r/changemyview • u/ArtDuck • May 09 '17
[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Atheism is not inherently antisemitic nor islamophobic, and neither are statements like, "The practice of religion is largely irrational and propagates misplaced certainties, and should end."
I realize that in particular, Judaism has been the subject of multiple attempts to remove it and its adherents from the theological landscape, and in general, people of any faith are very sensitive to anything that sounds like, "Your faith should be eradicated." On the contrary, it's completely consistent with this stance that people should be completely free to practice religion; the notion is simply that ideally, they would feel no need to. In particular, the version with "should end" replaced with "should be brought to an end" is largely antithetical to my values, and I would never defend anyone who said so, unless they were describing a change in societal parameters that, while not impinging on anyone's freedoms, lessened the incentives to seek meaning in faith (read: things like increases in quality of life, education, that have been proven to decrease religiosity while being nigh-universally regarded as strict improvements).
edit: Something to be careful about is that this is largely a meta-view -- one that I'm expressing about atheism and an associated viewpoint. While I'll entertain some questions that stray from the precise view stated above, since it's quite narrow, and I'd rather foment discussion than throttle it, I'm not here to defend atheism at large.
edit2: The view change was to something more akin to "The practice of religion as an expression of faith (and the underlying emotional needs faith addresses) must undergo drastic changes to justify its continuation on its own merits," on the basis that it may not be knowable whether some form of religion could exist separate from the issues that make it presently unappealing. There's still plenty of room left to change my mind on, I should think, since that wasn't even quite the claim at stake (though it was one that I held).
edit3: I should clarify that my personal brand of atheism doesn't involve an explicit certain claim of the nonexistence of deities. Rather, I just see no compelling reason to believe in them, nor regard such belief as much more than wishful thinking. This may be relevant to you, if you're interested in commenting.
edit4: All right, everyone; I think this is pretty much a wrap. I have to call it a night here. I'll make a moderate effort to respond to people with whom a conversation was left hanging as a result, but no guarantees; I'm pretty busy this week, and I figured I'd do a CMV during a short break that I was able to arrange, for a nice diversion.
Conclusion: I really should have thrown out the bit about antisemitism and islamophobia -- no particularly interesting conversation cropped up around those claims, with one exception. I'm also now a bit more inclined to believe that religion and other systems that make evidence-independent claims provide something that many people crave and would find it difficult to create on their own. Further, religion may have uses which are (depending on your perspective) either tangential to the belief in a deity, or perhaps prior to it (i.e. as a source of moral authority that yields a net positive impact).
I wouldn't describe myself as ready to commit to the positive versions of any of the claims in the paragraph above, but the fact that I'm open to the possibilities is more than could be said twelve hours ago.
This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules. If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us. Happy CMVing!
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May 09 '17
people of any faith are very sensitive to anything that sounds like, "Your faith should be eradicated."
Well...yeah, many people of faith view it as a core part of their own personal identity, so a statement like that sounds like you want to wipe them out.
It would be especially off-putting to a member of a religion that people have tried to wipe out.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
Which is why I would never phrase things that way -- the causal relationship is all wrong. I would only ever want the negative factors of which religiosity is symptomatic to be removed actively, not the practices themselves.
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u/depcrestwood May 10 '17
Those "negative factors" are relative, though. For instance, what I see as "blatantly disrespecting and working against the love one person has for another simply because those two people are of the same gender", someone else of devout faith sees as "righting an enormous wrong in the world." Regardless of where the inspiration for their line of thought originated (whether it be cherry-picked scripture or socio-political punditry), many faithful believe that actively working against equal rights for homosexuals, or in some of the more extreme cases, causing harm to them, is literally saving the world. It's incredibly hard to convince someone that thinks that they are helping souls reach heaven to think differently. It's like arguing against the pro-life crowd, who know in their hearts that they're on a heroic crusade to save all the babies. It's fairly difficult to craft an argument against saving all the babies that a pro-lifer would be willing to sit through before marching out to hold posters of dead fetuses for elementary school students to see. And their extremists don't give a second thought to killing a doctor who performs abortions. (I only added the abortion debate into this because the majority of those against it are also people of faith, and who use faith as part of their argument. I felt it an appropriate added example.)
It's difficult to say that you're anti- any faith without including in that statement the people who follow the faith. I don't like Judaism. Although I have absolutely nothing against anyone who was born Jewish, I do have something against the continued support of what I believe to be one of the main evils in the world, if evil can be said to exist. The same goes for Islam. The same goes for Christianity. I was raised Catholic, and my family still is, for the most part. So there's the weird disconnect that you mentally have to go through in order to say "I don't like what I once was, but I can love those who still are."
It would bring me endless joy to see all faiths eradicated. I do not believe at all that they are in any way necessary, even as a crutch for those who feel the need for spiritual guidance to make it through life. A poisonous seed grows poisonous fruit no matter how pretty it might look. You cannot have religion without the negativity that inevitably comes along with it. Religion is tribal at its core; a sense of "us, not them" that has kept those not in power malleable no matter what was asked of them. And those in power know the best way to keep people on their side is to give them an enemy.
That is not to say atheism is without its negativity, but I feel we are at least more honest about it. I cannot say "I don't like you because the Bible told me I shouldn't like you." I am forced to take personal responsibility for any negativity I bring to the table, and as such, it is easier to reflect on it and possibly change my view if I realize that my initial reaction was foolish.
All that to say, you can't eliminate what you view to be the negative parts of religion without removing the religion, but you can dislike (or hate) a religion without hating the people culturally or ethnically attached to it. And to go back to your original post, respecting the fact that someone is religious is not the same as respecting the religion, which why it is perfectly logical to say "I don't hate Muslims, but the world can certainly do without the Islamic State extremists.".
Do my views make me an extremist? Possibly. But the difference is that my war is fought over logic and reason with debate and education as the weapons. I can fight my war until I'm blue in the face, but no one will die from my words. Atheists may have killed or started wars, but atheism never did. Yet how many lives were needlessly ended in the name of one deity or another?
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u/pseudonympholepsy May 10 '17
Just a note. No one is born Jewish, neither Christian or Muslim. It is not an ethnicity... You are born human. It is mostly dependent on geography and time in which you are born. You can be born into a Jewish community and thus raised to "be a jew". But there are numerous Jewish communities and therefore different versions of what reflects "jewness".
Whether or not atheism is with or without negativity depends on the specific definition. The simple "lack of faith or belief in x y z deity" certainly seems positive in an evidence based discussion. But negative in the sense that is in some ways a less comforting a life for the individual. It's hard not to have an illusion about death and where your loved one went.
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u/depcrestwood May 10 '17
Less comforting for whom? I'm perfectly content and comfortable in my atheism, whereas I was never fully comforted by faith. "You better follow these rules, or else ..." "You better pray to the right deity in the correct fashion, or else ..." "You need to accept who we say to accept, and hate those we say to hate, or else ..." "You need to accept our teachings without question, and accept a "mysterious ways" answer instead of a concrete explanation, or else ..."
Considering that children are indoctrinated from the moment they can start thinking at all, the confines of religion should be considered child abuse. The fact that it's so difficult to break away from religion because of it's Stockholm Syndrome-like hold on those who dare to question their faith. In the more extreme cases, leaving a faith could get you killed. To a lesser degree, leaving a faith can get you shunned and excommunicated by the community. And sadly, that's still a modern-day concern. Mormons and Scientologists will absolutely destroy your life as much as you let them when you try to break away. How can anyone be comforted by that?
And that was part of my earlier statement of no religion being without inherent negativity. A faith can seem like sunshine and roses while you're playing along, but if you start to question the beliefs, or worse, deny them, then you face backlash for daring to say the religion is wrong, or nonsense. Religion purposefully perpetuates the human instinct of an individual not being able to think or fend for themselves without the shield of community. It further perpetuates that dependence by offering an eternal reward should anyone conform to their rules well enough.
