The Religion of Atheism

If you don't accept the existence of objective truth, how can you debate anything? After all, debate requires that you make a statement and making a statement implies an objective claim.

This statement of yours, for instance, implies objective truth. It implies the objective truth that you exist, that you experience the feeling hate, and that some plural number of objects that you hate also exist.

 

Objective truth (in regards to religion, which is what this discussion is about) would imply that it is always true in every situation and for everyone. Truth is very dependent on the individual perceiving it. I fully understand that sometimes what *I* consider truth is not the same as what others consider truth. Truth as it pertains to ones beliefs and ideals, is not objective, it is subjective. I have one truth, and odds are good you have a different truth. That I hate something is my OPINION..it is a truth to me, but not necessarily to you, hence it is subjective, and not objective. That I exist is even up for debate, but I am not gonna dust off my Plato and get THAT conversation started.

 

How would you expect such an "entity" to exist at all? Why do you act like this idea is acceptable at all? It's human bias to imagine a mind like our own governing the universe. Observation in no way supports it, as you know and admit. The only reason to believe in it is because you find it pleasing, not because it's reasonable.

You might as well be arguing for the existence of Santa Claus.

Miracles are so far unproven - they are people's claims after the fact. You can say that 500 people saw a person alive after his death, yet there isn't even evidence outside of the bible and very few other claims made after he is supposed to have lived that he had indeed ever even existed. He could be as unreal as Frodo and people even 1 year, or 1 day after the reported events would by and large be none the wiser. There's a huge number put to the Fatima miracle, yet how many have given an actual account? What did they in fact see? People can see something by power of will alone. Believing is seeing.

 

Aye, relative truths arise from our having similar yet different ways of thinking, based on our different experiences and fundamental mental differences.

Science cuts through the BS, though, by limiting what we accept as true to that which can be objectively demonstrated and described in such a manner that it is consistent and has predictive power. Einstein's theories have predicted things that were only observed in nature after his death, e.g. black holes.

 

Is the statement, "Truth is subjective" also subjective? Because if it is, it is not universally true. And if it is not universally true, then, sometimes, truth is objective. But by definition, if a truth is objective sometimes, it is objective all times. Thus, the claim that truth is subjective is self-refuting.

 

It seems that you might have fallen prey to the old misinterpretation of 'extraordinary'. In its original form the term had the following meanings:
"[Middle English extraordinarie, from Latin extrardinrius : extr, outside; see extra- + rd, rdin-, order; see order.]" Therefore, it can be said that your statement regarding a claim of God to be extraordinary, would in itself be extraordinary due to the fact that you have no proof that God is not a part of 'order'. You might want to check out the definitions of "order" : see here: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/order

 

I just explained that in post #73.

I explained that well-attested miracles can support it, but that materialists reject miracles as more implausible than all materialistic explanations because they have already embraced materialism. And I further explained that that is circular reasoning.

 

Aye, relative truths arise from our having similar yet different ways of thinking, based on our different experiences and fundamental mental differences.

Science cuts through the BS, though, by limiting what we accept as true to that which can be objectively demonstrated and described in such a manner that it is consistent and has predictive power. Einstein's theories have predicted things that were only observed in nature after his death, e.g. black holes.

That is true, of course, but science is quite frequently ignored, when discussions about religion get started. "god did it!", pretty much ends any possibility of reasoned discourse. Objectivity is thrown out the window. I have no real issue with discussions like that..I just prefer to have them with people who are at least willing to admit that they are being subjective. I am.

 

Again, that makes no sense. God is indeed not a part of order, except within the human mind, where the concept of a god comes naturally. I would argue that the idea of God is no more objectively real than the ideas of angels and demons, or of a flat earth. These things are the product of an animal mind operating on certain assumptions with a limited perspective, assumptions like spirit. What is spirit? It's the notion of something alive but immaterial, which was apparently born of an earlier interpretation of the air we breathe and the wind we feel. They didn't know what air was, but they knew that living creatures had a kind of breeze associated with them, and so the ancients came up with the concept of spirit. Greek even uses the same word for air and spirit - pneumatos. A modern believer in these things, who is an inheritor of this ancient, flawed thinking, might instead think of 'spirit' as something else, a kind of "energy field" -- yet that is going the opposite direction, trying to explain the old air-based spirit concept in more modern terms, i.e. trying to make the idea of spirit true in the modern world. Such has been the evolution of that idea from ancient times to the present

God went from a glorious being who sat atop the dome of heaven and looked down on the flat earth to something invisible which now hides behind the very fabric of space-time, again an ancient idea which is now being retooled to fit into the modern world.

Science refines or eliminates ideas as new information comes to light; religion simply redefines the same ideas to try and keep them true in spite of themselves.

