There’s a philosophy called dialectics where opposites actually define one another. Atheism is a really good example of this IMO. Atheists usually define their beliefs as “no religion” but in practice they are anti-god, anti-religion. This means that even though religion has its own internal logic, being anti-religion has an opposite logic: what is good over here is bad over there. So it really ends up being that theism and atheism, through their contradictory traits, embody a single rational system.
But as many people have learned, through wrestling with these contradictions, we eventually reach a third stage where we just don’t give a shit anymore, or maybe we develop some ways of grappling with metaphysical questions which religion is really good at but atheism basically just deny these problems even exist. I think that’s why we often relate atheism as being childish, because a lot of people who are self aware and introspective will start out with a religious phase, then go through an atheist phase, and finally land in that secret third thing that is unique to the individual and their community.
I was recently reading a book about Hegel and early Marx, and the author Cyril Smith quoted one of Marx’s letters saying something like, “atheists are like children trying to reassure a grownup that they don’t believe in the bogeyman” do it seems like these “reddit atheists” have been on this same bullshit for at least the last 150 years
I don’t know, saying “I don’t have proof, I just believe” doesn’t seem like any sort of internal “logic” to me.
And while there are a lot of vocal people who are anti theists, most of us just look at believers like we would real people who are too afraid to say Voldemort’s name so he won’t come back because they can’t separate stories from reality.
Well I was specific to say that you have to look at things dialectically in order to see the connection. When you describe other people’s beliefs, you say they believe in something that doesn’t exist. So in order for something to exist, it has to be a “thing” or an object. This is its own type of logic called “Empiricism” or more radically, “Positivism”. Empiricism is a really good basis for reasoning, especially scientific reasoning. The creation of Empiricist reasoning is the intellectual basis for the (notably Atheistic) Enlightenment, which is the ideological superstructure for our current Modernist milieu.
But empiricism is actually bad at other kinds of epistemology (theory of knowledge.) For example, it necessarily divides the objective and the subjective into two separate “things”, as well as the mind and body. This leads to some wonky conclusions about metaphysics and the self, particularly where human experience meets nature. Empiricism is great at categorizing, but often fails to reassemble the collection of objects back into a monistic whole. As such Empiricism’s theory of social is extremely atomized and individualistic.
Like the way you describe religion, as " trust me bro this thing exists," is a perfect example. There is that part to it, the belief in a god, but there is also creation and appreciation of monuments and temples, ritual, community, social events, group study, all of these human experiences that collectively make up the very real and undeniable power of religion. But my understanding of your explanation just has a bunch of alienated individuals with the same wrong ideas, with no explanation or historical context as to how things became this way. This is also how people come to the very wrong assumption that the value of money doesn’t exist. Because it doesn’t have an objective form, it doesn’t exist. This is just completely untrue. It is socially real, which is as real as any object. In fact religious belief and power is just another form of social currency.
Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm and countless other philosopher theologians imbued Christianity with a consistent, self supporting logic. That was their job, and they have been extremely successful. We can discuss the limitations and shortcomings of that logic, but denying that it is logical is just willful ignorance.
Dialectics has its own shortcomings, so I’m not arguing that one is better than the other. But each form of epistemic reasoning, of which religious belief undeniably contains a vast epistemology, has certain advantages and shortcomings. In my opinion our task isn’t to find one way of reasoning and then brow beat others into accepting that reasoning, this is a form of fundamentalism – a way of determining knowledge, meaning and truth that supercedes all others in every way; which is exactly what religious fundamentalists want people to believe (so those people can be exploited, as fundamentalism always serves some higher power whether it be religious or economic.) Instead I think we should learn as much as we can, acknowledge the strengths and shortcomings of each way of conducting analysis, as well as our own strengths and weaknesses in doing so, and use them as tools to help us understand the world that exists. Leave nothing out, embrace contradiction, and learn how to become the most fulfilled, practical and honest selves.