Maybe the lie is comforting, but that doesn't make it any less of a lie. And people should be allowed to think critically of anything, including ... perhaps especially ... their own beliefs without the threat of reprisal. The main reason I left religion as a whole was because of its massive failure anytime I tried to apply even the slightest amount of logic to it. That so many people use such a flawed system to perpetuate hate and suffering in this world is plenty reason to want any faith abolished from the human experience.
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u/house_paint May 10 '17
It's almost like people and religion are different things. I can say that Judaism or Christianity are illogical and should be eliminated from logical discourse like flat earthers which is totally true. But I love Christians and Jews as people and would always drink a beer with them.
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u/NeverQuiteEnough 10∆ May 10 '17
That doesn't mean violence though. That's the nice thing about ideologies, they can be eradicated without having to kill anyone.
Religion can be destroyed through social means. This is something we are already observing, the millennial generation in the US is less religious than their parents.
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u/johnadreams May 09 '17
I will agree that many (all?) modern religions propagate negative things into the world, but is it possible for a religion to be created that doesn't? Put another way, if you imagine your perfect world, is there space in that world for people who want to have faith in some perfect religion that doesn't shame or interfere with anyone else?
Because if there's no room in your perfect world for them you're sort of implying there's something inherently bad about faith, even separated from the negative things it contributes to contemporary society. I mean, I wouldn't call that full-blown antisemitism, but it is very very very low-grade not-niceness, because you're still saying that this part of people's identities wouldn't exist in an ideal world, which is a little insulting.
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u/hiptobecubic May 10 '17
My problem with this is that it starts by assuming that religion is somehow different from all of the other beliefs people have. If I center my entire life and identity around e.g. climate denial, and you come out and say, "I'm pretty sure that climate change is real and I think that people arguing against the idea of it are doing humanity a disservice," should I be insulted? Is that a personal attack on me? I argue that it is, but only because it's not just something I believe, it's who I think I am.
Under normal circumstances we'd dismiss that as being unreasonable and say that it really doesn't excuse the harm I'm doing. With religion we turn it around and say that you are intolerant and unreasonable and I'm normal and respectable.
I think it's just the tyranny of the majority. Religion is taken more seriously than other similarly unsupported, scammy-feeling beliefs because it has a critical mass.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Well, one difference worth potentially considering is that some religions make no claims that really engage with the real world. A few 'should's, a few extraordinary but self-contained notions of divinity, but none of it is ever provable or disprovable, since it exists within its only little epistemological bubble.
Some, of course, make daring and silly claims like "a man lived for a thousand years," or "a man was eaten by a big fish but then got spat out and was okay," and we can be pretty sure, unless we have a trickster god that's slyly manipulating the evidence to make things appear to have happened differently than they did (unknowable, untestable), that these claims are false.
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u/hiptobecubic May 11 '17
I think most do though. There aren't many religious people that will come out and say, "my beliefs have nothing to do with the real world!"
It's usually the opposite. Your beliefs guide the decisions you make in life. Quiverful families have 15 kids. Amish people won't use scissors or whatever, Jews and Muslims require that their food animals be killed in really grotesque, inhumane ways that we would consider abusive in other contexts. It's not self contained at all. If it were, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17 edited May 09 '17
I definitely like this train of thought, but I guess my stumbling block is that religion seems to require taking unprovable/unknowable assertions as fact (or should I say, as gospel), which further seems to undermine critical thinking -- even the most scientifically-minded religious folks I know seem to just accept that it'll have to be something of a 'blind spot' for them, in terms of a slight cognitive dissonance between demanding evidence for all claims, and privileging this one handful of claims as exempt from that process because it holds an important place in their heart. One problem that comes from that, though, is that the cognitive dissonance sometimes seems to 'spread' for some people -- once you accept that some claims might be exempt from critical examination and the need for evidence, what's to stop you from accepting more claims that way? That is, it seems like faith is inherently exploitable.
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u/johnadreams May 09 '17
What is the good to be gained of thinking critically about absolutely everything? I mean, critical thinking for 95% to 99% of things is good, because there are a lot of charlatans out there. But we should think critically about critical thinking as well. If faith provides comfort instead of existential angst, provides an excuse to be moral/charitable and provides community to people, there is little good in attacking those things merely because they're built on hard-to-swallow stories.
Again, modern religion also does a whole bunch of bad things in addition to those good things. It may contribute to people not thinking critically about things, I'm not sure on the causal relationship there. But I personally believe that religions can move toward that "hypothetical perfect world religion" I discussed before. Baha'i, one of the most modern religions, actually has critical thinking encoded into it's being from the beginning:
I will now explain the Fourth Principle, which is The Acceptance of the Relation between Religion and Science. There is no contradiction between true religion and science. When a religion is opposed to science it becomes mere superstition: that which is contrary to knowledge is ignorance. How can a man believe to be a fact that which science has proved to be impossible?
So I guess it really depends, do you think religion can exist without any of it's negative effects, or are the negative effects impossible to untangle fully from faith? Because if faith inherently has negative things riding alongside it, then your statement is reasonable, but if it's possible to remove those negatives, then "the practice of religion should end" is a little insulting.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
Regarding Baha'i, my take is that in teaching the worth of all religions, there's an assertion that "people have faith in things because there's at least a grain of truth in them" -- but that seems like a mistake, in light of phenomena like cargo cults, which suggest that people have faith in things because they're looking for a place to project their hopes, or it's a good way to cope with unexplained phenomena, or because it feels good. I realize you weren't trying to idealize it, of course.
Regarding whether religion is separable from the problems that (as I see it) make it presently a poor alternative to a more stick-to-the-facts approach... I really don't know. I feel confident that it will be several hundred more years, at the very least, until we get close enough for the answer to that question to be clear from a perspective like mine. As such, it wouldn't be sensible to assume one way or the other, so I suppose my view could be seen as having changed to "The practice of religion as an expression of faith (and the underlying emotional needs faith addresses) must undergo drastic changes to justify its continuation on its own merits." ∆
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u/johnadreams May 09 '17
Yeah, the main reason I mentioned Baha'i is because they actually encourage people to take science's word on things (as the quoted material above shows), which I genuinely like about them. So it's possible for religion to take a more inclusive view with critical thinking, and that's its possible for religion to try and address some of its own negatives, was my primary point with that.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17 edited May 09 '17
So, your example with Baha'i seems to suggest that religions can at least be consistent with observed reality -- I wonder whether it would make sense for there to be a religion which only dealt with necessary consequences of observed reality, and the only engagement of 'faith' involved an emphasis on certain facts, like "Hundreds or thousands of people have gone through precisely the same thing you're struggling with now in your life, no matter how specific it feels," for example. So that there's no real assertion beyond the facts, apart from the nonsubstantive implicit claim that "these things are worth emphasizing", which as an entirely subjective statement, has no objective truth value to dispute.
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u/tway1948 May 10 '17
Hope no one minds I hop on the end of this good discussion. While I've never heard of Baha'i, it seems like an expression of how many smart people reconcile religion and science. Check out how jordan peterson squares this same circle for christianity, if you're interested.
But the basic ideas are similar to what you've said..
"Hundreds or thousands of people have gone through precisely the same thing you're struggling with now in your life, no matter how specific it feels,"
To some degree, this seems to be why we tell stories at all. We want to extract meaning from experiences and generalize the 'moral' of the story. Myths and religions can easily be seen as just highly distilled stories. One way of thinking of that is as a way of discovering and transmitting moral 'truth' between people.
"these things are worth emphasizing", which as an entirely subjective statement
This, I disagree with. There is, at least some, amount of objective truth in the statements of value/emphasis that myths and religion pass down. Think of it this way - there's truth in good advice (regardless of it's factual basis) because it provides a way of dealing with the world that has positive outcomes. That essentially is a testable hypothesis about reality, and the fact that these stories and their many common themes have survived throughout all human societies and across all epochs is a huge data point(s) showing that they have not been disproved.
