The Religion of Atheism

That is just dumb, if God came down and proved his existence, I would say, Hey, I was wrong, and I am pretty sure all atheists would do the same.

But until that happens...………………………….

 

No, you very very clearly didn't understand.

So, you could disprove that a teapot is orbiting neptune?

Well, anyway, that's the point. To them it would be a miracle, or act of god.

Well, first of all, a god is supposed to be a super powerful perfect being, the president is less competent than these guys. So if that's your view of a god, maybe you have a valid argument. But really, I didn't say it should, I said if it wanted to it could.

So what's your point?

By all means, please demonstrate.

 

oh? then what religion is theist? the believer religion? lol

 

Understand what? you never did say what you believe I didnt understand, am I sup;osed ot guess?

Sure I can.

and that same point could apply to atheists as theists point out all the time.

No thats my view of anyone who would demand god come down and appease them. I htought he did that already?

you failed to make the distinction between philosophy and religion again.

waste of time, you could simply look the answers up and claim you intuitively knew.

 

kool so tell me how you will recognize God so I dont **** up and miss the opportunity?

 

Ok, from here on out I am just going to assign the code word 'peanuts' to this post. It will be short hand to refer back to this.

Please do so.

There is way way more to unpack here, but to keep on track or attempt to get back on track I only asserted that if a god existed, it could find a way to provide evidence of itself. And clearly it hasn't done so.

Who said anything about intuition? I said rationality.

 

We'll probably share a beer and talk about it..
Ask a dumb question, get a dumb answer.

 

The issue is simply that we have to act as if there is a particular reality. When there is no evidence that we are in a particular reality, we should rationally act as if we are not in that reality. Since there is no evidence for or utility in believing that a god exists, the smart thing to do is to act as if there isn't one. What exists outside of the observable universe can be left up to imagination and theory. Things like the multi-verse have a little more weight than a god given that there is at least a theoretical framework. When there is no evidence for something you act as if it doesn't exist. Doesn't mean you don't keep looking, but until you have a good enough reason to think something is true, it probably isn't.

 

Ah so I dont understand peanuts huh? I never talked about peanuts.

I said I can I did not say I would.

and I asserted god may have already, how do you know God has not already shown you all there is to know?

You did

Albert Einstein: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

Descartes refers to an intuition as a pre-existing knowledge gained through rational reasoning or discovering truth through contemplation. This definition is commonly referred to as rational intuition.

 

Aaaand peanuts. When I say 'peanuts' it means you either can't or won't understand what we are talking about.

Riiight... and also you can't

Because I don't believe in a god. That's how I know.

None of this means anything. Rationality and intuition are not the same thing. Your 'physics problems' are clear demonstration of that. We determine things with reason that go against our intuition. Not that it has anything to do with my original point.

 

cant have one without the opther lol

so tell us what god looks like since you know god has not been here

 

You are saying absolutely nothing here.

I don't think logic works the way you think it works. First of all, 'peanuts' second of all, how could that question possibly follow? Third of all, you hav edriven us way off the rails here, let's circle back.

I know a god hasn't tried anything to get me to believe in it because I don't believe in it, and a god would be able to make me believe in it. Simple.

 

Sure I am, maybe its crayola time?
You cant get milk without something milkable.
Do I need to explain how that applies too or are you able to connect the dots?

I have done no such thing.
Yes you have explained peanuts means you think something is wrong with what I said but have no clue what it is.
Well you seem to thing that if and when God drops in to prove the existence that you will know it in fact is God and at that point will accept the existence of God, but when I ask what God looks like you dodge the question, hell I am agnostic and I want to know too!

speaking of logic fallacies your last one is a wonderful exhibit of circular reasoning! bravo!

 

Well, yeah, if a term lacks a definition, then it is meaningless. A definition is basically the mapping between a word and its meaning. Now, I exaggerate a little bit here, I mean there isn't a complete definition of "cult". There are bits and pieces of one, for instance, nobody is going to think the word "cult" means apple, so some parts of the definition is clearly present. Just not enough to be an entire definition (since the conditions in a definition have to be necessary and sufficient).