 

The "boundary" between what is intelligent and what is not... Right now, intelligence is attributed to life, and different degrees of intelligence to different forms of life. All life is reactive to its surroundings, though when you get down to the simplest levels, those reactions are chemical or otherwise physical, without a mind driving them. A mind, however, is a more complex product of the same basic principles -- chemical reactions. But a human being has built upon that basis to eventually produce a system which is capable of a higher order of reactive intelligence. We're still fundamentally chemical in nature, but we have patterns of chemical interaction taking place constantly in the brain, a great cascade of reactions which come together to form a greater whole, a mosaic. Like a mosaic image - like the image on your monitor - unity is an illusion, for it is in fact very many tiny constituents acting together.

That is us. What is God? Apart from being an idea in a human mind, there is no God. At least, not as long as we continue to imagine what God is. If we want to point to something real and call it God, then at least we have something that can be called God. You choose to call the Unknown "God" - what we don't see and so far cannot comprehend, you call God. Talk about a God of the Gap..

Now, I fully agree that just because we've only seen intelligence as a product of life on Earth, and more so of the brains which Earth's animal life possess, is no reason to conclude that intelligence exists in only this state. We still strive to create artificial intelligence, after all, and arguably we already have a measure of it in existence. Still, this does not in any way prove God, a concept which is born of human thought and then treated by many as a truth which does not even need to be proven. You appeal to miracles to demonstrate the existence of what you call God, yet there are no confirmed miracles. What we have are a lot of claims made by human beings, and human beings are certainly fallible in their thinking and their observations. This is why we have and need science - with that, we can get past personal prejudices and get much nearer the objective truth. So far, science can't confirm any miracles, which would be understood as something which defies the known laws of physics, etc. Fatima is a claim, not a reality. Same with the Bible's numerous claims. Same with those of the Book of Mormon, and of the Quran, etc. People make stuff up, and people make mistakes. Some people think that a statue of Jesus leaking oil is a miracle, yet that can be & has been investigated scientifically, and the results don't bespeak any miracle. I personally think that there's fallibility and/or charlatanism behind every miracle claim. Like with the Shroud of Turin... The Faithful don't care what science says about it anyway, they want to believe in it, so they do. Same thing with God itself.

 

A God that is is absolute, omnipresent, omnipotent, timeless, and spaceless seems much more glorious to me than a Zeus that exists within finite time and space. Furthermore, it is also a much more ancient idea than you think, presented in the Old Testament:

God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

-Exodus 3:14

Meaning that God is essential Being. Which is a much more sophisticated idea than some bearded man on a cloud, which is nothing more than an artistic metaphor. My sense is that you are retooling the beliefs of the ancients to fit your own modern beliefs about them.

 

What do you mean by "evidence?" A theist has evidence for God's existence by way of religious experience and intuition. If those don't count as evidence, then you need to spell out what does, and I suspect that at that point we will find that you, too, believe many things without evidence.

No, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that the first cause was the freely willed action of a mind. Here's Craig again.

"If we go the route of postulating some causal agency beyond space and time as being responsible for the origin of the universe, then conceptual analysis enables us to recover a number of striking properties which must be possessed by such an ultra-mundane being. For as the cause of space and time, this entity must transcend space and time and therefore exist atemporally and non-spatially, at least sans the universe. This transcendent cause must therefore be changeless and immaterial, since timelessness entails changelessness, and changelessness implies immateriality. Such a cause must be beginningless and uncaused, at least in the sense of lacking any antecedent causal conditions. Ockham's Razor will shave away further causes, since we should not multiply causes beyond necessity. This entity must be unimaginably powerful, since it created the universe without any material cause.

"Finally, and most remarkably, such a transcendent cause is plausibly to be taken to be personal. As Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne points out, there are two types of causal explanation: scientific explanations in terms of laws and initial conditions and personal explanations in terms of agents and their volitions.{57} A first state of the universe cannot have a scientific explanation, since there is nothing before it, and therefore it can be accounted for only in terms of a personal explanation. Moreover, the personhood of the cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality, since the only entities we know of which can possess such properties are either minds or abstract objects, and abstract objects do not stand in causal relations. Therefore, the transcendent cause of the origin of the universe must be of the order of mind. This same conclusion is also implied by the fact that we have in this case the origin of a temporal effect from a timeless cause. If the cause of the origin of the universe were an impersonal set of necessary and sufficient conditions, it would be impossible for the cause to exist without its effect. For if the necessary and sufficient conditions of the effect are timelessly given, then their effect must be given as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless and changeless but for its effect to originate de novo a finite time ago is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to bring about an effect without antecedent determining conditions. Thus, we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal creator."
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/theism-origin.html

 

"A mind is a more complex product of the same principles." You think the mind is complex because the only minds you have empirically observed happen to be located in complex brains. That does not show that minds themselves are necessarily complex. Why would they have to be? A mind is simply the quality of sentience and sapience. A quality is not, in itself, complex.