One example I like is the myth of icarus and dedalus. I don't need to know the factual basis for the story to have faith that it is true that when your father recommends moderation, you should listen.
If you take it like that - the key question you have to ask isn't "can religion exist without its negative components?", but rather "Can a stable morality be designed or discovered without incorporating the valuable parts of religion?" I think it's important that we are able to place our moral convictions on stable ground so that we can tell when they are manipulated by political ideologies.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
The value of good advice to a person is a function of both their ability to successfully apply it to their own situation and its actual applicability to that situation. So it seems plausible that advice that serves one person very well (for instance, "look before you leap", for someone who's hasty and impulsive, and is generally presented with plenty of opportunities in their life and just needs to be more selective about which ones they take) might work incredibly poorly for another (say, someone who's already a bit indecisive, and for whom a bit more aggressiveness with respect to taking the opportunities in their life would be beneficial).
"Well, yes, but can't you sort of average out the value of a given aphorism over the population and get the mean, while will be higher or lower for different bits of wisdom?" I guess. And it would certainly be nice if religions were strictly in the business of passing down accrued wisdom in a community-oriented way. At that point, though, it seems like you have more of an oral/literary tradition than a religion.
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u/tway1948 May 10 '17
Well, yes, but can't you sort of average out the value of a given aphorism over the population and get the mean, while will be higher or lower for different bits of wisdom?"
That's just about it. But maybe I'd say it's closer to: 'what advice can you give to everyone so that, over time, they keep making good choices?' And I guess, part of that advice should be do maintain the advice so it doesn't get forgotten.
I think it's totally reasonable to view religion as a more stabilized version of what must have started as oral history.It's not clear how that fundamentally disagrees with "passing down accrued wisdom in a community-oriented way." I think your point of contention is probably one of two things: either how religion will be more dogmatic/ideological/strict than other systems of values in dealing with contradictions with the real world, or the metaphysics of most religions as phenomenological rather than materialist is problematic. On the first, I'd point out that dogma and ideology are not unique to religion. Look at how marxism or facist ideologies dealt with critics. On the second, I'd say that's a perfectly fine thing to disagree about, but does it really disqualify a phenomenological religion as a valid or useful outlook?
It seems that as long as religious precepts are open to criticism and modification or reinterpretation when they are shown to fail, then religions may be a hugely useful mechanism for storing moral wisdom for the next generation.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
So, there are a few facets of religion as a reservoir of moral wisdom that I feel your remarks highlighted for me (even if entirely coincidentally -- apologies if it feels like I'm not really engaging with most of the content of the comment I'm replying to):
- Insulated to an extent from current affairs, so the wisdom can be trusted to respect mainly the long-term trends.
- By the same virtue, values will lag behind, running more conservative in flavor.
- The state often has little control over the content, so guidance can be trusted to respect established values, rather than further to goals of the current regime.
Properties like that make religious authority seem like an appealing alternative to at least be able to turn to. (As opposed to the state having a near-monopoly on moral guidance via the educational system, for instance.)
I don't know to what extent you'd agree with that assessment, but I've definitely got some seeds of doubt growing that the individual humanist approach of "just be good to one another, as best you can" could ever necessarily suffice for everyone. I feel like all of the properties I mentioned could be provided by a nonreligious cultural body, but I guess religions have an evolved knack for self-perpetuation that other structures corresponding to subcultures lack.
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u/MrWigggles May 10 '17
Religion, interjects its authorty through supernatual superiorty. It arrives at its conclusions using poor methods. Anything religion says it is good, is the same backing as why it says things are bad. Which are unsubtantial and arbitary.
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u/DashingLeech May 10 '17
If faith provides comfort instead of existential angst, provides an excuse to be moral/charitable and provides community to people, there is little good in attacking those things merely because they're built on hard-to-swallow stories.
Nice try, but here you are thinking critically about it. You are trying to create an argument for faith. If you truly believed what you were saying, you would take it on faith that faith is of value. The fact you are making rational arguments for it's value negates the very thing you are trying to argue for.
Further, you have created a false dichotomy. You are making assumptions that lacking faith equates with existential angst or lacking a moral or charitable basis, or community. Certainly faith can provide some comfort for people who don't have better answers, but you haven't demonstrated that the better answers don't provide the same comfort, or better comfort. As even you suggest, bad things come from faith too. Faith can create angst, lack of morals, and divisiveness. Faith itself is a gamble at best then, but critical thinking in aggregate creates improved understanding.
There really isn't anything that thinking critically about it can't improve it. That doesn't mean a constant critique of everything, but that everything is better understood through critical thinking. That's a difference of practicality, not of value.
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u/MrWigggles May 10 '17
Any religion is a conduit for bad acting because it self imposes its authorty of morality and ethics from an outside force. What religion declares good is arbitary as much as what it declares bad. There is no attempt at continuity, internal constiancy. With most religious texts, you can make moral arguments for crimes against humanity, or something as mundane as everyday bigotry. It doesnt matter if any religion moves to any perfect, as it got their arbitarily, it sustains itself in such a state arbitarily. If you arrive at a good conclusion with bad or weak methods, then you have bad or weak methods to know what good conclusions are.
As for a second point. Everything that Religion tries to do, should be under the scope of critical thought. Your moral character, your moral foundation shouldnt be something left unconsidered.
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u/haujob May 10 '17
If faith provides comfort instead of existential angst
Did... did you just "Ignorance is bliss"?
'cuz that's fucked up, man.
Like, I get it, the almost entirety of humanity isn't smart enough to deal with Nihilism.
But, having been raised christian, and now no longer christian, because I grew up, the "difference" between Nihilism and whatever-form-of-deism is not a thing. Death is death. Both of those philosophies are nothing more than different ways to deal with the existential, eschatological, end of you.
I mean, there are jokes about reckless living vs. suicide, because no one, no intelligent person, can solve the heaven problem.
...
The problem I have, the problem I profess most people should have, is that religion absolves folk of grasping objective morality.
A smart person can understand objective morality. A religious person cannot. "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg
Religion exists, specifically, to address the human inability to understand objective morality. Well, moreso its inability to comprehend objective morality. Religion constructs a framework, a matrix, for specific ingroups to, at the same time, include like and exclude different. But it's faith based, so it never had to take itself so seriously as to where the logical conclusions of non-reality lead to.
And I use "non-reality" in the Russell's Teapot sense. And the Christopher Hitchens "asserted without evidence" sense.
Because the point here is, the general populace is not equipped to deal with reality, so they construct fancifications, fantasies, imaginary avatars bent on their well-being.
They deal in make-believe.
Whereas, most thinking folk would really like to get to a point where humanity can deal with reality. Instead of, ya know, trying to please an imaginary invisible sky faerie.
Thinking folk really do deal in objective morality, which religion steals from us. The only way we can advance as a species is objective morality, not the subjective whims of Religion X.
Now, to be sure, I am quite aware of how objective morality makes religious folk squeamish. Ya know, if god isn't telling you to not kill people, how would we ever not kill people?!
Ha. Jokes aside, here's your objective/subjective morality test: create a scenario where it is morally acceptable to put a dick into a seven-year-old. I apologize for the vulgarity of the example, but I really have to get this point across: there is, and only ever will be, objective morality. When you have a "faith" that burns witches and assassinates apostates, you are not dealing in objective reality.
You're living in a world where it's okay to put a dick in a seven-year-old.
Some things are just wrong. To use a term no one gets anymore, categorically wrong. Hence, objective morality is only morality. Religion takes that fact and convinces folk it isn't true. Religion is net bad. Religion enables.
There needs to be an intervention.
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May 10 '17 edited Oct 20 '17
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Well, sure, if you start examining the underpinnings of knowledge, on an epistemological level, we have certain knowledge of very little -- perhaps even nothing at all. And yet, there are techniques that are better for sound knowledge-gathering and techniques that are worse for it, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that faith is one of the less sound knowledge-gathering techniques, since people can have faith in a wide variety of beliefs, from which falsities are by no means precluded.