But then again, everyone is on a different path ;)
That’s a lot of words that don’t tell us anything other than people created art and rituals they found meaning in. People do that with books and story’s that we recognize as fiction all the time without use elevating that to a religion.
Is it epistemologically consistent to say that something that cannot be measured or observed in a replicable manner exists? How would the world be conclusively different from that thing if it didn’t exist if it exhibits no measurable or replicable and observable outcome?
I’ll try to be a little less obtuse. I thought better about getting into this in the shitpost comm, and since I’m getting massacred my first impulse was probably correct. But I’m a huge nerd, cant help it.
So I guess I don’t know what you mean by epistemologically consistent. As a general rule of epistemology, people can have different, incompatible epistemologies, which basically renders communication impossible, since the participants use different models to determine what is true. This uh happens a lot since people think the way that they determine truth is the “right” one. Even my attempt to adapt different ways of thinking to different situations has limits, since I’m never going to subscribe to like flat earth theory. Not all epistemologies are equally valid or rigorous. Arithmetic is highly rigorous, whereas flat earth has a low bar for proof. Also I’ll argue that the validity of various theories of knowledge are historically contingent. Empiricism isn’t just “more true” than religion because it is more rigorous; in fact the hermetic tradition was extremely rigorous and scientific, but because they viewed “god” as indistinguishable from nature, they could synthesize religion and empirical science without contradiction. Their scientific inquiry was a sacred religious ritual where god learned about its own physical body (nature) through the consciousness of the scientist which was a part of the consciousness of god. This kind of monism is completely foreign to us, yet Isaac Newton was a Hermetic whose theories are still highly relevant and rigorous. But if a scientist publicly expressed these views to the academy they’d be deemed an eccentric, if not a crank of the highest order.
The second part of your question is more straightforward. How would the world change if god didn’t exist the way I described, as being socially real? There’d be no churches, no religious art, no pilgrimages that attract tens of millions each year. There’d be no recognizable European medieval period. Tens or hundreds of millions of people wouldn’t donate their time or money to the church. Which like, wouldn’t that be fucking awesome? no indigenous “schools” no religious colonialism/imperialism.
But all these followers aren’t lying in order to trick you into thinking god exists. They feel god, they experience god through their institutions, rituals, art, monuments, and yes, crimes. This exactly is the limit of pure Empiricism, it forces you to completely disregard subjectivity, or relegate it to a lower order of “realness” than a physical object. A stone in the middle of a lake will have little effect on the outside world outside of its extremely local circumstances; but a religious belief can have deadly implications for millions if it becomes the policy of a government. Laws, money are socially real, determined by their existence on paper, are upheld by sophisticated social constructs that reach into our minds and our behavior. But again, is a law not “real”? Of course it is. Try to break one in front of a cop and find out how real it is.
How would the world change if god didn’t exist the way I described, as being socially real? There’d be no churches, no religious art, no pilgrimages that attract tens of millions each year.
That is tautological and presumes the antecedent. It’s true because they have these experiences and produced these objects. It wouldn’t be true if they hadn’t done that.
I didn’t ask, how would the world would change if people did not believe that God existed. I asked how it would change if God actually did not exist whether they believed or not. 
I’m looking for the major distinguishing characteristic that would differentiate belief in something untrue versus the actual no existence in that. It’s accurate to say that if belief was none existent, those buildings, rituals, etc. would not exist, but that doesn’t distinguish between people believing it to be true yet it not actually comporting with reality.
Those things you mentioned aren’t reliant on being consistent with reality only on people believing that they experience something that is unmeasurable in any actual sense. Our history is full of times where people believed something and developed practices, rituals, stories, and structures in recognition of those beliefs and purported to experience the presence of that belief target only for later peoples to recognize that those beliefs weren’t based on any thing that comported with reality.
