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Split Thread Atheism and lack of belief in the afterlife

I'm hesitant to bring this up least dishonest parties use it hijack, but there are on the very fringes a few things which MAYBE (obviously this becomes a lot of semantics and categorization real quick) been seen as a natural or secular afterlife, mostly things involving brain-uploading and AI and all that. Ray Kurzweil kinda stuff.
 
bruto said:
I really can't see how an afterlife can be considered as anything but supernatural, and thus tied to some supernatural force. Sure, we have in our historical past attributed supernatural forces to natural phenomena, but in the case of death, the very definition of death would be an oxymoron.
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I basically agree. However, to somewhat rephrase Clarke, any sufficiently undescribed natural phenomenon is indistinguishable from supernatural. This whole discussion started because someone said that you can't be an atheist and believe in an afterlife.

And atheism does not necessarily exclude the supernatural. It just excludes gods.

Nitpicking, I know, but this seems to be a nitpicking thread.

Hans
 
JoeMorgue said:
I'm hesitant to bring this up least dishonest parties use it hijack, but there are on the very fringes a few things which MAYBE (obviously this becomes a lot of semantics and categorization real quick) been seen as a natural or secular afterlife, mostly things involving brain-uploading and AI and all that. Ray Kurzweil kinda stuff.
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Yes, interesting point. We may now begin to try to define "afterlife". Or ... we may refrain from that. :boggled:

Hans
 
Darat said:
A strange use of the word "obviously" - especially as you have already been given examples of an existing religion that millions of people follow that has no such agency but believe in an afterlife.
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What Pterry called a "wallpaper word", used to try and cover a gaping hole in an argument.
 
It's not just that atheists lack belief in the afterlife. It's that we don't believe most of the nonsense that goes along with religion.

I mean the Bible starts out with a talking snake. After that, there is a 500 year old man building a huge boat in the desert. A man being swallowed by a fish and living inside it for three days. A woman turned into salt. Sticks magically changing into snakes. A man with super-human strength losing it all after getting a haircut. Etc. Etc. Etc.

I don't need Science proving that the Earth is 4.5 billion years and evolution for me not to believe in God and the Bible. The Bible is not believable all by itself.
 
I hate the term "atheist" because it conceptualizes the entire discussion inside the concept of religious belief, a case of "Well before we even start the discussion we'll have to agree to rules as how we phrase everything that already prove I'm right."

I'm, of course, an atheist but it's not a term I apply mentally to myself. It's meaningless. I don't have a special term in my brain for the fact that I don't believe shovels can fly under their own power or that a block of Wisconsin Sharp Cheddar Cheese is aerodynamically stable at Mach 7 or anything else.

All god has is cultural inertia, popularity power, and a crap ton of special pleadings and argumentative trolling.

That's why I keep going back to Sagan's Garage Dragon metaphor. The point of that whole thing is not to start a debate about the existence of dragons or a thought experiment about how you would detect a dragon, it's a parable pointing out the absurdity of looking for the dragon in the first place. In the real world that entire parable would last about 2 seconds before "Why are looking for a dragon?" would be the end results and that's the whole point.

That's the distinction the God Excusers refuse to address because they can't. If you look into a garage, don't see a dragon, you don't start a debate where the existence of the dragon is proved or not proved you never bother asking the question "Hey is there a dragon in this garage?" because that would be stupid.

Pearls shall be clutched and vapors shall be had and a lot of wasted hot air about "Just asking questions" and "Ya know in philosphiaballaly it's good to make up stupid questions for no reason and then never let it go" is gonna get spewed at me but... I'm right.

I don't not believe in God. I don't hold a negative belief in God. I don't swear that I hold the personal belief that there exists an exactly .0013% chance that an statistical average of all beings that could be called God exists.

There is no God.
 
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psionl0 said:
You may not realize it but you brought religion back into the question.

I never claimed that an afterlife can exist only if God exists. I merely claimed that some agency (or undefined gods) must exist and you are claiming the same thing.
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Those gods or deities in Buddhism and Jainism aren't "agency". They're fictive, obviously, so that all of this is kind of angels-on-head-of-pin territory; but the point is, while they're there, sure, but they have nothing to do with the afterlife per se, and nor are they some kind of creators or keepers of the afterlife. That is, these systems posit different planes of existence, and these gods and deities (as well as demons and ghouls) inhabit their respective planes much as we inhabit this plane of ours (basis their theology/cosmology); and they are as much subject to the law of cause-and-effect (the karma thing), in their lives as well as their afterlifes (afterlives?), much as we are in ours. Like I said, kind of angels-on-pin territory, but I hope you can see the difference.