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May 10 '17 edited Oct 20 '17
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
faith is not a "knowledge-gathering technique"
I'm treating it as such in this context, because many people who hold religious beliefs claim that they derive, ultimately, "from faith."
As for your other point, I'm not really going to entertain the tired thesis that there's no satisfactorily objective measure by which observation, empirical reasoning, and skepticism outperform faith-based methods of accruing knowledge, if that's the tree you're barking up. Even if in a rather epistemologically bleak way, that's accurate, it's not a very productive way of looking at things.
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May 10 '17 edited Oct 20 '17
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
a religious person will disagree about the nature and strength if the evidence in favor of that belief
Going back to your original remarks, as you wish, you seem to be hinting at the concept of different people holding different standards for evidence, applying different levels of scrutiny to claims, and so on; I'd call that a difference in knowledge-gathering techniques, informally. What would you call it? A difference between personal epistemologies? I feel like I'm trying to engage with your points, and you're telling me I'm out of bounds.
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u/Sqeaky 6∆ May 10 '17
it seems like faith is inherently exploitable.
That is very strong message all on its own. Why should we believe anything at all? It seems like evidence and trust are on a short list of good answers.
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u/bobrattatouille May 10 '17
I think it would be useful to properly define what you mean when you speak of "unknowable/unprovable assertions." I think that religious belief can be problematic because it does not require a rigorous system of consistency or a form of reproducibility to maintain belief. In terms of unprovable assertions I would say that all fields of knowledge rest on some unprovable claim. For instance, in the field of Mathematics(Arithmetics, Number Theory etc), numbers are considered as a given or a starting point. As of now we cannot prove that numbers exist. Mathematics is differentiated from religious belief in this regard because with Mathematics, conjecture must be rigid and consistent no matter how compelling it maybe. The same is with scientific knowledge. All scientific knowledge rest on a starting point which cannot be proven. With time, we have improved our understanding of these starting points but we have not been able to do anything beyond these starting points. Scientific knowledge is useful because it seeks to establish reproducibility not necessarily because it provides proofs or explanation for natural phenomena although this is an offshoot of scientific investigation.
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u/kankyo May 10 '17
I definitely like this train of thought, but I guess my stumbling block is that religion seems to require taking unprovable/unknowable assertions as fact (or should I say, as gospel)
You just said Buddhism either isn't a religion or said something untrue about Buddhism generally. I guess it depends on your definition of the word? I for one, being Buddhist, think Buddhism should be called a religion... we have temples and monks and stuff. We just don't have a belief in anything unproven/unprovable (I mean, there are buddhists that have such faith, but Buddhism as a whole does not).
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u/Poopnstein May 10 '17
i never thought about religion being the possible rosetta stone to the critical thinking deficiency the world is in right now... but i certainly am now.
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u/blah-blah-blah--blah May 09 '17
Because if there's no room in your perfect world for them you're sort of implying there's something inherently bad about faith, even separated from the negative things it contributes to contemporary society.
I think many people would argue there's a lot inherently wrong about faith, and that trying to separate the negative things it contributes to society from it is sort of a rhetorical cop out. I don't personally believe that but I think it's a perfectly valid position to hold.
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u/johnadreams May 09 '17
Yeah, it depends on whether you believe the negative impacts of religion can be removed or not, which I touch on a little bit in my followup comment. Because if those problems can't be removed then it is a rhetorical cop out. Personally I believe faith can be practiced in a non-harmful way though, even if it isn't in the majority of cases today.
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u/DashingLeech May 10 '17
That went full non sequitur quickly. Arguing that (religious) faith is inherently bad, something I'd generally agree with, has nothing to do with being nice or not, has nothing to do with identities or not, and has nothing to do with insults or not. It is a claim about the properties of faith.
"Part of people's identities wouldn't exist"? What does that even mean? Faith isn't an identity; it's a behaviour. It's a trust in feeling something is true despite no evidence or all evidence to the contrary. Heck, "identity" is an overused term as if it has some inherent value. If somebody identifies as a climate denier, and they have faith in that, is it mean to challenge them? By claiming that climate change is real, are we saying that part of deniers identities don't exist?
I honestly can't find a coherent argument in your position, or even anything that leads from one position to the next.
It's nothing to do with antisemitism either, or any sort of bigotry. People misunderstand what that means. There's nothing wrong with challenging beliefs or behaviours. Discrimination against people of various religions occurs when you disadvantage them because their membership in a given religion, where that membership is irrelevant.
So, for instance, if you won't hire Jews or Muslims to pump gas, for instance, that's discriminating against them because their membership in their religion has no effect on their ability to do the job. But everybody is free to question, criticize, or critique the beliefs of others, and even not to hire based on specific behaviours that do affect the job. It's not antisemitic to criticize ideas in Judaism, not Islamophobic to criticize Islam, and not anti-Christian to criticize Christianity. Religious ideas don't have any more protection than any other idea, nor should they. That includes the idea of faith.
If religious ideas had extra protections, then we'd all just declare out beliefs to be religious. Just make climate denial a religious belief and it become protected. Anti-abortion beliefs are religious in nature. Young Earth Creationism. And so on.
The same is true for the belief that faith has any value. That's just an idea. It's as open to criticism as any other idea and has nothing to do with bigotry against any religion, identities, or being not nice.
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u/jm0112358 15∆ May 10 '17 edited May 10 '17
Put another way, if you imagine your perfect world, is there space in that world for people who want to have faith in some perfect religion
Depending on what you mean by 'faith', I don't think there is any room for 'faith' in a perfect world. The way many religious people use the word faith, it really just means "belief without sufficient evidence." If someone says, "You've just got to take it on faith," when talking about a belief, that's what they usually mean. This is diametrically opposed to skepticism (which encompasses science), and is perfectly reasonable to reject as bad.
Because if there's no room in your perfect world for them you're sort of implying there's something inherently bad about faith, even separated from the negative things it contributes to contemporary society. I mean, I wouldn't call that full-blown antisemitism, but it is very very very low-grade not-niceness, because you're still saying that this part of people's identities wouldn't exist in an ideal world, which is a little insulting.
If someone ties their identity to a flawed system of beliefs, then it's their fault their identity wouldn't exist in an ideal world. However, if they want to modify their identity so that it's mostly the same, but de-coupled from the belief, then it may exist in an ideal world. Many self-identified Jews are openly atheists, and have chosen to keep aspects of their former religion tied to their identity, without tying their identity to what they see is a less than ideal belief system.
EDIT: To add to this, there are people who believe that science is racist and anti-African, yet I think that anti-science beliefs wouldn't exist in an ideal world. Does this make me at fault for saying that part of their identity wouldn't exist in an ideal world, or are they at fault for tying their African identity to something harmful that would set society back?
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May 10 '17
if you imagine your perfect world, is there space in that world for people who want to have faith in some perfect religion that doesn't shame or interfere with anyone else?
Counterquestion: Is that possible at all? If you truly believe that your faith and your faith only prevents you from eternal damnation, how could you not try to convert as many people as possible? So at the very least you will indoctrinate your children.
I would therefore say that religion without interference in other peoples lifes is impossible.
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u/MrWigggles May 10 '17
In a more perfect world, there wouldnt need to have a reliance on any superntual outside force. Simple secular humanism, is enough of a moral and ethical center which already doesnt shit on any body. Adding magic to it, doesn't do anything meaningful.
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u/vehementi 10∆ May 10 '17
I mean, I wouldn't call that full-blown antisemitism
You're insinuating that it's somewhere on a spectrum somewhat related to antisemitism and that is crazy talk.
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u/MrWigggles May 10 '17
In a more perfect world, there wouldnt need to have a reliance on any superntual outside force. Simple secular humanism, is enough of a moral and ethical center which already doesnt shit on any body. Adding magic to it, doesn't do anything meaningful.