But your problems with my explanation depend on a view of reality that is completely divorced from history. Your conditions for realness depend on the existence of a real physical object and reject socially contingent objects, which is your right, but this is an example of an epistemological crisis: I insist that things that are socially real are real; you deny their existence, also denying the existence of law, value, many things that our society depends on. If you pick out parts of my argument that you don’t like and act like the points that I did make just don’t exist, then you are making your argument based on willful ignorance. But besides that, if your standard for what is real differs from mine we cant even have a debate, we just talk past each other smugly assuring ourselves that we are correct because our opponent is just like stupid or something. Maybe you think I’m stupid, I don’t think you’re stupid. My point is you can’t just deny the existence of things that are real in every way but physically. If a huge proportion of people in a society believe that something is real it is the same as that thing being empirically real. You can’t just throw away thousands of years of history because it disagrees with your narrow definition of objectivity. Or I guess you can, none is stopping you, but don’t pretend its consistent with reality.
Maybe god exists, maybe it doesnt, maybe god is just nature, but religion exists which would be the same as if god exists
Except things like law exist in a measurable state. Violating a law has a measurable outcome in the physical world. That’s the difference. If you run a stop sign in the presence of observers such as a police officer (such that it has an impact on that observer) you will be issued a citation for violating that law. We can test that hypothesis.
If something has no measurable presence under any observable state it is indistinguishable from that which does not exist. And to assume it does is tautological and a fallacy.
Bad example, turns out Voldemort actually had a curse on his name and it was a good idea to not say it
There are metaphysical religions that explore that third state—a sort of mystical atheism that acknowledges spiritual feelings while rejecting a simplistic controller god. Thelema is a good example.
Checked his post history, checks out certified athiest.
I believe in all the gods, goddesses, and spirits. Join me :)
yeah i get the feeling that some of the trigger happy reddit mods have migrated here and on .ml
Very cringe, very nice
Very based, very cool, thank you Kanye
Why do all the fedora guys look like Dollar Store Matthew Lillard?
Have you tried sprinkling a random reference to “sky fairy” in your post? Teenage atheists think they’re clever every time they hit that one.
Fuck off, everyone knows it’s the magic sky fairy, fake fan
Meatball man…🎼
In the sky… 🎵
Flying high… 🎶
M’lady.
I made fun of their very early reddit-type edgelord memes and they banned my ass too
Back on the old place I subbed to the religious meme subs of all the religions I did not beleive in, because they actually had fire memes, rather than the Atheist sub cringers.
I think I am banned from there too, don’t even know why, I think I managed to find the log once and it something like “no idiots” I don’t even remember posting there, I just remember it being annoying as fuck and being full of le fedora atheist circlejerk shit.
I’ve posted something unintelligent as an experiment. Now we wait 😉
You’ll be accepted in kind, I assume ;)
Task succeeded catastrophically.
I can find a comment by you that got removed a year ago, but no ban.
Are you insinuating someone would LIE in a shitpost?
Where’s the “lie”, my guy??
I can no longer post in the community, and they found I once commented on a grandpa-tier ‘me stand against the IS-LAMS’ meme as a possible reason why.
Trust me, if i could shitpost in my people’s meme community, I would!
You should be able to. There is no ban on record.
They look like this:
Oh wow ig I mustn’t know what I’m talking about, I tried to post and all I saw was:
Why are you getting combative? There’s no need for that.
I was curious for the reason behind your ban, so I went looking. But it’s not there.
You’re welcome to check the modlog yourself, and find that there is no entry for your ban.
Just curious - what do you think is the reason for OP’s posting problem and the “banned from community” message? Is it some kind of a bug?
I’m not sure. I’m inclined to believe there is a ban, but that an entry for it for some reason got omitted.
Why are you mad at God? Y’all need Jesus.
If I’m mad at god, why wouldn’t I be mad at jesus? They’re the same person
That’s leaning real hard on the toe line triune biblical interpretation, my friend. To get the trinity out of the bible you gotta be lookin for it really hard. The history of christianity is littered with groups advocating and being persecuted for every imaginable interpretation of god, but the trinity folks really knew how to murder their way to top dog better than any other group
Sounds about right, if I saw disgusting Islamophobia I would call it out, IDC if they believe in X fairytale, there’s generally a line.
