chance amongst a bunch of stuff they got wrong which the mark promptly forgot about, are two different things. That's why only testing under scientifically rigorous conditions can actually determine which mediums are genuine. So far the number of genuine mediums identified is zero.

 

[David Mo]

You have obviously not read the books of Lobsang Rampa. I think it was the fourth book in the series which describes cat legends which cats apparently tell each other. I threw out his previous three books when I read that. It strained even my credibility.

No, obviously not and you should give me very strong reasons to do so. I am not interested in pseudoscience mixed with pseudomisticism.

 

[David Mo]

The fact that we've walked on the moon or can contemplate our navel is no reason to divorce us from what we really are.

Has anyone suggested that 'empathy alone' can solve moral dilemmas? I might have missed that claim in this thread.

Divorcing man from the animal would be stupid.
Not to recognize what differentiates man from animals would be absurd.
Projecting the present into the future, giving meaning, posing moral problems are essential differences. There is more.

 

[David Mo]

That's kid of the rub, really. I don't know if moral dilemmas are solvable, and they're certainly not solvable by me. And why should they be solved by me? We give the cat a pass cause it's incapable of operating on such a level. Why not give myself a pass too? I'm not THAT much better at it than the cat is. I'm gonna go ahead and flip the bird to the idea that the ability to do a thing implies an obligation to do it.

It's not unlikely that the closest we can get to The Truth is already out there and just doesn't have any traction - in which case what good is it really? Besides participating in collective action I'm going to get a lot more positive mileage out of personal level, empathy based actions, than out of trying to figure out The Truth.

Again though not dissing philosophy in general, just saying it's not really for me.

I don't understand the cat passing. What does it mean?

In any case you cannot make disappear the moral dilemmas because they bother you. They are there when you are faced with decisions such as voting or not voting, helping or not helping, supporting or not supporting, fighting or not fighting...

Using empathy to deal with the dilemmas posed by social life is a good philosophy, but not enough. Faced with such problems you will have to decide when and how to apply empathy and for that you will need something more. What?

Your reference to The Truth amazes me. Sounds like a cult. Have you ever been involved in one? I'm afraid you interpret "searching for meaning" in religious terms. You are mistaken. It is a problem raised by prominent atheists such as Sartre or Camus who did not believe in any Truth.

 

[Lithrael]

“Give a pass” means to excuse someone for not doing or attending something.

The moral quandary does not go away if I don’t deal with it, correct. But what I’m saying is I can’t solve the moral quandary anyway. It’s going to stay there no matter what I do. I’m absolutely not going to get better results with any formal philosophy than I am with Best Guess intersection of empathy and available info when it comes to my personal level choices.

This is sort of what I mean when I say maybe the truth is out there but has no traction; if we had a reliable way to answer these questions of what to do and a reliable way of figuring out goals to strive for then a whole lot of us would already be doing and using those methods and we’d be able to point to what obviously works, instead of the whole thing of humanity being a barely navigable morass of ideas.

I’m just using “truth” as a shorthand for whatever philosophy is trying to reach. That “something more” you say I need.

 

[David Mo]

“Give a pass” means to excuse someone for not doing or attending something.

The moral quandary does not go away if I don’t deal with it, correct. But what I’m saying is I can’t solve the moral quandary anyway. It’s going to stay there no matter what I do. I’m absolutely not going to get better results with any formal philosophy than I am with Best Guess intersection of empathy and available info when it comes to my personal level choices.

This is sort of what I mean when I say maybe the truth is out there but has no traction; if we had a reliable way to answer these questions of what to do and a reliable way of figuring out goals to strive for then a whole lot of us would already be doing and using those methods and we’d be able to point to what obviously works, instead of the whole thing of humanity being a barely navigable morass of ideas.

I’m just using “truth” as a shorthand for whatever philosophy is trying to reach. That “something more” you say I need.

I don't know what "formal" philosophy you're talking about that wants to reach the "truth." We all want to achieve some truth. But the methods are many and the truths too. Some philosophers use some methods and others use different methods. There is a lot of diversity. If you don't precise, we don't know what you're talking about.

Nor is it understood what you mean by solving a moral problem. There are no algorithms or crucial experiments in morality. There are decisions to be made and ways to justify them. Moral philosophy (formal or informal) is charged of analysing these latter.

Your way of solving a moral problem includes empathy, information and goals. As I said this includes at least two points that are strictly philosophical. To whom do you direct empathy and which goals are the best. If the word philosophy bothers you, use another one. What you do will be what philosophers have been doing for centuries.