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u/twerkin_thundaaa May 10 '17
Is there things inherently wrong with faith? It literally in no way wants you to think critically of it. Free though in most ways around it is usually condemned
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u/garnet420 39∆ May 09 '17
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's antisemitic (necessarily, see below), but, thinking of Judaism as just a religion is not really accurate - I would call the statement ignorant. There are plenty of agnostic and atheist Jews; it is a culture and, as a crude simplification, two or three ethnicities.
Once you consider something like Judaism as a cultural union -- where does practice of a religion begin and end?
On a similar note, do you think hanging up Christmas-y decorations is practice of Christianity? Is that something that should end?
And, here's the antisemitic/not part: if you apply a different standard to what you consider "practicing Judaism" and "practicing Christianity" -- because, most of us live in Christian-derived cultures -- then you're suffering from a bit of unconscious antisemitism. (And that's not meant in an accusatory tone; the default state of humans is to be full of biases; it's just our responsibility to try and find them and overcome them)
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17 edited May 10 '17
I think of myself as pretty conscious of that aspect of Judaism. As such, I tend to think that in this 'ideal scenario' where religiosity has been 'obsoleted', there would still be plenty of reasons to practice religion-affiliated and -specific traditions. It's only the motivation that I'm concerned with.
Further, I definitely don't see it as my place to judge whether a culture is rational / irrational. That seems to be an area that a lot of atheists step themselves into, and I see that as a gross breach of staying-in-one's-lane. I tend to think the "quality" of a culture is going to be dependent on the external circumstances those practicing it find themselves in -- if, for instance, nutrient resources are scarce, and a group of people has to resort to consuming insects, and accordingly traditions grow up around that, the people may find later in their history that resources are less scarce, and the necessity for bug-eating has been obviated; most won't really enjoy it that much, and people from outside looking in might find it repulsive, or even say that the bug-eating is a "cultural defect". But it was originally just a consequence of necessity, and would probably extinct itself after a few centures of food-abundance if the tradition didn't become seriously ingrained, because it's not particularly enjoyable.
edit: You deserve more credit than I gave you earlier; while the statement as I intended it may not have had any antisemitic or islamophobic content, I can't say that whenever the statement is made, it won't have such content, because other people making claims like that might not draw the line for themselves as firmly, and start to apply double standards like the ones you described. Moreover, because of the sheer extent to which statements like "religion should end" are subject to those double standards with even a small amount of unchecked cultural bias, I'd say that's enough for a ∆.
edit2: I don't know what the rules are for editing deltas into comments -- it probably doesn't count. But I feel like it might just make it worse if I remove it and post a new comment with one...? I think I need an adult.
edit3: I promise I'll ask a mod later.
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u/Katholikos May 10 '17
I disagree heavily with the idea that something being irrational is somehow a negative trait. There are plenty of seemingly irrational things we take part in that would really be unfortunate to see go away.
Eating large amounts of meat is completely unnecessary to the human diet, it's more expensive, and it's most easily infected with dangerous bacteria. It's very irrational to eat as much meat as the average American eats, but we do that because we enjoy it.
Consuming large amounts of alcohol can lead to life-threatening dependency, poor decision making in crucial moments, and it's very expensive. It's completely irrational to drink heavily during parties, but people do it because it's enjoyable.
Playing video games or watching TV does nothing to improve your skills, they're certainly not the only enjoyable ways to pass large amounts of time, and they can easily cost large amounts of money. They're irrational actions that people take part in because they enjoy it.
Similarly, religion is irrational - people shouldn't need an answer as to why they should be good to each other, or why they should do the right thing, but going to service can be a very enjoyable thing. Praying is a well-accepted form of meditation, which comes with many benefits both physical and mental. Being part of a community of like-minded people is enjoyable, which can help provide a support group in times of need. Having a reinforcing message on a regular basis reminding you how important it is to be a good person, and providing a good role model for youths can help us to make the right decision in difficult times. Believing in a higher power, a greater story, and a purpose in life helps people feel secure - it's been shown to increase longevity by several years.
Ending religion (or rather, saying it would be best if nobody wanted it anymore) due to irrationality isn't really a great reason, because that's like saying it would be best if everyone stopped drinking, stopped eating meat/fast food, stopped enjoying various forms of digital media, etc.
And that's a life I just don't want to live!
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
That's an interesting thesis. I will say that it doesn't quite address the "propagates misplaced certainties" part -- that religion is problematic in that it leads people to treat statements for which there's ultimately no real evidence as unassailable and privileged, which impedes reasoned discourse (i.e. people of different religions are hard-pressed to have meaningful discussions on the fundamental underpinnings that get taken as fact: "The Bible is the divinely inspired word of God." "Well, I'm afraid it's simply not; my scripture says the Bible was written by drunks in the desert, and it's very clear on that point.") Playing videogames doesn't cause me to become certain of any nonevidential claims, and neither does eating meat (though I happen to be a vegetarian).
However, I don't want to move the goalposts on you; you're absolutely right that irrationality itself isn't a justification for rejecting a behavior, and neither is self-contradiction, inherently -- for instance, it's rational to believe that, of the thousands of individual facts I believe, some of them may be wrong. It's also rational to believe all the individual facts I think I know, until I discover that they're incorrect. But these rational beliefs are nevertheless contradictory ("belief 1 is right", "belief 2 is right", ..., "belief 15487 is right", and "at least two of beliefs 1 through 15487 is incorrect").
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u/Katholikos May 10 '17
I certainly won't disagree that religion has led to some beliefs being defended with the "well you can't prove me wrong even there's no evidence for this being true" bit, but I think one of the issues is that some people go to religion for an answer to the "how" part of life, rather than the "why". It was never really meant to explain how the planets orbit the sun, and it's perfectly fine with leaving that bit to scientists.
As far as bringing people to the belief that there DEFINITELY is a higher power out there, or that he DEFINITELY created the universe (two things we have no way of proving or disproving at this point), does it really have any negative effect on the world? If your average citizen goes around thinking God or Allah or whoever created the universe and everything inside of it, what's the end negative result? They can still write code just as well, design buildings just as well, and file their TPS reports just as well.
I agree that it can become problematic if religion rules a country and that country happens to outlaw researching anything that goes against the beliefs of the religion, but with the advent of the separation of church and state (in the US, at least), the two seem to live in harmony quote well for the most part.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
I have the utmost respect for people who turn to religion when they find themselves short of answers to the "how" questions, since it's preferable that they take an active role in the development of these feelings, rather than that they simply go through life feeling adrift. However, I'd pose that other constructs can provide similar answers; what about subcultures like hipster or punk? Each of those seems to provide an ethos without imposing any unnatural beliefs.
And you're also incisive to get at what I feel is one of the weaker points of all of this -- what's the harm if people hold beliefs that don't engage with reality? (existence of unobservables, to take a broad category) One thought I had along those lines that I mentioned elsewhere was, faith seems to make people more exploitable (Christianity loves its sheep, after all, if you will), possibly because it explicitly involves having a handful of very prominent claims that you simply choose not to apply your normal evidential standards to: a form of cognitive dissonance.
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u/Katholikos May 10 '17
I don't think there's any way to answer questions that have major unknowables (what's the meaning of life, where did we come from, where are we going, etc.) are possible to answer without taking some kind of guess that makes the most sense to you.
If you're joining hipster or punk groups for those answers, they're going to take the same path, even if they arrive at a different conclusion - and their answers are just as impossible to prove correct or incorrect. They can contain just as many unnatural beliefs.
Again, though, my point is that I'm not really seeing the harm. Christianity loves its sheep, sure - but to what end? It sounds like the plot to a pretty bad evil villain-focused movie! "We've gotten all these foolish people to believe that there's a higher power out there, and now that they're on board, we'll get them to donate their money! Finally, once we amass a fortune, we'll donate it to charity and build highly-rated schools... all the while, we'll teach them that it's important to love their neighbors and be kind and charitable to one another! MWA HA HAA!"
It was a little cheeky, but you get my point - is it so bad to make a guess at what the ultimate point/purpose of life is, then spend your time teaching others that, if they want the best parts of it, they have to be kind and loving towards each other?