Good meme, butthurt community
Amen
Thank you for sacrificing yourself for our memes.
Unrelated to the post but is /c/communityname a valid link on some apps/platforms? Or is it just a carryover from the /r/ days.
Just a carryover, I’m not typing out the fqdn for that circus
Just a carryover. You reference communities here with an exclamation point. For instance:
!atheistmemes or !linux@lemmy.ml
!ligma
No it’s not “just” a carryover - it’s a valid link actually, if you put it into the link portion of a URL, even without the http part.
Also, your first exclamation link does not work. Probably bc it lacks the ending part so like !atheistmemes@lemmy.world.
This is all explained much better than my words here: Guide | How should I link to a community?
!atheistmemes works for me, I think that might be a client thing. /c/athiestmemes
Interesting. I did check that it was not merely my instance being different, bc even on Lemmy.world it still didn’t work, though both of these from the webpage UI.
The link also does not work on Voyager for Android, which iirc is the most popular app.
So not working for these two approaches means that it’s not a safe bet that it will work for most recipients, I believe.
On a related note, if you allow the webpage UI to finish the completion, then it will turn it into a link that will work, like !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world. But I don’t know about all the variety of apps and how each one would handle it - Voyager for instance seems to do nothing at all with the exclamation point, at least while you are still composing the message.
This will help: Guide | How should I link to a community?.
I assembled that link specifically for you on lemmy.world, but for anyone else on another instance who wants it, note that links to posts do not really work well since they take you off of your instance to go there, but you can either paste the link to the search bar to “translate” it into one that works on your instance, or in this case it’s easier to just go to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca and it’s one of the posts near the top.
I was banned because I said that a meme wasn’t Atheist but plain Islamophobia. No explanation given.
This is such a huge problem in atheism communities, which is why I don’t spend any time in them despite being secular and non religious myself (yeah, I honestly don’t even like using the term “atheist” anymore). Religious or not, you shouldn’t be telling people what to believe or how to believe. That goes for hardline Christian nationalists just as much as it goes for hardline Atheists attacking anyone of faith. If it’s not hurting anyone, let people believe what they believe.
Thanks, Sam Harris.
I read “The Moral Landscape”. 90% of it is pretty good, but he’ll randomly drop “and that’s why we need to be worried about Islamic takeover of western Europe” into something completely unrelated. He spends a lot more time complaining about Islamic fundamentalist than he does the Christian fundamentalist who actually have political power in the US (and to a lesser degree, western Europe). Then you get to a chapter that’s all about religious influence on society, but it’s all about relatively relaxed Christians who have Ph.Ds in some field and show up at scientific conferences.
You might expect a word somewhere about the fundamentalist Christians who control roughly half of Congress, but no. It’s all Muslims and Christians who make it a more personal thing.
Wow, that is pretty ridiculous
I agree with this sentiment, but Christianity is partly defined by “spreading the word of god”. So “telling people what to believe” is par for the course (think missionaries).
Curious though, why do you not refer to yourself as atheist? Non-religious is actually not very specific. Non-religious can mean Agnostic Theist, Agnostic Atheist, or Atheist.
Really I prefer the word secular for myself, and for me that means I am comfortable within my own ignorance. Scientifically, we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a god/gods, afterlife, etc. They are unfalsifiable, and therefore inproveable either way. So I just say I am comfortable not knowing. I neither assert the existence of god or the nonexistence of god, because I have no way to know either is true. That, and as I stated previously I just don’t like some of the connotations aetheism has gotten. Long ago I used to be a very loud, annoying, self-proclaimed atheist. But eventually I realized that just as there is no way to prove theism, there is no way to prove atheism. That, and I recognized that in my efforts to “spread” atheism and debunk religion I’d basically become what I was originally trying to “fight against,” essentially. Now I should be clear that I very much do still massively criticize those who try to exercise their religion onto others. I’m trans so I’m very used to it at this point. But I know plenty of religious people from all kinds of different religious backgrounds who practice in a way that is accepting of all people and does not impact those who do not share their faith, and I really see no problem with that.
