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Split Thread Atheism and lack of belief in the afterlife

arthwollipot said:
...I can't believe that I'm having this conversation again..
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I think it's like flared trousers - it comes in a cycle every decade or so.

psionl0 said:
That is exactly what it means. Outside of this forum, you won't find anybody saying that atheism is a "lack of belief".
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Yes you will, it's what the word means.

Without god/s. Very simple concept that everyone not a theist understands, and even lots of theists recognise it as correct.

As Penn Jillette - I think - once pointed thesists are atheist about every god that ever existed. Except for their one.
 
psionl0 said:
I discussed this in post #11. Are you claiming that one can come back to life without some agency* reconstructing your essence?

* I would say "some god" but you always ask, "which god?" as if it made a difference.
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ISTR during a discussion with PartSkeptic I fantasised about a far distant future in which our descendants had complete mastery of space and time, and were able to retrieve the consciousness of anyone who had ever lived at the moment of their death and transfer it into a practically immortal cloned body to live again. Naturally they would be choosy about who they invited to join them in their utopia, irrational and bigoted individuals would not fit in. I think I specifically ruled out anyone who'd voted for Donald Trump or Brexit. :D
 
Pixel42 said:
ISTR during a discussion with PartSkeptic I fantasised about a far distant future in which our descendants had complete mastery of space and time, and were able to retrieve the consciousness of anyone who had ever lived at the moment of their death and transfer it into a practically immortal cloned body to live again.
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Transferring your consciousness into a "practically immortal cloned body" prior to death might be technologically feasible in the far distant future but I suspect that after death, all bets are off.

Pixel42 said:
Naturally they would be choosy about who they invited to join them in their utopia, irrational and bigoted individuals would not fit in. I think I specifically ruled out anyone who'd voted for Donald Trump or Brexit. :D
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If the world is going to be that super politically correct in the far distant future then I think that I will pass.
 
psionl0 said:
..... the concept of an afterlife is closely intertwined with the concept of gods,...
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Can you describe those concepts?

I think the problem is you have a different concept of what "after life" is from what an atheist has.

As evinced by the below...


psionl0 said:
.....Are you claiming that one can come back to life without some agency reconstructing your essence?....
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psionl0 said:
Transferring your consciousness into a "practically immortal cloned body" prior to death might be technologically feasible in the far distant future but I suspect that after death, all bets are off.
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Like I said, in this fantasy time is not a barrier. They can retrieve anyone's consciousness from any point in time.

If the world is going to be that super politically correct in the far distant future then I think that I will pass.
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What makes you think you'd be among the ones given the option. ;)
 
Psion, you seem to be confused about

a) "belief in god(s)" (or lack thereof) vs "any belief in anything anyone ever associated with a god". The two are not even remotely the same. I can be an atheist and believe that R'lyeh is gonna rise this solstice and Cthulhu is gonna get us all. (Since He's not a God but a high priest of the Great Old Ones.) Or I can believe in Karma without believing there's a God dispensing it. (The difference between Buddhism and Hinduism in regards to Karma, in a nutshell.) I can believe I'm gonna be lucky at the roulette table without believing in the goddess Fortuna.

b) "not believing X" vs "believing not X". Dunno what gives you the idea that the two are incompatible. In fact they are very much compatible. E.g., not believing that it's night is perfectly compatible with believing it's not night. E.g., not believing in dragons is perfectly compatible with believing there are no dragons.
 
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psionl0 said:
I discussed this in post #11. Are you claiming that one can come back to life without some agency* reconstructing your essence?
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I'm not claiming anything bar what the words mean, afterlife and god are two different things, you need to establish why the same arguments can be used to make a claim about either.

psionl0 said:
* I would say "some god" but you always ask, "which god?" as if it made a difference.
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An untruth.
 
psionl0 said:
I discussed this in post #11. Are you claiming that one can come back to life without some agency* reconstructing your essence?
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To see how daft that question is, let me rephrase it to you: Are you claiming that I can read my emails on another computer without some agency personally copying the bits from one computer to the other? :p

Or: are you saying that the Lich King can be back alive for the next raid without some agency personally reconstructing his essence? :p

It's quite trivial to imagine some fantasy scenario where, just as the theists said, the brain is just a receiver. Except without involving a god. It could be any entity that is doing the processing for everyone, without being conscious or having any agency. It could be some shared consciousness mumbo-jumbo, or whatever. In which case, the info 'in your brain' never went anywhere because it wasn't (just) stored in your brain in the first place.

Now I don't actually believe any of that to be true, but it's not even hard to come up with something like that.
 
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psionl0 said:
You mean like an ISP? :p
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Except that server doesn't actually have any agency, and most definitely doesn't qualify as a god in any meaningful sense. I mean, it can be the same as I have to go to the can after drinking a sixpack of beer. Sure, SOMETHING is causing the beer to turn into pee, but it sure as heck isn't conscious and it doesn't actually have any agency. It's just some molecules in my body interacting.

Just saying, the same can be handwaved for a cosmic consciousness kind of persistence or any other claptrap, without involving a god or really anything with any agency.

In fact, Buddhism is the best example of how you can literally have that kind of persistence of self, even supposedly (to some extent) lessons learned in previous life, and an afterlife (not just reincarnation, but the whole Nirvana too) without involving any god. Not even greater spirits like in Animism. Siddhartha Gautama, aka the Buddha is not a god, he's not saving you, he's not the one reconstructing your essence, or anything. He's just the guy who figured it out. Kinda like Einstein isn't the one preventing you from going faster than light, he's just the one who figured out relativity. Buddhism literally proposes that there's a cause-effect sort of cosmic mechanism by which you pretty much sort YOURSELF into whether you manage to ascend to Nirvana, or reincarnate. If you cling too much to desires, like, you know, the desire to keep living, you go this way, if not, you go the other way. Pretty much in the same way as you float if you're naked, sink if you're wearing a mail shirt. Just physical cause-effect. Literally no god is involved. Nobody is judging you or intervening in any way.
 
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psionl0 said:
That is exactly what it means. Outside of this forum, you won't find anybody saying that atheism is a "lack of belief".
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How about the Oxford Dictionary? -- "disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods."

per: Google.
 
psionl0 said:
But the real reason seems to be to enlarge the set of atheists. Many here will claim that babies are born atheist by default because they are not born with a belief in any god. Never mind that this argument could equally apply to a block of wood.
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Do you care whether babies are born atheists or not?

I've seen babies. They're total idiots.
 
psionl0 said:
Is that what you are so afraid of? Somebody who doesn't understand English?
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What I am "so afraid of" is the implication that NON-believing in gods allows for the possibility that one's belief system is wrong - i.e. it is possible that there ARE gods. And this is not strong enough for a true atheist whose position is simply that there are no gods.
 
Tassman said:
What I am "so afraid of" is the implication that NON-believing in gods allows for the possibility that one's belief system is wrong - i.e. it is possible that there ARE gods. And this is not strong enough for a true atheist whose position is simply that there are no gods.
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No, it's worse than that. The argument is that atheism is just as much a belief system as theism. Therefore any argument you make against my religion is equally applicable to atheism, therefore tu quoque.
 
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