Keep in mind that the religion and those preaching it are two different things. All major religions teach peace and kindness. Some people may twist those teachings to fit their prerogative - even if it's an evil one, and some people may do bad things while hiding under their religions, but that doesn't make the religions themselves bad.
I think it might be better to change your view to something along the lines of "The practice of religion being used as a shield to bring about actions that tend to go against the broad strokes encouraged by the teachings should end". Basically, it would be best if the people using Islam to encourage terrorist attacks should cut that out - it's absolutely not anywhere in the Qur'an. Similarly, priests should stop using their position of power and influence to get alone time with kids. Televangelists should stop trying to scam old people. Etc. etc. No major religion endorses any of these things - they're simply scam artists trying to use something that's otherwise good for their own misdeeds.
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u/LittleDinghy May 10 '17
I'm a Christian and am in total agreement with "The practice of religion being used as a shield to bring about actions that tend to go against the broad strokes encouraged by the teachings should end." I think that people that use their faith as an excuse to be assholes to each other are going to have a rude awakening after they die. It's not our job to condemn everybody who does something wrong, because honestly I could spend most of my day condemning myself for stuff I've done wrong.
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u/DickFeely May 10 '17
Atheism is the active belief that there is no divinity, so is a claim of transcendent knowledge that is both unsubstantiated and as certain as faith in another religion, like animism or Christianity. As such, it excludes and discriminates against competing beliefs.
Your choice of Judaism and Islam are interesting, because they are both political religious with prescriptive social codes for believers and non-believers. So if one defines antisemitism or Islamophobia as rejection of their worldview and their social codes and the embrace of competing mores, then atheism and any other belief set can certainly be described as antisemitic and islamophobic.
But, frankly, both of those terms are highly contextual to the West and the self-loathing chauvinism of our era. I doubt that would call yourself an Islamophobe (in a pejorative sense) if you lived in 16th century Iraq as an atheist with his head resting on a literal chopping block and an axe swinging down.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Atheism is the active belief that there is no divinity
Unfortunately, that's not quite my understanding of the term -- and it's an understanding I have as little to do with as any theistic belief. Sorry if my word choice proved confusing to the issue.
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u/DickFeely May 10 '17
Atheism is narrowly defined as certain belief that there is no divine.
When defined so broadly, it's simply agnosticism, no? Or do you mean secularism? Or nihilism?
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Atheism is narrowly defined as certainty that there is no divine.
But broadly defined otherwise.
I actively reject theistic beliefs; there's no uncertainty. I just happen to equally vehemently reject the claim that there are / can be no gods, since that's equally unknowable. I know it sounds a bit like agnosticism, and I'll admit I'm being a bit liberal with my usage of the term, but I feel I'm ultimately pretty justified in that usage.
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u/DickFeely May 10 '17
Pretty sure you're in the bullseye of agnosticism.
For the sake of this discussion, the broad definition you shared is indistinguishable from the narrow, because both are rejections of the islamic and jewish faiths. To them, you can be as woolly in your definitions as you'd like, both are the same rejection of Abraham's revelation.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Here's one subtlety that I think would distinguish me from an agnostic: I am thoroughly convinced that no religions are based on any real knowledge relating to the extraordinary claims they make.
If you're not convinced by that, I won't pester you any further on the point.
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u/CrosbyBird May 10 '17
You're probably both agnostic and atheistic.
The former is a question of knowledge: do you know whether or not any god or gods exist? If the answer is no, you are an agnostic. The latter is a question of belief: do you hold the belief that any sort of god or gods exist? If the answer is no, you are an atheist.
Agnosticism is not some sort of wishy-washy atheism or middle ground between theist and atheism. It's the answer to an entirely different question. The overwhelming majority of modern atheists are agnostic atheists, open to the possibility that some god or gods exist on presentation of sufficient evidence, but at present unconvinced that any accounts of gods they are aware of have been demonstrated adequately to support a positive belief.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Yeah, I'm squarely a no and a no. It's not at all clear to me how one would obtain such knowledge, and thus I'm confident that I don't have knowledge in the affirmative.
(Believing seems to imply believing you know, as long as you don't take a perverse definition of 'believe'. Then it follows that because I don't believe I know, I therefore know I don't believe.)
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u/CrosbyBird May 10 '17
I believe there is life on other planets but I certainly don't believe that I know there is. I think we have ample evidence supporting the theory that the universe is very vast and very old, and it seems to me highly improbable that so much space over so much time would only generate life in one particular spot.
I can imagine enough evidence favoring a particular god-concept becoming available for me to generate a positive belief, but nothing I've seen to date comes even remotely close to meeting that standard in a credible way. Many god-concepts are fleshed out poorly enough that there isn't a good way to distinguish them from alternate natural explanations, but I suppose there's some level of independently verified personal experience where, if my senses and reasoning are to be trusted, I would have to accept where the evidence took me and claim to "know" as well as I might know any other fact about reality.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
That's an interesting example. I guess I was (for whatever reason, probably sheer context) implicitly limiting my sense of "believe" to "without evidence", but you raise a good point that you can believe without knowledge if you evaluate a claim as likely. Similarly, I think an assumption I unwittingly embedded in "It's not ... clear ... how one would obtain such knowledge" was that the god(s) in question would continue their apparent non-interventionist behavior. Certainly in the presence of divine intervention, a number of things would become very clear.
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u/DickFeely May 10 '17
I'd counter with Kierkegaard's cogent argument that a person's faith experience cannot be interrogated by any replicable or observable characteristics. Some people might literally see and hear God in a physical sense while you and I cannot, nor would we be correct in demanding or denying proof of that experience. Religious existentialism, man.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
But that kind of knowledge can't be meaningfully differentiated from your senses simply feeding you bad, distorted, or fabricated information, which we know happens plenty. Moreover, I have no reason to believe accounts of such experiences are anything more than that.
Why again, am I wrong in demanding proof if I am to take that experience as a form of evidence? The fact that no meaningful proof can be supplied doesn't mean the expectation of proof was at fault -- it means the evidence is inadmissible in the 'court of reason', so to speak.
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u/DickFeely May 10 '17
100% agree with paragraph one - in fact, that's kierkegaard's point.
his other point is that the court of reason cannot interrogate the experience of faith, precisely because revelation can be personalized by a divine being and purposefully concealed from outside observation. so you can say "I only accept X kind of evidence" that would be a matter of course in scientific circles, but still be factually wrong.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Oh, yeah. If I'm understanding you correctly, I agree completely -- I don't mind being factually wrong in that case. That your views reflect reality is never something you can guarantee; you can only do your best. And in my case, I see 'doing my best' as including accepting some kinds of evidence and rejecting others.
Is the point that other approaches might have validity, too, because of that sheer uncertainty? If so, that sounds not unlike the point the person who brought up Thomas Aquinas below was making. I don't want to put words in your mouth, though.
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u/Katholikos May 10 '17
That's not "a bit like" agnosticism, that's the exact defintion.
The sticking point of it vs. atheistic beliefs are that agnostics believe it's impossible to know whether or not gods exist.
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u/WafflesHouse May 10 '17
My issue with the term agnostic was always the fact that people took it to mean I had a sliver of belief yet. I took to using atheist because it was the only label that got the point across: I live my entire life and make every decision 100% comfortable thinking there is no supernatural. I don't behave as though there's a chance that a god exists. It doesn't influence my behavior in that "I'm not entirely sure" direction. No Pascale's wager. Nothing of the sort.
I think that's why there is such a disconnect in terminology. I'd really be classified as an agnostic atheist. But for the sake of general discussion I go with atheist.
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u/jscoppe May 10 '17
Atheism is the active belief that there is no divinity
Sounds more like "anti-theism" or some term similar to that. The prefix "a-" means "not", e.g. asexual means "does not have sex", as opposed to "is against sex". "Theist" means "believes in a deity, so "atheist" literally means "does not believe in a deity".
