The dreaded "A" word

[Mark6]

Oh, I'm the one who made this forum a monothema experience, right? (You shall not start any other topic...)

Did you miss the forum title? You know, at the top of the page? Where it says Religion and Philosophy? Do you expect people to talk here about fishing?

 

[CriticalSock]

Right, I'm ready for the Antediluvian discussion!

 

[mijopaalmc]

I demur. While not intended as a perfect one-to-one correspondence, it is illustrative of the fact that, particularly here, most of the time atheists spend discussing 'god' is in response to some silly claim of proof of 'god's' existence, or properties, or necessity. Putting out the 'god' fires set by the superstitious.

Yeah, but the whole point is not that atheists' focus of the supernatural does not prove that the supernatural exist; rather, the point is that, if atheism is "only" about the non-belief in god, atheists expend an inordinate amount of energy discussing beliefs in the supernatural and consequence thereof. After all, to compare to a common analogy that atheists use to attempt to illustrate the fundamental differences between atheism the conflation of religion and belief in the supernatural (which is in itself problematic), people who don't collect stamps don't:

• refer to themselves as "non-philatelists"
• insist that adavances in science and technology that have rendered the postal service obsolete also render philately obsolete
• doubt the existence of philately as valid hobby, because stamp are "really" just pieces of paper decorated with ink that designate an arbitrary value within human society
• oppose philatelist organizations
• oppose philatelists' trying to get their children to practice philately
• form non-philatelist organizations
• write best-selling books about what an inherent evil philately is
• claim that other non-philatelists are not True Non-Philatelists™, because those non-philatelists don't share their opinion on the intellectual bankruptcy of philately
• claim that philatelists are mentally ill because the believe that philately valuable activity
• build non-philately into their identity

In othere words, there are many points of non-correspondence between atheism and many of the states or activties that atheists use that explain as defualt-state analogies and such non-correspondences help to illustrate why the form of "atheism" that has gained prominence in the early decades on the 21st century in qualitatively different in many fundamental ways than the default-state analogs that "atheists" claim as reasonable-by-analogy to atheism. Atheists, including those who don't get "fired up" in support of the recent self-identified, best-selling "atheist" authors, may choose to define "atheism" as "a lack of belief in God/god(s)", but it is clear from reading the aforementioned authors in genres that differ form the one in which they originally chose to express themselves that what is called "atheism" involves far more than the promoted definition implies, let alone logically entails.

 

[MikeG]

........ if atheism is "only" about the non-belief in god, atheists expend an inordinate amount of energy discussing beliefs in the supernatural and consequence thereof. ....

Only here.

Nowhere else in life. Indeed, this is just about the only place I could ever find a theist if I tried, and so is the only opportunity I personally ever get of discussing something that is as taken for granted as the air we breath and the setting of the sun.

Oh, and as for the rest of your monologue.......at least allow us the privilege of saying what is important to us, rather than have you decide it for us. Thanks.

Mike

 

[TimCallahan]

Living in the U.S., religion is a BIG deal. You may not be burned at the stake these days, but you have to be pretty circumspect in your conversation with friends and relatives who believe. Forget about politics, and in some cases, in spite of anti-discrimination laws, employment.
I hate the agnostic and atheist labels. People seem to have different opinions about what they mean. I think non-believer is a much clearer term, and states my position exactly.
I am encouraged to see that enlightenment has finally reached some areas of the globe.

The hilited area is particularly true. I have a feeling that an accused child molester who believes in God has a better chance of getting elected to any office than an atheist.

As to employment, when I was working at the Disney Feature Animation unit, one of the major animators there, an evangelical Christian, was notorious for pressuring the assistant animators who worked for him to join his prayer group. It was generally understood that, if you wanted to move up under his tutelage, you had to regularly attend his prayer group.

 

[TimCallahan]

You know who the super-hard atheists are, don't you? They would scream in horror when you show them the cross, and they also posses an interesting property: the mirror doesn't reflect their image.