From your description, it sounds like you are an Agnostic Atheist. It takes some faith to be an Atheist. Personally, I agree with your points, so I’d be more of an Agnostic Atheist too; but I am somewhat convinced that science has decent evidence which disproves the old and new testament god. I believe our scientific understanding of our universe suggests god would not give a shit whether it was worshipped and it would not be some moral judge. It’s consciousness (if we can even call it that) would be so far beyond what humans could comprehend that our puny human morales and ethical dilemmas would be irrelevant to it. Nevertheless, I still think human morales and ethics are important, because us Agnostic Atheists don’t need the fear of divine retribution to do the right thing.
Thank you for sharing your beliefs in such detail. I appreciate it. Sorry to hear about your experience with those forcing their religion on you due to being transgendered. I am cisgendered, but I like to consider myself an ally. I have a lgbtq+ flag flying in my classroom (I’m a teacher) and I already had to give a student a stern talk for telling me that “god loves you” after looking at my flag
The constant angry circlejerk abounds. Deadass I got way more atheist mileage out of the DankChristianMemes sub than any atheist sub on the old place.
Some fuckers are too euphoric to have fun it seems.
Religious or not, you shouldn’t be telling people what to believe or how to believe. That goes for hardline Christian nationalists just as much as it goes for hardline Atheists attacking anyone of faith. If it’s not hurting anyone, let people believe what they believe.
I would agree, but I’ve actually become sympathetic to the opposite viewpoint recently. It is hurting people. Look at the policy decisions in the US that are driven by religious fundamentalism. Heck, just think about the core premise that faith is stronger than reason. That’s an inherently problematic and extremely exploitable viewpoint. I don’t think something like religion can be counted as harmless by ignoring all the examples of harm that it causes. If a belief is only not dangerous when it agrees with other beliefs, and is dangerous when it disagrees, then that is a fundamentally dangerous belief all the time, which only becomes apparent sometimes. I think religion has a purpose, to give community to those who need it, but fundamentally it is not good.
spoiler
If God is reading this, I’m sorry, but I do hope I get points for trying to hold good beliefs from fundamentals. It’s also a reasonable religious viewpoint that organized religion has been taken over by the literal Antichrist. You could say that I hold faith that good acts are judged accordingly regardless of religion.
…I would make a really weird Christian.
The thing is that is exactly what I mean by having a problem with people who force their religious values onto others, which is expressly not okay. But I know plenty of people, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever else who practice their faith in their own lives and do not disrupt the lives of others according to their beliefs. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of religious people I have met and know in real life are like this. Christian nationalists are different, they don’t respect the beliefs of others and want to force their faith onto other people. That’s where the line is. What I have a problem with is those who attack people who are not past that line, who are practicing their faith in their own lives without forcing anything onto others.
I think that’s fair. I generally follow that philosophy in my personal life; many members of my family are religious to various degrees, but we don’t really discuss it much, and their beliefs don’t really effect my perception of them, because we don’t try to force our beliefs on each other.
The mod clearly is not an atheist. What kind of atheist is afraid to demonize islam?
Without knowing the situation, in the world as it exists today, there’s a lot of racist people that use Muslim or anti-Muslim rhetoric to refer to or denigrate any person of roughly Middle Eastern descent. Think of how many stories there were of Sikhs that were assaulted physically or verbally after September 11.
A moderator or admin who is aware of this could easily still allow criticism of Islam, the religion, while taking actions against those who are just being racist assholes with a veneer of anti religion. I have seen this many times before.
deleted by creator
You mean how do we not believe in something harder?
Become so much of an Atheist, that your disbelief in God sucks the faith right out of theists.