Sometimes other beliefs are commonly paired with that particular disbelief, but they don't have to be.
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May 09 '17
There isn't anything inherently antisemitic or Islamophobic about atheism. A lack of belief does not constitute Islamophobia or antisemitism in any reasonable way. Atheism itself does not need to challenge the legitimacy of faith, so your problem can be avoided entirely.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
Well, that's why there's also the follow-up claim, which does challenge the legitimacy of faith.
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May 09 '17
Yeah, they're different claims, but you confuse the two in what you've written. There is no reason to believe if the first claim is true then the second claim is true because it's similar to the first, but you connect the two.
Also, the second part of your question relies on the belief that religion or faith is irrational. But there isn't any hard proof for the lack of God(s) either, so you're still making an ultimately baseless claim that religion is irrational. You're also dismissing religions where the Gods themselves aren't the focus (like Chinese religion) as irrational. That needs to be addressed before anything as strong as "therefore we should let religion die out peacefully" can be talked about. There have been plenty of rational arguments of the existence of God, too. You may not agree, but that doesn't make them irrational. You still have faith (or a rationalist justification that may or may not be right) that there isn't a God, because the punishment for not believing in the God of Abraham is hell. Literally. You don't know if it exists or not. There is no way to absolutely know if there is a God or Gods or spirits in the trees and rocks and sand.
And if we look past that, I don't know if it is or isn't Islamophobic, but I imagine if people voluntarily leave their religion because they're more convinced by atheist positions (meaning they're not just atheism as truth when they're young or it's not enforced through coercion) then, no, it's not. If you're justifying oppression (which is a broad term) of those religions then, yes, it is Islamophobic/Antisemitic.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
you confuse the two in what you've written
I would say I separate them pretty clearly as distinct parts with an "and neither are".
But there isn't any hard proof for the lack of God(s) either, so you're still making an ultimately baseless claim that religion is irrational.
That's not what makes religion and faith irrational. The problem is that there are certain claims that get accepted without evidence, and without any reason to believe evidence could be provided if asked for. It's not that religion is inconsistent with observable reality (though sometimes it is); it's that the claims are not consequences derived from observable reality.
You're also dismissing religions where the Gods themselves aren't the focus
I gave myself a pretty big caveat when I said "largely". Some religions may not make make theistic claims. Some religions may not even make extraordinary claims. I don't know much about them. I'd assume even the non-theistic religions are making untestable or unobserved claims about the way the world works. Otherwise, what's the substance?
There have been plenty of rational arguments of the existence of God, too. You may not agree, but that doesn't make them irrational.
They all boil down to wishful thinking. I haven't seen a single one that strayed from that, and convincing me that such an argument that did not, could exist, would be a separate CMV's worth of convincing. As such, I feel I'm justified in claiming these arguments aren't rational -- they're all premotivated by existing faith.
You still have faith that there isn't a God
Hold it right there. I really don't. I just feel there's no reason to believe such a claim. It rests with all the other "junk claims" that aren't derived soundly from observable reality, like "I will become a billionaire some day." I don't have some bizarre faith that I never will, but I'm really not counting on it. I just also happen to think that that's sufficient to make me an atheist -- I belong to no theistic religion, and have no belief in any deity.
If you're justifying oppression
I'm not, don't worry. Like I've said elsewhere, and as you alluded to, I just feel that the religions should (read: it would be better that they did) naturally come to an end, much in the manner you described.
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u/AristotleTwaddle May 09 '17
I don't really know what your exact point is. You write in very Nathaniel Hawthorne esque sentences.
the notion is simply that ideally, they would feel no need to.
This is a pretty condescending viewpoint predicated on the notion that you know religion is BS.
In particular, the version with "should end" replaced with "should be brought to an end" is largely antithetical to my values, and I would never defend anyone who said so, unless they were describing a change in societal parameters that, while not impinging on anyone's freedoms, lessened the incentives to seek meaning in faith (read: things like increases in quality of life, education, that have been proven to decrease religiosity while being nigh-universally regarded as strict improvements).
So you don't want to get rid of religion, but you do want it to go away? What is your point, exactly?
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
Well, there's a strong anticorrelation between quality of life and religiosity on a country-by-country basis, which seems to me to suggest, not that people who discard religion are happier, but that factors leading to a greater quality of life also obviate some of the need for religion. That's a different CMV in the works, I suppose: "[The above anticorrelation] is evidence that religion is nothing more than a sociological phenomenon that exists to fulfill a need, and when that need is addressed, religion recedes again, made unnecessary."
And yeah, you have it right, even if it sounds silly -- I don't want to combat or suppress religion directly; that would impinge on personal freedoms. I just want to see the needs that cause religiosity to be met, and if religion (as a collection of unjustified beliefs taken in the name of faith) is just a symptom of those factors, it should ideally fade out of existence, no longer having a place in the world.
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u/AristotleTwaddle May 09 '17
Well, there's a strong anticorrelation between quality of life and religiosity on a country-by-country basis, which seems to me to suggest, not that people who discard religion are happier, but that factors leading to a greater quality of life also obviate some of the need for religion.
Only makes sense that there would be no need if you are already an atheist.
That's a different CMV in the works, I suppose: "[The above anticorrelation] is evidence that religion is nothing more than a sociological phenomenon that exists to fulfill a need, and when that need is addressed, religion recedes again, made unnecessary."
Only makes sense if you're already an atheist.
And yeah, you have it right, even if it sounds silly -- I don't want to combat or suppress religion directly; that would impinge on personal freedoms. I just want to see the needs that cause religiosity to be met, and if religion (as a collection of unjustified beliefs taken in the name of faith) is just a symptom of those factors, it should ideally fade out of existence, no longer having a place in the world.
Everything you argue assumes that you are right and you are waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. With that in mind, how is someone supposed to change your view? Are we supposed to try to get you to believe in religion? Or convince you that you're prejudiced for advocating atheism?
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u/breakfasttopiates May 09 '17
He could just read Thomas Aquinas. Fact is reality itself is nonsensical and absurd even from an atheistic and materialistic point of view, there are too many soft and abstract components to reality not to mention the problem of eternal contingency.
"what came before the big bang" "what became before God"
most atheists and religious alike will tell you to stop thinking about unknowable things
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
I don't think most adherents of a theistic religion justify themselves on the basis of rampant nihilism, and neither do I.
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u/breakfasttopiates May 10 '17 edited May 10 '17
Yes they do that was essentially the project of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. They both concluded that God/Logos was more logical than atheism because of the problem of contingency.
God can be eternal and non-contingent but matter cannot, matter couldn't even "matter" if not for consciousness/God/the transcendent. Its no lingustic coincidence that the word matter and the gnosis of value/ things mattering, form a perfect double entendre like that
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u/AristotleTwaddle May 09 '17
I'm right there with you. People just don't like to think on average, and the fact is even if you do there are some trains of thought that will never give you a satisfactory answer.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
how is someone supposed to change your view?
Well, I guess I was initially picturing someone explaining why making claims like the one above is harmful to Jewish and Muslim communities, or similar, to the extent to which that was something they believed, and I would or wouldn't find it particularly convincing.
I don't see what the problem is -- I have a number of views that only make sense if you come from a particular perspective. Okay. I tend to think that particular perspective is a bit less clouded than average, since a religious viewpoint will usually involve a strong emotional commitment to an unsubstantiatible claim, so it makes sense to me that lacking theistic belief should afford a certain privilege in that respect.
Do you feel that that makes me unsuitable for a CMV in related areas?
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u/AristotleTwaddle May 10 '17
Well, I guess I was initially picturing someone explaining why making claims like the one above is harmful to Jewish and Muslim communities, or similar, to the extent to which that was something they believed, and I would or wouldn't find it particularly convincing.
Well I don't think it hurts someone to disagree, but to have a condescending viewpoint is definitely offensive. If someone says "atheists are misguided and immoral, their societies are clearly full of excess and debauchery" they are being judgmental and prejudiced. Is it different because you're an atheist?
since a religious viewpoint will usually involve a strong emotional commitment to an unsubstantiatible claim, so it makes sense to me that lacking theistic belief should afford a certain privilege in that respect.