I think faith is a hallmark of religion due to practicality rather than by definition. If there was a religion which was undeniably true and provable, I think I would call it a religion, but didn't necessarily include faith. The idea of a creator god might be enough for me to still call that religion a religion. Maybe not, though, not sure (chances are in that situation we would have to change our usage anyway).

It seems to me that those who argue that atheism is a religion does so to highlight a contradiction or hypocrisy in criticising religion. Of course, if they actually succeeded in convincing people of that, it would make no difference. Atheists' criticism of religion does not rely on the definition of religion, it had just proven to be a useful word. If you change the word, atheists will simply phrase their criticism in other words. To expect atheists' arguments against religion to stay true after changing the definition of religion to include atheism would be the fallacy of equivocation.

 

typically misuse of words as they try to disassociate themselves from the rest of the world in their never ending eternal pursuit of specialness.

Denial goes a long way, agreed.

Most of their word usage for self definition is unreliable grammar.

It may be changing your understanding of the word but its not changing the long held meaning of the 'word'.

Hardly, we are dealing with once again the typical atheist 'lack' of understanding.

The etymology of “religion” is indeed disputed. This is not, of course, the case when it comes to English, which clearly inherited the word from Latin religio. Rather it applies to Latin itself, in which it is not clear what the component parts of the noun religio are or mean. The ancient Romans disagreed about this. Cicero, for example, thought that religio derived from the verb relegere in its sense of “to re-read or go over a text,” religion being a body of custom and law that demands study and transmission.

On the other hand, the Christian writer Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century, opted for religare, a verb meaning “to fasten or bind.” “We are,” he said in his book “Divinae Institutiones,” “tied to God and bound to him [religati] by the bond of piety, and it is from this, and not, as Cicero holds, from careful study [relegendo], that religion has received its name.”

Lactantius’s greater contemporary, Augustine, preferred this etymology to Cicero’s while suggesting yet another possibility: re-eligere, “to choose again,” religion being the recovery of the link with God that sin has sundered.

It may be that Lactantius and Augustine rejected Cicero’s etymology because it made religio seem too close to such Jewish terms as torah, mishnah and talmud, all Hebrew words having to do with teaching and studying. Since unlike the practice of Judaism, the Christian religion, as they saw it, was a matter of binding faith and commitment rather than of accumulated knowledge, the religare etymology may have appealed to them for the opposite reason than that proposed by Rappaport: as a way of distancing Christianity from Jewish concepts rather than of adopting them.

[Atheists faithfully bind to a 'belief', the 'belief' there is no God, why faith, because atheists cannot prove there is no God, a religion in every respect.]

In any case, however, the “binding” of tefillin on an observant Jew’s arm and the “binding” of Isaac in Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of his son on Mount Moriah have never been, to the best of my knowledge, closely associated with each other in Judaism. Nor do they share the same word. To put on tefillin in rabbinic Hebrew is, as Rappaport refers to it, le’haniah. tefillin, to “lay” them on one’s arm, a term that does not in itself imply submission to God’s will, although the biblical verb for the same act, kashar, “tie,” might seem more suggestive of this. The verb for what Abraham did to Isaac, on the other hand, is akad, which generally refers to the trussing of an animal prior to its being slaughtered, sheared, neutered, etc. Although the Akedah, as Isaac’s binding is known in Judaism, has always functioned there as a powerful symbol of the Jewish willingness to sacrifice all for God (as well as functioning in Christian theology as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion), it has never served as a symbol of the overall Jewish relationship to God, which was certainly not pictured as one of being trussed upon His altar.

To return to the word “religion,” it is a curious fact that, although all the ancestors of today’s Europeans had (like the ancestors of all the world’s inhabitants) what we would call religions, no ancient Indo-European language had a specific word for religion, Latin having been the first — which is why the great majority of modern European languages have some version of religio as their term for it. Probably this was because, precisely since religion was everywhere in the ancient world and no activity was divorced from it, it never struck anyone as a distinct aspect of life calling for a name of its own. There were names for specific gods, ceremonies, rituals, forms of worship, cults, sects, etc., because all these were discrete things; religion itself was the unnamed totality of them all, the forest that couldn’t be seen for all its trees.

