gaffo wrote: ↑Sun Jul 21, 2019 3:09 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:39 pm
Sculptor wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 12:32 pm
Atheism has nothing to do with anything, except the denial of God.
Precisely correct. It's a void, a null, a mere negation.
yep
no, i hate Nihilism personally.
I wasn't talking about what you like or don't like, gaffo. I was only talking about what Athe
ism, as a one-precept, negative ideology, makes it rational for a person to think.
That's an important distinction. One can make certain statements about Athei
sm that one cannot ever make about Athe
ists. And this is because Atheism, if it were really believed by anyone and lived out consistently, with all its rational implications, would simply issue in Nihilism.
In contrast, all Athe
ists I have ever encountered, including people like Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, do not live out a consistent Atheism. Instead, they take back into their belief system
something that Atheism itself does not rationalize -- like historicism (Marx), morality (Freud) and hierarchy of values (Nietzsche).
In other words, then, there's no such thing as an Atheist who
lives Atheism. There are only those who
talk about Atheism, but
live out some hybrid belief that incorporates Atheism's negation of God, and perhaps its implied denial of moral authority and ultimate meaning, but usually little more than those things. For the rest, they look to some other ideological package -- often Socialism of some kind, but not always. They always need a secondary ideology to supply what pure Atheism does not rationalize for them.
Lived Atheism is total Nihilism. And that's the implication of what we agree on below:
Immanuel Can: It's an ideological gelding: it has no fruitfulness in it. No good thing comes out of it.
gaffo: agreed.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:39 pm
it insists on imposing itself on people who may want to believe other things.
bullshit,
Do you mean you suppose Atheists are happy to leave all other people believing in God?
Dawkins certainly isn't. But do you think that when people say "I'm an Atheist" they only want us to understand they hold a
private disbelief? Or do you suppose they are trying to say, "I don't believe,
and you shouldn't either?"
Which way would it be?
the last thing i wish is for anyone to become an Athiest
I think that perhaps that makes you unusual among Atheists. Or perhaps you're the kind of regretful Atheist that Thomas Hardy the great novelist was. He decided that he disbelieved in God, but was miserable that he did.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:39 pm
But people cannot live with a void -- no meaning, no purpose, no hope, no future. So they have to add something.
agreed, for me it is Universal Secular Humanism.
Yes, see...this is a perfect example of what I was saying earlier. Plain Atheism is unliveable, so you had to add something positive -- Humanism -- to make it liveable.
why so hostel toward Atheists?
Hostile? Not at all.
I feel no personal animus against them. It's not hard to see that their one-precept creed is not only empty, but is irrational as well, so it's really unthreatening to me. I do feel a certain amount of sympathy for the emptiness they sometimes evince. But they don't make me at all anxious, as you can tell from the way I'm "speaking." I'm feeling very calm, actually.
And, as for misunderstanding them, as they assure me, there isn't much to understand about Atheism: it's a one-statement (dis-)belief claim, they all say. If that's untrue, please tell me.
Now, I should also say that I have friends and colleagues who are Atheists, and many whom I like and respect. But I do not agree with them about Atheism. For me, there's a huge difference between disagreeing with a person's beliefs and disliking the person. I make no connection between the two, in fact.
Atheists have no "political ideology"
This is also true.
But Atheists are also often political people. The Communists certainly are. Marx said that "the critique of religion is the first of all critiques" (his words), then provided the rationale that killed over 100,000,000 people in the last century alone. This is a good illustration of what happens when Atheism gets paired up with political beliefs.
And since Atheism is a political void, what can a politically-minded Atheist do but take on some supplementary political dogma to supply the direction that his Atheism itself will simply not provide?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:39 pm
Because if there's no God, it's up to us. But each of us is too small to achieve anything.
yes, and/so?
your point?
My point is simply that if it's up to "us" and we have insufficient power, then the next logical step for the Atheist is to create or adopt some existing political ideology to mobilize the collective. If he doesn't, then he is going to have to accept his own personal powerlessness -- political Nihilism -- and give up.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:39 pm
So, the logic goes, people must be forced to do what is necessary for that political ideology.
??