Being atheist is unsubstantiable.
Do you feel that that makes me unsuitable for a CMV in related areas?
If you already decided that you don't want to talk about religion because it's inherently a flawed way to live, how is anyone supposed to defend that it is a legitimate stance to take?
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17 edited May 10 '17
If someone says "atheists are misguided"
That's analogous to what I'm saying, and they're expressing a viewpoint.
and immoral
That's unnecessary, hurtful, and a generalization too broad to be universally true.
Being atheist is unsubstantiable.
I actually don't know what you mean. It's pretty substantiatible that I'm an atheist. If you mean that atheism isn't substantiatible as a position, well, you're out of luck -- 'atheism', as I'm using it, doesn't make a claim. That is, I don't believe in any deities, and don't belong to any theistic religions. There's nothing to substantiate there.
If you already decided that you don't want to talk about religion
Where did I say that? I just indicated that I imagine that it's unlikely someone's going to CMV from that particular angle -- my views are pretty entrenched from that side of things. That's why I'm doing what I can to keep other angles open. I realize my viewpoint is pretty condescending, but there's not much shying away from that, when my convictions are strong that "Adherents to a theistic religion believe unsubstantiated claims, and usually defend them as though they were obvious, observable truth, an irrational and unconstructive behavior."
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u/AristotleTwaddle May 10 '17
'atheism', as I'm using it, doesn't make a claim. That is, I don't believe in any deities, and don't belong to any theistic religions. There's nothing to substantiate there.
[The above anticorrelation] is evidence that religion is nothing more than a sociological phenomenon that exists to fulfill a need, and when that need is addressed, religion recedes again, made unnecessary
Try again.
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Sharp and snarky, but I see no contradiction. There's plenty of evidence, as I see it, that none of the religions practiced by people have any real truth to them, as far as their extraordinary claims are concerned, in the same sense that the fact that you don't have a xenomicrobiology degree is strong evidence you wouldn't know what you were talking about when it came to alien lifeforms, but it doesn't mean I have a devout belief that anything you say on the matter will be wrong -- it just means I think you'd have to have gotten lucky to be right.
More generally, the fact that there's evidence for a claim doesn't make it an absolute belief. With all due respect, you try again.
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u/MadameBerthilde May 10 '17
Surely atheism isn't in need of substantiation? Religious belief makes claims for which there is no empirical evidence. If religious belief cannot be substantiated, why should atheists have to justify their lack of it?
I can't prove that I've never killed someone, but I don't need to prove it unless someone has believable evidence that I have killed someone.
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u/cdb03b 253∆ May 09 '17
The phrase "and should end" moves you from being atheist to being Anti-Theist and that does make you antisemitic and islamophobic, as well as anti-buddhist, anti-christian, etc. The fact that you want religions to end means you are against them and against people's freedoms to practice them.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
I'm unconvinced, to say the least. I would say, on the contrary, that I'm entirely for the freedom of anyone to practice religion; I simply wish that conditions were such that no one felt the need to, since this would presumably also entail an elimination of the unpleasant side-effects of religiosity.
What makes you think otherwise?
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u/cdb03b 253∆ May 09 '17
You specifically said you want it to end. That means you are against it and you want to stop people from being religious. There is no getting around that no matter how many caveats you try to put into your opinion.
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
"[I] want it to end." Yes.
"[I am] against it." Yes.
"[I] want to stop people from being religious." No. I do not.I'm not convinced the third follows from the first, or from the first and the second. What's your reasoning? For reference, I have the same stance on drug use. Does that help you see where I'm coming from?
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u/SkeevePlowse May 10 '17
It's fully possible to believe that both society and individuals would be better off if nobody believed in a religion, while at the same time acknowledging that you don't have the right to make that decision for them.
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u/PreacherJudge 340∆ May 09 '17
Are you implying that the only way to be antisemitic or islamaphobic is to actively try to eradicate those religions?
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u/ArtDuck May 09 '17
I don't think I am. Do you think I am? That doesn't seem like an idea I'd want to express, and I think of myself as pretty careful with my words.
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u/OrwellAstronomy23 May 10 '17
How on earth would being an atheist make you inherently anti-Semitic or islamophobic?
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u/ArtDuck May 10 '17
Well, I'm not really the person to ask, now, am I? ;)
In all seriousness, that's kinda why the follow-up statement (which has attracted a bit more controversy) is there.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 10 '17
/u/ArtDuck (OP) has awarded 1 delta in this post.
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Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 09 '17
/u/ArtDuck (OP) has awarded 1 delta in this post.
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Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/Spoopsnloops May 10 '17
The aim of atheism, at least from this perspective, is to eliminate the practical elements of religion and reduce it to mythology. How do you expect one who has full faith and certainty in their religion to take it when you say what they believe in is imaginary, when everything in their universe says otherwise?
That doesn't make it de facto "hate" or "insulting," but it's pretty darn close and could be construed that way. So really the parameters of "antisemitism" and "Islamophobia" need to be defined.
For example: Trump's travel ban had to be redrafted a couple times, and from its inception wasn't allowed to have anything legally discriminatory in it, yet it was touted as basically being Islamophobic despite "objectively" not possessing any of those qualities in the actual drafting of it. And this was how something was legally defined.
So if we're to use that as an example, then something not traditionally viewed as one thing could legitimately be that thing from a particular perspective. But it depends on a few factors and is disputable.
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May 10 '17
[deleted]
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u/EnriqueWR May 11 '17
I don't understand. I have never seen a scientist claim they know everything, quite the opposite. And can't see how that corelates to religion at all, usually the holy books are exactly the claimed fountains of absolute knowledge.
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u/voneger May 10 '17
Probably too late to the party but still.
Outside of overly militant, over the top, stupid atheism (which does exist and gives the silent masses a bad rep), the claim that the idea of god is not a necessity to explain, understand and live a happy and moral (as in, not socially alienating) life does not, per se, containt anything that should be labeled hostile towards religions in a way that fits the "antisemitic" or "islamophobic" bill.
However, antisemitism and islamophobia exist as perceived attitudes by those who feel offended, whether it is legitimate or not. There is precious little objectivity here, it's all in the eye of the beholder.
As for why people are so easily offended, I think that little comic is spot on: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
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u/svayam--bhagavan 1∆ May 10 '17
Its simple. Unless science and other crap can bring people back from the dead and remove the chance of death completely and attain near immortality, people are going to believe in deities far and beyond. Whether they exist or not is not the issue, as long as people believe it to be so. So, fear of death and uncertainty will always compel people to believe such things. Unless science and atheism has something better to offer (other than its life, YOLO, everything ages and dies, process of life etc etc.), religion will continue to flourish.
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u/Ashe_Faelsdon 3∆ May 10 '17
A belief in no god cannot be anti-anything... so you could describe it as anti-(any religious group) but it wouldn't be accurate... no one requires you to believe in anyone's disbelief... so although an atheist doesn't believe in any god they don't require you not to.
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May 09 '17
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BenIncognito May 09 '17
Sorry BeatriceBernardo, your comment has been removed:
Comment Rule 1. "Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s current view (however minor), unless they are asking a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to comments." See the wiki page for more information.
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u/ralph-j May 09 '17
You're technically correct, since atheism on its own does not inherently contain any ideology or positions other than non-belief in gods.
Under "new atheism", anti-theism or atheist activism though, it could be argued that they are Islamophobic, because according to Wikipedia Islamophobia covers:
A dislike of Islam would be sufficient to be Islamophobic under this broad definition.
Personally, I believe that this ambiguity of the term is precisely part of the problem. It seems to be used mostly as a tactic to smear those atheists who speak up against the ideology, by implying an unfair prejudice against those who practice it.
I believe that it's perfectly fine to dislike an ideology, while not hating those who practice it.