It took the Romans, who in conquering the world were forced to become its first anthropologists, to realize that behind all this multifariousness was something about which it was possible to generalize. From its original meaning of “punctilious respect for the sacred,” religio came to denote any comprehensive human system of organizing and expressing such respect. Religio was, Cicero wrote, cultus deorum, “the worship of the gods.” Whether he was also right about where the word came from would appear to be anyone’s guess.

Read more: https://forward.com/articles/10776/roots-of-religion/

When you read about how the word was used clearly it covers every conscious thinking person alive on the planet that is willing to stand by a strongly held conviction. the bond to a conviction

Everyone faithfully binds to their sacred beliefs which are part of their religion, atheists simply have been using the word improperly as usual.

The only difference is what G/god one chooses to worship, atheists worship themselves and as he said cant see the forest because all the trees are the way.

 

I disagree a little bit. A word's definition is not a consistent mapping. It's a lot like the sorites paradox which is why debates around the definition of a word are rarely productive. But, as I hinted at, from a sort of information theoretical perspective, we can tighten them up a little bit. For example, if we call scientology a cult, we have a better idea of what scientology and a cult is. If we call an apple a cult, we have broadened the definition of a cult so wide that when we call something a cult, we haven't increased our understanding of what that thing is. We have decreased the information contained in the word 'cult.' I think from that perspective, we do a similar thing if we include atheism in our definition of the word cult. The people who study cults typically have some criteria in their definition and that usually involves a clear unquestioned leader among other things which don't apply to atheism.

I disagree in that I think if there were undeniable and provable ideas behind a religion, that would just become science. But I agree, it would essentially change the entire paradigm.

I think we are in agreement here. The attempt to criticize atheism as just another religion however usually centers on attempting to argue that atheism requires an equal amount of faith. Usually the foundation of that argument is that those people think that there is some fundamental a priori truth to the existence of a god that holds more weight than other possible realities which must then be denied.

 

You think that any post that points out the absurdity of your logic is a pejoritive attack. Not my problem that you cannot defend or explain why there is any difference between the Flying Sphaghetti monster and god.

 

So, peanuts, and I have failed to explain simply to you before, but I'll try again.
A god that created everything also created my disbelief, and would easily be able to defeat that disbelief. This isn't circular reasoning (although, if we accept that there was a god we would end up in some circular logic, but that's a different conversation). As an example of just one flaw in your logic, showing itself to me visually would be far from the only way it could reveal itself to me. I never said a god couldn't show itself to me without my knowing it, in fact, it certainly could.

To bring this back to my original statement: I don't think anyone could come up with a piece of evidence (like god coming down from heaven to reveal itself) that couldn't be more reasonably explained as an alien technology. However, despite the fact that we can't think of a piece of evidence, a god could.

 

There absolutely are undeniable provable ideas behind religion.

Its cognitive dissonance or worse irrational denial to say there is not.

Religion has told us;
murder = evil = bad = dead body,
steal = evil = bad = deposed of rightful possession
and so forth and so on.

Seems pretty conclusive religion does deal in fact.

Just because it has been stolen, repackaged and sold as secular does not magically vaporize the fact its religion and was religion first and has been religion from the beginning of time forward.

You continue to fail to make the distinction that all science provides is data, the qualitative assignment (in these cases) is religion.

More inappropriate application. There is nothing vague about the word religion as I have posted in the above that you chose to ignore.

More deceptive misapplication using equal amount when any amount of faith is faith. Atheists hide under any grain of sand and as always come out here using deception to manipulate unsuspecting minds.

Nope just posts that are pejorative and designed to ridicule that which they clearly do not understand using slams like Flying Spaghetti monster.

We can always join you by using lackers or dead brainers when referring to atheist atheology to get this on an equal playing field if you like and use your same reasoning..

 

There isn't really a distinction here. But lets address these 'facts' that are supposed to come from religion. Religion also tells us that homosexuality=evil, sacrifice=good, and slavery=ok. So clearly religion co-opted intuitive ideas, not the other way around. Furthermore, if there are any possible natural explanations for anything, it doesn't make sense to attribute it to religion or anything supernatural. It obviously cannot be proven that any of those ideas came from religion.