I can always count on an insulting response from epix.

 

[Aepervius]

Blahblah snipped

All analogy break down at a certain point.

1) the phillatelly analogy is only useful in its context. Which is to make people udnerstand why atheism is NOT a religion. It is nigh useless in the context you are trying to use it.
2) Time I spend discussing bigfoot and stuff, skepticism in general : at most an hour a week. I spent more time discussing the latest news about Egypt yesterday during meal time.
3) this is a skeptic forum in which we discuss skeptic things. To take your wrongly used analogy, it would be a forum where we discuss hobby, and we are in the chess section, and you keept telling us that everything including chess ark back to philattelly, the greastest and first hobby of all. Expect us to dispue the assertion even if we consider ourselves not phillatellist.

 

[blutoski]

Yeah, but the whole point is not that atheists' focus of the supernatural does not prove that the supernatural exist; rather, the point is that, if atheism is "only" about the non-belief in god, atheists expend an inordinate amount of energy discussing beliefs in the supernatural and consequence thereof. After all, to compare to a common analogy that atheists use to attempt to illustrate the fundamental differences between atheism the conflation of religion and belief in the supernatural (which is in itself problematic), people who don't collect stamps don't:

• refer to themselves as "non-philatelists"
• insist that adavances in science and technology that have rendered the postal service obsolete also render philately obsolete
• doubt the existence of philately as valid hobby, because stamp are "really" just pieces of paper decorated with ink that designate an arbitrary value within human society
• oppose philatelist organizations
• oppose philatelists' trying to get their children to practice philately
• form non-philatelist organizations
• write best-selling books about what an inherent evil philately is
• claim that other non-philatelists are not True Non-Philatelists™, because those non-philatelists don't share their opinion on the intellectual bankruptcy of philately
• claim that philatelists are mentally ill because the believe that philately valuable activity
• build non-philately into their identity

In othere words, there are many points of non-correspondence between atheism and many of the states or activties that atheists use that explain as defualt-state analogies and such non-correspondences help to illustrate why the form of "atheism" that has gained prominence in the early decades on the 21st century in qualitatively different in many fundamental ways than the default-state analogs that "atheists" claim as reasonable-by-analogy to atheism. Atheists, including those who don't get "fired up" in support of the recent self-identified, best-selling "atheist" authors, may choose to define "atheism" as "a lack of belief in God/god(s)", but it is clear from reading the aforementioned authors in genres that differ form the one in which they originally chose to express themselves that what is called "atheism" involves far more than the promoted definition implies, let alone logically entails.

One of the tasks in critical thinking is identifying "weak analogies" or "disanalogies"

I've always found the analogy of atheism as similar to 'not stamp collecting' mindblowingly inane. The problem is the abundance in the West of atheism as a movement and bundling with claims as you state.

I remember last year after a concert that I performed in a church. The concert was popular music, we were just renting the church as a venue, and the attendees were from the general population, not necessarily religious. After the concert, the attendees filed out through the front doors and had to walk through a gauntlet of atheist crackpots with "Child molesters go back to the Vatican" signs. It was not only disgraceful but telegraphed shocking ignorance - this was not even a Catholic church.

My wife asked me what what was going on and I said "Somebody got bored of not collecting stamps today I guess."

The disanalogies are so striking and obvious that a person who uses that analogy has to be creating a pretty strong cognitive dissonance bubble for themselves to carry the fantasy.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Only here.

Nowhere else in life. Indeed, this is just about the only place I could ever find a theist if I tried, and so is the only opportunity I personally ever get of discussing something that is as taken for granted as the air we breath and the setting of the sun.

Mike

Yeah, because books entitled The God Delusion and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, both written by authors who self-identify as atheists, certainly give the impression that atheists only discuss religion and belief in the supernatural at any meaningful length online.

 

[blutoski]

Yeah, because books entitled The God Delusion and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, both written by authors who self-identify as atheists, certainly give the impression that atheists only discuss religion and belief in the supernatural at any meaningful length online.

