How is atheism a faith?
- Thread starter drew
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Your prerogative, naturally. Doesn't make it accurate, but it's absolutely your opinion to have. Just like all those people that popularized "vunerable".
Efficient maybe, effective not so much.
Oops... my response wound up buried in a quote. But it's there, you can read it, and I'm out of here.
Since you don't yet have post editing privileges, I have taken the liberty of pulling your response out of the quote block, for clarity. I hope this is OK.
I must respectfully disagree. For the most part, participants have been good about discussing and arguing the concepts presented, and people have generally been civil in a topic that can be divisive.
Have faith in the internet.
I just don't understand why it is SO important for some religious people to state that Atheism is a faith. I've seen this before, and I don't get it. What's the endgame here? Why do people with this belief care so very much about it that they want to prove to Atheists that their understanding of atheism is correct and the actual understanding held by the actual atheists is incorrect?
My first hunch would be the need to establish the feeling they are on an equal footing in discussions like these. "Yes, I believe in a God but I'm really not making any more implicit assumptions than you guys, who don't believe in a god" - since deep down, they probably know they assume a hell of a lot more of things which they can't really prove.
Oddish,
Care to explain what exactly is getting you to have faith in a creator and it’s ongoing relevance?
What positive reason do you have?
Maybe try without using the negation of anything.
Because that doesn’t get you any closer to a specific faith.
Just because No X, doesn’t mean Y.
It’s not a binary game.
Care to explain what exactly is getting you to have faith in a creator and it’s ongoing relevance?
What positive reason do you have?
Maybe try without using the negation of anything.
Because that doesn’t get you any closer to a specific faith.
Just because No X, doesn’t mean Y.
It’s not a binary game.
It wouldn't need to turn into a verbal knife fight if both sides were intellectually honest.
Fine, great. All power to you.
It's not.
Likewise, but...
On the existence of a god or gods, fine, but that's not what this discourse has been about; it's been about non-believers refuting an erroneous assertion about the nature of non-belief. We didn't even get into the value of belief vs non-belief. Debate is fine, but you don't get to misrepresent the opposing position to do so, and cling to that misrepresentation when corrected by its proponents.
If I say that atheism is a belief like nudity is an outfit, you could maybe make a case that strong vocal atheism from the likes of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins is akin to streaking, but that still doesn't make it a faith-based belief, or non-belief a choice.
As a Deist - I approve of the idea of not returning to this topic!
I have been a member of Trekbbs for nearly 20 years and I can’t recall any religious thread in Miscellaneous ever turning nasty. Over on the forum that we don’t name here, yes discussions can become heated, but not in Miscellaneous.
You can feel free to see your way out of it, then. What you can't do is continue trying to shut down the discussion because it makes you uncomfortable.
Apart from a few gentle barbs by internet standards, this discussion has been pretty low key and respectful.
Why, exactly?
This thread was (supposed to be) about exploring the claim that "atheism is a faith". It shouldn't have anything to do about whether a specific god or or gods exist and I think for the most part the responses avoided that topic.
I just find it incredibly rude and condescending. Trying to make an atheist use a word they don't use so a believer feels.. vindicated? It's embarrassing even reading it.
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If the requirement for being gnostic is absolute lack of doubt, I would agree with you.
The current scientific theories for the universe require advanced degrees to even modestly understand and still don’t really answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” They barely even explain why we might have gotten this particular something yet. Absolute certainty that the answer can be found somewhere down that road is not strictly rational.
And even putting aside the science of the origins of the universe, why is it bad to kill someone to benefit yourself if you know for sure there will not be consequences? Is it just because your brain is hardwired to feel bad about it, or do you believe in the abstract value of life? And in the absence of the threat of eternal torture, does that abstract belief in the value of life not also require faith?
Where do our morals come from? If they do not come from a higher being, either they are a meaningless construct of our communal instincts, or they are something we’ve collectively put our faith in.
we are by and large empathic beings.
We can put ourselves into other shoes and understand that it’s bad to be killed or harmed by someone like us.