This patently is not my argument. I said nothing about "the Unknown" nor have I claimed there is any gap that needs filling. Indeed, I laid out a step-by-step case of how a Universal Mind can be deduced through logic from the fact of existence. As I said, a logically necessary first cause must be intelligence because it must be absolutely simple. And an absolutely simple existential entity capable of creating the Universe can only be an all-encompassing, infinite, and limitless All-ness, the absolute essence of Being. And such an All-ness, since it encompasses all Being, must also encompass intelligence as an aspect of Being.

Have you looked into any of the claims you have mentioned or are you only assuming they are not confirmed or at least plausible? You say, for example, "Fatima is a claim, not a reality." But you don't say why you think that or what your standard is for placing something in the category of "reality."

 

The mere absence of a belief in a god cannot be stretched, pounded, or otherwise manipulated into a religion, no matter how much the faith-filled would pray it was so.

 

Although atheism, in itself, is the mere absence of a belief in a god, there is no atheist that holds such an "absence of a belief" in a vacuum but within the context of a matrix of philosophical thoughts and ideas.

 

Why would I expect any different answer from you.f the 'concept of god comes naturally', then the concept is a part of nature and therefore should be detectable by all those wonderful scientists.

You forgot to mention the ideas of what lays beyond the rim of a 'black hole'. Care to speculate on that one?

The same is held true with regard to those who would attempt to explain what lays beyond the rim of a 'black hole'. What are those things beyond the rim of a black hole?

Were you there to be a firsthand witness of the birth of that earlier interpretation? Or are you simply taking the word of some other man/woman who is expressing the descriptions of the creatures of his/her mind?

Are you speculating again? This time in trying to establish that you KNOW what the ancients knew or did not know? Or, are you just making things up as you go along?

Are you saying that modern science is not able to resolve such a little problem? So much for the ability of science.

Retooled by the hands and imagination of man, does not make a fact when dealing with God and spirit. Especially when science cannot resolve the problem with the confusion between spirit and air.

So far, science has failed in eliminating many things which the people have pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into scientific research, and have found zilch for an answer ... A cure for cancer is one of those failures, to name just one of many.

 

You seem to make pretty much the same point as the OP and then tell him to "get over it".
There have been and always will be horrible people. They have used religion, political ideology, wealth and whatever, to justify acts ranging from unethical to horrifying.
I've seen atheists blame mankind's problems on religion and the religious blame mankind's problems on atheists.
The cause of mankind's problems is mankind.
Not religion.
Not atheism.
Mankind.

 

How can anyone say that mankind has problems? Whatever our condition is it's the best that it could be. Other alternatives would be a lot worse.

 

Presumptive ignoramus, arent you. I'm not an atheist, I'm an apatheist.

You have given no description of a difference and I see none personally. I already explained this. You clearly didnt understand what I wrote.

LOL By that definition everything taught to the Nazis was a Biblical truth since they taught stuff "supported by scriptures in the Judeo-Christian Bible--based upon the context in which the scriptures were written."

Furthermore I can see you just invented that definition, but no matter, the Nazis were teaching 'Biblical truths' if we apply it regardless.

 

That's the most stupid thing I've ever heard. Regardless, there is no definition of "Biblical truth" - you just made one up.

ALTER2EGO -to- MEGADETH FAN:
In that case, why are you up here arguing that atheism is not a religion? Since subjective opinion is all that matters, why are we having this conversation about the courts having defined atheism as a religion? It's all subjection; remember? [/QUOTE]
You've misunderstood me. "TRUTHS" here refers to your "Biblical truths", which are entirely subjective - I am not referring to ALL TRUTH. Truth is not subjective, but "Biblical truths" almost certainly are.

Atheism is not a religion because it has no code of ethics. I've said this repeatedly.

No, you just see your poor comprehension skills.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- NO PARTY AFFILIATION:

Both you and TBryant are missing what I said in my opening post: that the problem is a human problem. I made that abundantly clear in paragraph 3 of my opening post, as follows:

 

That doesn't change the fact Christianity proves a poor basis for moral understanding and thought. Blame it on humans, or blame it on God - still wont change this fact.

 

LOL!

Empedocles (ca. 490–430 BC) was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek colony in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the origin of the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements i.e. fire, water, earth, air.

You weren't paying much attention to the lesson Harry Potter was teaching you in the last book you read. He told me to tell you that he is terribly disappointed in you.

For more on the story of the four natural elements:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empedocles/

 

Are you so unaccustomed to having people agree with you, that you think they are "missing the point" you make, when they do?
Odd.

 

How is a thread titled, "The Religion of Atheism" still getting replies?

Can't remember who said it but saying atheism is a religion is like saying bald is a hair color.

Is my non-belief in fairies a religion too?