What exciting developments have occurred in the world of atheism recently? Seems like the same circlejerks by 14 year olds today as it was decades ago. Cool, you don’t believe in fairy tales. Better spend a lot of time talking to other 14 year olds about how you don’t believe in fairy tales.
You mean how do we not believe in something harder?
I can find a comment by you that got removed a year ago, but no ban.
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 ;)
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.
It’s a real shame that a lot of atheist communities online are just circle jerk condescending bs. There are some interesting discussions to be had but I guess we’ll have to look elsewhere.
Deadass, it seems like atheist communities are full of these vibes
Like I was that kid once, but grow up please
Well maybe many of those communities are actually filled with 14 year olds
they absolutely are. Where else can a teen growing up in a religious family and forced to attend church/mosque/temples vent their frustration, and they are definitely going to be edgy about it, that’s what being teen is about after all
If you don’t let your inner 14 year old atheist out every once in a while what’s the point?
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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… 🎶
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 😉
Maybe because you didn’t have enough faith
Impossible. I watched the music video for Faith by Limp Bizkit every afternoon on TRL for like three months straight in 7th grade. I was up to my eyeballs in faith!
Orther! I got a plan! We just gotta HAVE FAITH
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. You reference communities here with an exclamation point. For instance:
!atheistmemes or !linux@lemmy.ml
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, which is why including the @instnance is recommended, since it works for more of not all
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.
!ligma
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.
Just a carryover, I’m not typing out the fqdn for that circus
(/s) Probably bc it reminds people of the site-that-shall-not-be-named?