We understand that it’s beneficial for individuals and society both to avoid harm And increase well being for all.
It’s religions like Christianity that claim the only reason people don’t commit those crimes is because of negative consequences.
That they need the threat of eternal hell which they cannot possibly avoid (except for that death bed conversion loophole).
Most atheists I know behave morally because they understand the mutual benefit and value.
The strive for well being, which we can and should extend even beyond our own species, just makes sense.
More than just empathic, humans are social beings. We've gathered and lived in groups since our origins.
Remember, the worst penalty to a prison inmate in the U.S. for misbehaviour is solitary confinement. The worst you can do to a human being without physical torture is to keep them isolated.
Going back to our roots, killing each other is obviously bad for the social group. To kill another member of your own social group led to being shunned by the rest of the group, either out of fear or hatred or both. Killers may even have been cast out of the group, if not penalized physically by the group. Through evolution, it therefore became instinct not to kill another member of our group. This also happened with other animals that live in groups.
Over time, this has changed according to what we consider our group. Used to be members of our tribe, then maybe members of a group of tribes in a region, to members of our class, members of our nation, members of our ethnicity, members of our religion, and so forth. To justify the killing of others always involved a de-humanizing way of thinking, the people to kill had to be less human than us so that it was justified to kill them. Even in recent history, from islamic terrorists calling people of the west "the devil", and westerners calling those terrorists (and often the people they came from) animals. The reason why the enslavement of Africans was viewed as okay was because Europeans and white Americans viewed them as not quite human, at least less human than whites. The Nazis de-humanized Jews and non-Whites in order to justify killing them, to "purify the human race".
But the instinct not to kill is still very strong. U.S. General S.L.A. Marshall claimed that more than seventy percent of soldiers in World War I would not fire their rifles, and most who did fire aimed above the heads of the enemies.
Of course, this all excludes killing in selfdefense and defense of others.
Killing for ot is therefore a symptom of sociopathy. And remember, not all sociopaths are killers.
The morale to not kill each other therefore has nothing to do with religion or faith, but with evolution and instincts.
Remember, the worst penalty to a prison inmate in the U.S. for misbehaviour is solitary confinement. The worst you can do to a human being without physical torture is to keep them isolated.
Going back to our roots, killing each other is obviously bad for the social group. To kill another member of your own social group led to being shunned by the rest of the group, either out of fear or hatred or both. Killers may even have been cast out of the group, if not penalized physically by the group. Through evolution, it therefore became instinct not to kill another member of our group. This also happened with other animals that live in groups.
Over time, this has changed according to what we consider our group. Used to be members of our tribe, then maybe members of a group of tribes in a region, to members of our class, members of our nation, members of our ethnicity, members of our religion, and so forth. To justify the killing of others always involved a de-humanizing way of thinking, the people to kill had to be less human than us so that it was justified to kill them. Even in recent history, from islamic terrorists calling people of the west "the devil", and westerners calling those terrorists (and often the people they came from) animals. The reason why the enslavement of Africans was viewed as okay was because Europeans and white Americans viewed them as not quite human, at least less human than whites. The Nazis de-humanized Jews and non-Whites in order to justify killing them, to "purify the human race".
But the instinct not to kill is still very strong. U.S. General S.L.A. Marshall claimed that more than seventy percent of soldiers in World War I would not fire their rifles, and most who did fire aimed above the heads of the enemies.
Of course, this all excludes killing in selfdefense and defense of others.
Killing for ot is therefore a symptom of sociopathy. And remember, not all sociopaths are killers.
The morale to not kill each other therefore has nothing to do with religion or faith, but with evolution and instincts.
So then, is morality just a function of our neural hardwiring? Are we only moral because of a chemical process in our brains, because millennia of natural selection have determined we socially benefit from not killing?
Most atheists would prescribe an intrinsic value to life that isn’t dependent on Darwinian prescriptions.
Most atheists would prescribe an intrinsic value to life that isn’t dependent on Darwinian prescriptions.
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