Peanuts

No, all amounts of faith are not equal. That is preposterous on the face of it.. obviously.

Peanuts. You just don't understand the spaghetti monster analogy, that doesn't make it a pejorative, although it is a bit lighthearted in it's spirit.

Please please please, join rationalists in our reasoning. All we want is for people to use reason over emotion and faith. We just want people to live in reality.

 

There are a lot of problems surrounding definitions, but I don't think they are problems with the concept of definitions, just with humans' approach to figure them out.

I'm not sure I follow your logic here. There are words that have very broad definitions, like "object" or "concept". That doesn't seem to me to be a problem. I think the problem with including atheism in the word cult lies in the fact that we'll be talking about cult using a different definition than many others, which is the fallacy of equivocation.

I mean, consider let's say the Divine comedy by Dante. In the albeit fictional world, Dante receives what I would call pretty direct evidence, so it might not be called faith any more (well, I guess that depends on what you think of as faith) but I wouldn't call him non-religious after literally seeing God.

For me, the thing is that it's quite possible to make those arguments straight away. Convincing people that religion technically is a concept which includes atheism isn't going to automatically make the argument that atheism requires faith. I don't really see the point in the detour via establishing a definition of religion which includes atheism.

 

I would phrase it as "The words aren't important, just the concepts and meaning behind them."

I'm not quite sure that equivocation fits. I keep wanting to think of it in terms of information theory, but as an example, consider the word 'sport.' We don't have a clear definition of the word, and it is the subject of endless debate (for example, is NASCAR a sport?) Now, if we consider video games a sport, the meaning of the word 'sport' has been diminished, and we can't be as sure what we mean by that word anymore even though we can't technically exclude video games from the broader definition of sport. In general, if we consider atheism a cult, now we probably have to include things like capitalism and liberitarianism.

I agree, going back to the first point, the concepts are important, not the words. Primarily what an atheist (at least the platonic ideal) is against is the blind faith part, particularly the establishment and following of policy based on that blind faith. The problem isn't so much a god in and of itself(although it would be a truly very very terrible thing if there were a god), it's the belief and action thereon without evidence that runs counter to the philosophy (keeping in mind that I am writing off the top of my head, so there may be things I'm not thinking of).

 

Also, as I think about it, in koko's diatribe above, he is technically correct that the word religion comes from the idea of being 'tied to' something. Which is what an atheist should at least in theory be against. The atheist ideal should be to change your mind "at the drop of a fact. " It should only be the evidence that matters. In practice, it doesn't always work that way of course, but that's the idea.

 

774 posts and atheism remains by definition, not a religion.

Atheism still means the lack of belief in a god or gods.

 

Religion didnt tell you any of those things.
People adopted and began living according to various philosophies, regardless of origin, and that is their religion. The cake doesnt create or tell the cook.

Gomer Pyle!

Never said all amounts of faith are equal, again you are using deception to muddy the water. No matter how much you shot yourself in the foot, whether its a nick or a hole in the middle you shot yourself in the foot. Please stop with the flim flam subterfuge already to continue spinning your agenda.

Gomer Pyle!
Its assinine in every sense.

Rationalists?
Oh yeh join your religion and have faith that there is no G/god.
Unless you have proof and we know you dont why would anyone want to join your faith?
Especially after watching you twist and spin everything out of context to push the deception?

Atheists made the argument again since they cannot prove there is no G/god the ONLY other alternative is 'FAITH' in their conclusion there is no G/god.

Its already been established, dictionaries simply have not caught up yet.

Try Politics.

Gomer Pyle!
Their whole premise is based on faith.

It only runs counter to your dysfunctional philosophy as pointed out when you demonstrate complete denial of the reality it is faith based, exactly what you condemn and pretend you dont have.

Gomer Pyle!

Geebus... It does not change the fact you continue to hold that no God exists based on faith, actions you take or refrain from taking by the acceptance of that philosophy is your religion.