More importantly, it may not be a 'religion' but that's dodging the obvious - it's a worldview that competes in the same space as religious worldviews, and displaces them.

This is an example of when a negative claim is also a positive claim.

eg: "I threw a coin and it did not come up heads." (negative claim) = "The coin came up tails." (positive claim)

This is disanalogous to stamp collecting, because stamp collecting is not 100% inversely correlated with another activity.

There is no rule that says a person must be either stamp collecting or coin collecting. If there was, then non-stamp-collecting would also mean 'coin collecting'.

 

[MikeG]

Yeah, because books entitled The God Delusion and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, both written by authors who self-identify as atheists, certainly give the impression that atheists only discuss religion and belief in the supernatural at any meaningful length online.

So, rather than discuss anything said by the dozens if not hundreds of atheists on this forum, you decide that we are all represented by some (non-member) authors (of your choice), some of whom many of us won't have read? Yeah, that seems rational to me.

I assume that your views (indeed, not just your views, but the percentage of your time that you spend discussing them) as a theist are entirely represented by the ravings of any swivel-eyed loon (of my choice) who writes a polemic in the name of religion? Sauce for the gander, and all that.....

 

[TimCallahan]

TimCallahan, I'm a little surprised that an author of your stature, on the topics you write about, would NOT be a serious atheist. Your investigation into the sources of the bible and religion doesn't read as faith-based in the slightest, but reads as a serious scholar would approach the subject without bias. Surely the more you research it, the less you would be convinced that there is anything more behind the bible than fallible and ignorant human beings, not supernatural entities.

Could it be that religion is too ingrained in your upbringing, your surroundings, your environment? It's hard to avoid ALL aspects of faith in typical daily US life. Just the other day, I attended a dedication for a park, a ceremony planned and executed by the local government, where a minister was invited to speak and give a prayer. He ended it with "And all the people say...Amen." That's about as blatant as you can be with government supporting religion, yet if I had stepped up to complain, I would have been seen as a rabble-rouser and probably have destroyed my career and future. It's hard to be an atheist under these circumstances.

By the time I wrote Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? I had pretty well dispensed with any sort of religious belief. I simply hadn't fully accepted that I really was an atheist, considering myself agnostic instead. By the time I began writing Secret Origins of the Bible I had fully accepted my own atheism.

As to my religious background, my childhood was, happily, one of benign neglect as far as religion was concerned. My parents had attended a local Methodist church before dropping out. Every once in a while they would decide they really should get back to regularly attending church. So, that meant I was forced to go to Sunday school, most of which just seemed boring to me. Then they would stop going to church, but would send me off to Sunday school for a while. Then they would let it go altogether, and I didn't have to go to Sunday school anymore.

It wasn't until I was in junior high school (what's now called middle school in the U.S.) that some people moved in across the street from us, who were active in the Presbyterian church, that my parents got into religion on a regular basis. I ended up very heavily involved in the youth fellowships in junior high school and later in high school. This was a comparatively enlightened church, and I was always a theistic evolutionist.

When I went into the U.S. Navy I drifted away from the church. I tried re-establishing a link with religion while I was in college, but just couldn't maintain any interest in it. I became, for all practical purposes, a deist, then, gradually, an agnostic. There was no dramatic rupture and no history of religious abuse in my life.

I suspect my wrestling with coming to grips with my atheism had more to do with what Daniel Dennet calls "the belief in the belief in God," mare than anything else.

 

[TimCallahan]

Really? So what's the main topic? Interior decorating?

Btw, this forum has been dedicated to religion and philosophy. Speaking of which, do you have any idea what happened to the Roman Empire? Kind of disappeared from the map.

The subject of this thread is what experiences atheists have had regarding their own acknowledgment that they no longer believed in God and what reactions their friends and family have had or still have to their atheism. We talk about religion and God on this forum a lot, because that's what this forum is about. We are not necessarily obsessed with those subjects beyond that.