As above.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:39 pm
What's more, it's not even "wrong" for us to compel each other, because there's no morality in Atheism either.
I'm a moral animal!
Again, let's go back to that basic distinction: Athe
ism is one thing, and Athe
ists do another.
I have no reason to suspect you're not a conventionally moral person. But if you are, then I can guarantee you're living by a code Atheism itself does not supply you.
As you yourself agreed above, Atheism is a void, a null. It
has no moral content.
why do you think there are so many Athiests in this world?
Latest figures put the numbers of genuine Atheists at about 4%. They've been there for some time now. However, even were Atheists 99% of the world's population, it would not suggest Atheism was true; just as when 100% of the people on earth believed the world was flat, it did not make that true.
That would be what's called "bandwagon fallacy," if we believed it did.
the concept that folks - friends (Hindu/Muslim i've made over the years who are not Christian, but I affirm as good - under Christian theology - GO TO HELL FOREVER due to not "beleiving in Christ".
If Christians have no problem with that concept, and Athiests like myself do.
That's not a fair representation, and I would prefer to challenge it; but let me pretend for a moment that you've got the Christian view right. Let me ask you, then:
Do Atheists (your own kind, not all Atheists) believe in justice? Do you believe in the affirming of good and the retribution against genuine evil? Or do Atheist believe, in concert with Atheism, that there is no good and no evil, no justice or injustice?
Because if your belief were the latter, you could not possibly raise your objection against the Christian idea of Hell. It could then not possibly be "unfair" for Hell to exist, since as per Atheism, there is no such thing as "fair." Nobody "deserves" anything, and nothing is to be expected either way.
And that's the very interesting thing about that challenge against God: if you believe it would be "unjust" for God to send people to Hell, you must believe there is an objective thing called "injustice." For how else can you launch the accusation in the first place? But if there is such a thing as objective "injustice," (and you want God to answer for it) then there must be objective morality.
But objective morality requires the existence of God, as many prominent Atheists have said. (Nietzsche, for example.) In fact, it's the reason so many Atheists tell us that objective morality
cannot exist....there's no objective God to create or sustain it...morality's all subjective, all temporal, all human, and all negotiable, they say.
So how can God be "unjust" to do anything, as per Atheism? And how can the Atheist demand from God a standard of justice the Atheist himself admits has no objective reality?
But if that's the case, then not-liking-the-idea-of-Hell cannot be any rationally-consistent Atheist's reason for disbelief in God.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:39 pm
There's the "freedom" of Atheism. The "freedom" to know nothing, to be nothing, to have no purpose, to go nowhere, to do anything to each other, and to have no moral recourse for the oppressed. It opens the world to raw power, and no more.
more dissparaging of Athiests as reprobates.
No, again.
Let me reinforce what I said earlier, so you'll understand. There's a great and important difference between Athei
sm and what people who call themselves "Atheists" do. I am not calling Atheists "reprobates": but what I am pointing out is that Athe
ism, the belief, drives some of them in bad directions. You may not be among those -- and I have no reason to think you are.
- I'm saddened to read your post above, after talking to you in that other thread.
I hope not. You're mistaking my intent.
I'm not here to abuse any Atheists. I'm trying to point out the dangers of believing Athe
ism, and particularly the danger of adding to Atheism a secondary political creed that turns it from nihilistic despair to homicide.
And I think we could agree on that, no? After all, don't people criticize it when someone who calls himself a "Christian" does something bad? Sure they do; and I would even argue they
should.
Christians take upon themselves a higher standard than that. So fair enough.
But why should Athe
ism, as a creed, be given an exemption from critique that it would deny to any other creed? Why shouldn't Atheism be required to answer for what it has caused and what its followers have done, if we hold Christians, Jews and others to such a standard?
It only seems fair.
Athiests are not a horde.
True. And I've repeatedly said so above. In fact, as I said above, I've never met a consistent Atheist...a "real" one. All I've ever found is ones who hold to some package of Atheismplus (TM), some combination of Atheism-plus-Marxism, or Atheism-plus-Buddhism, or Atheism-plus-Humanism.
Atheism alone is, as we have already agreed, nothing but a gelding, a nothing, a void, a negation. It always needs a supplement to be liveable.
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