TLDR: Those gods aren't "agency".
 
acbytesla said:
It's not just that atheists lack belief in the afterlife. It's that we don't believe most of the nonsense that goes along with religion.

I mean the Bible starts out with a talking snake. After that, there is a 500 year old man building a huge boat in the desert. A man being swallowed by a fish and living inside it for three days. A woman turned into salt. Sticks magically changing into snakes. A man with super-human strength losing it all after getting a haircut. Etc. Etc. Etc.

I don't need Science proving that the Earth is 4.5 billion years and evolution for me not to believe in God and the Bible. The Bible is not believable all by itself.
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Haha, true, it's risible, the thought of grown men (and women) seriously sitting down to "study" all of those completely infantile fairy tales -- and not as Tolkien fans might "study" Tolkien, but studying it as relating to actual reality.

Regardless of the God question, what kind of retard would seriously consider that any of those things might be true? In this day and age? And yet there are, like literally millions that do.
 
Chanakya said:
Haha, true, it's risible, the thought of grown men (and women) seriously sitting down to "study" all of those completely infantile fairy tales -- and not as Tolkien fans might "study" Tolkien, but studying it as relating to actual reality.

Regardless of the God question, what kind of retard would seriously consider that any of those things might be true? In this day and age? And yet there are, like literally millions that do.
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I usually say when they ask me why I don’t believe one simple phrase. Well it's not believable.

Seriously, 9 out of 10 of these Christians wouldn't believe me if I said snakes and donkeys talled to me. So why does it become believable if it was said by somebody 4,000 years ago?
 
psionl0 said:
That is a really terrible analogy. Earthquakes are real but there is no evidence that anybody experiences an afterlife.
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Many people, based on the evidence, believe that earthquakes occur. Is this the same in your view, as the belief that gods exist? That an afterlife exists?
Is the “belief” system that you so much want to apply to atheism similar to the belief that earthquakes occur? A “belief” for which the words, understand, or perceive, or recognize, or even know can be substituted?
 
I don't believe in an afterlife, but there's no reason I couldn't. This life seems to do fine without a God, I see no reason why another plane of existence couldn't also manage without one.
 
Steve said:
Many people, based on the evidence, believe that earthquakes occur. Is this the same in your view, as the belief that gods exist? That an afterlife exists?
Is the “belief” system that you so much want to apply to atheism similar to the belief that earthquakes occur? A “belief” for which the words, understand, or perceive, or recognize, or even know can be substituted?
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I have experienced earthquakes and I have seen credible news reports of earthquakes in other parts of the world. There is no faith required here.

OTOH I have never seen any (recognizable) gods nor have I seen anybody who has "risen" from the dead (and if they are living somewhere else then I have no knowledge of it). It would take an act of faith to believe that gods or an afterlife exist.

I don't see how this analogy bears the slightest resemblance to gods/afterlife.
 
psionl0 said:
....I have no knowledge of it). It would take an act of faith to believe that gods or an afterlife exist.....
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People who use that kind "faith" ought to admit that the word in this context really means acute credulous gullibility and absolutely clueless irrationality and pathetic wishful thinking and of course oblivious tribalism and chronic indoctrination and acculturation and special pleading galore... no?
 
psionl0 said:
....
OTOH I have never seen any (recognizable) gods nor have I seen anybody who has "risen" from the dead (and if they are living somewhere else then I have no knowledge of it).
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So why are you even discussing what you admit you have no knowledge about.,, this is just a fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam through and through... why do you keep engaging in this fallacy over and over??
 
psionl0 said:
I have experienced earthquakes and I have seen credible news reports of earthquakes in other parts of the world. There is no faith required here.

OTOH I have never seen any (recognizable) gods nor have I seen anybody who has "risen" from the dead (and if they are living somewhere else then I have no knowledge of it). It would take an act of faith to believe that gods or an afterlife exist.

I don't see how this analogy bears the slightest resemblance to gods/afterlife.
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Conversely, having not experienced gods or an afterlife, it takes no act of faith, or belief, to think that gods or an afterlife do not exist. There is just no reason to think they do.
 
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