What does the Roman Empire or any other empire in history have to do with the subject of this thread?

 

[mijopaalmc]

All analogy break down at a certain point.

1) the phillatelly analogy is only useful in its context. Which is to make people udnerstand why atheism is NOT a religion. It is nigh useless in the context you are trying to use it.
2) Time I spend discussing bigfoot and stuff, skepticism in general : at most an hour a week. I spent more time discussing the latest news about Egypt yesterday during meal time.
3) this is a skeptic forum in which we discuss skeptic things. To take your wrongly used analogy, it would be a forum where we discuss hobby, and we are in the chess section, and you keept telling us that everything including chess ark back to philattelly, the greastest and first hobby of all. Expect us to dispue the assertion even if we consider ourselves not phillatellist.

*yawn*

You completely dismissed, in a very condescending way (which seems to be a characteristic of how "atheists" who indentify with the "atheism" delineated in the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and others), the fact that the differences between "a-philately" and "atheism" are fundamental and qualitative, much as atheists claim that the differences between atheism and religion fundamental and qualitative. After all, as the argument goes, an necessary property religion is a belief in existence of something that transcends the "natural" or "physical", and, since atheism is by definition a lack of said belief, atheism cannot be a religion.

Similarly, and most importantly, "a-philately" is not in any meaningful sense a "non-hobby" in a manner that is deductively equivalent to the sense that the atheists who promote the "a-philately" anology want to apply to "atheism" as being a "non-religion".

 

[Aepervius]

*yawn*

You completely dismissed, in a very condescending way (which seems to be a characteristic of how "atheists" who indentify with the "atheism" delineated in the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and others), the fact that the differences between "a-philately" and "atheism" are fundamental and qualitative, much as atheists claim that the differences between atheism and religion fundamental and qualitative. After all, as the argument goes, an necessary property religion is a belief in existence of something that transcends the "natural" or "physical", and, since atheism is by definition a lack of said belief, atheism cannot be a religion.

Similarly, and most importantly, "a-philately" is not in any meaningful sense a "non-hobby" in a manner that is deductively equivalent to the sense that the atheists who promote the "a-philately" anology want to apply to "atheism" as being a "non-religion".

After reading that load of nonsense I think I will tip toe out , nod at you, smile, and let you write whatever you want.

 

[mijopaalmc]

So, rather than discuss anything said by the dozens if not hundreds of atheists on this forum, you decide that we are all represented by some (non-member) authors (of your choice), some of whom many of us won't have read? Yeah, that seems rational to me.

I'm sorry, but it was you who said:

Only here.

Nowhere else in life. Indeed, this is just about the only place I could ever find a theist if I tried, and so is the only opportunity I personally ever get of discussing something that is as taken for granted as the air we breath and the setting of the sun.

Oh, and as for the rest of your monologue.......at least allow us the privilege of saying what is important to us, rather than have you decide it for us. Thanks.

Mike

(emphasis added)

The fact that sever self-identified atheists had made lucrative careers out of writing books that argue explicitly for atheism and expressly against religion is in direct contradiction to assertion that atheist spend an in ordinate amount of time talking about God "only here".

Also I don't recall ever assigning particular things to atheists as things they valued.

I assume that your views (indeed, not just your views, but the percentage of your time that you spend discussing them) as a theist are entirely represented by the ravings of any swivel-eyed loon (of my choice) who writes a polemic in the name of religion? Sauce for the gander, and all that.....

The bold is a perfect illustration of how atheism as represented in this thread is, at best, questionably "only" about lack of belief in the supernatural. I disagree with legitimacy of an analogy that is a staple of "atheist" discourse and suddenly I'm an theist. If "atheist" does not indicate an identity, how can I be identified as a theist for objecting to an argument posited "atheists"?

I thought the semantic consequence of an argument did not depend on the properties assigned to the arguer. In fact, I thought that deriving properties of the arguer from linguistic content of an argument was a fallacy aking to ad hominem.

 

[RSLancastr]

Th fact that A-Philatelists are not as outspoken nor as organized as some Atheists are might be linked to facts such as:

• philatelists rarely ever tell A-philatelists that they (and their children) will burn in Hell for all eternity if they don't start collecting stamps before they die.
  
  
• There is no day of the week generally accepted in our society as a day when people gather to read and sing about stamps.
  
  
• There are so few Country & Western songs about stamps, nor is there an effusion of FM "Stamp Rock" radio stations.
  
  
• Mentioning at your workplace that you do not collect stamps hardly ever elicits gasps and tsk-tsks from co-workers, nor are you likely to then start finding flyers regarding the Wonders of a Stamp-Collecting Life on your desk.
  
  
• The paucity of Chick Tracts on the subject.

 

[MikeG]

I'm sorry, but it was you who said: (Only here)

I was talking about me, and only me. No-one else. That is trivially easy to see from my post:

Only here.

Nowhere else in life. Indeed, this is just about the only place I could ever find a theist if I tried, and so is the only opportunity I personally ever get of discussing something that is as taken for granted as the air we breath and the setting of the sun.......

I apologise for your lack of understanding of that simple post.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Yeah, but the whole point is not that atheists' focus of the supernatural does not prove that the supernatural exist; rather, the point is that, if atheism is "only" about the non-belief in god, atheists expend an inordinate amount of energy discussing beliefs in the supernatural and consequence thereof. After all, to compare to a common analogy that atheists use to attempt to illustrate the fundamental differences between atheism the conflation of religion and belief in the supernatural (which is in itself problematic), people who don't collect stamps don't:

• refer to themselves as "non-philatelists"
• insist that adavances in science and technology that have rendered the postal service obsolete also render philately obsolete
• doubt the existence of philately as valid hobby, because stamp are "really" just pieces of paper decorated with ink that designate an arbitrary value within human society
• oppose philatelist organizations
• oppose philatelists' trying to get their children to practice philately
• form non-philatelist organizations
• write best-selling books about what an inherent evil philately is
• claim that other non-philatelists are not True Non-Philatelists™, because those non-philatelists don't share their opinion on the intellectual bankruptcy of philately
• claim that philatelists are mentally ill because the believe that philately valuable activity
• build non-philately into their identity

In othere words, there are many points of non-correspondence between atheism and many of the states or activties that atheists use that explain as defualt-state analogies and such non-correspondences help to illustrate why the form of "atheism" that has gained prominence in the early decades on the 21st century in qualitatively different in many fundamental ways than the default-state analogs that "atheists" claim as reasonable-by-analogy to atheism. Atheists, including those who don't get "fired up" in support of the recent self-identified, best-selling "atheist" authors, may choose to define "atheism" as "a lack of belief in God/god(s)", but it is clear from reading the aforementioned authors in genres that differ form the one in which they originally chose to express themselves that what is called "atheism" involves far more than the promoted definition implies, let alone logically entails.

...very few people try to tell non-stamp collectors that their n
on-stamp collecting is a "hobby" that will result in their eternal torture by a loving, omnipotent postmaster.

OTH many people pretend to be able to state "what 'atheists' believe", as if there were a monolithic homogeneous consensus. If you want to know what a specific atheist believes, ask. If you are looking for a binding, definitional, credal confession claimed by all atheists, you are sitting in the wrong pew.

 

[epix]

There are about 8 Million Posts on the Forum. About 1 Million, or 12% of the total posts are in the Religion Forum.

And many of these are responses to people who spout off their religious beliefs and simply ask for comment, and many others are quite interesting discussions on Biblical exegesis.

Give us a detailed breakdown and analysis (look that word up in a dictionary) of the Board by topic/subject and related discussion, and I will listen to your "point" whatever it may be.

Norm

Give me a detailed breakdown and analysis of your claim stated in your first and second paragraph and maybe I'll get back to you.

How about considering this thread as a a single random sample? Come on, man. What are you onto?