Yes, so rare I’ve never met one. But what I have seen is theists claiming that all atheists are like that, especially Richard Dawkins, even though Dawkins has explicitly stated that you can’t prove the non-existence of god (I’m going with the small g here because while vague concepts of god can’t be disproved, some more concrete concepts of god can be such as gods that are inherently self-contradictory, or who’s acts or history are in conflict with the physical evidence of the universe or world, etc.)
It is annoying that Christians have been so successful with this false trope that even some atheists repeat it.
Not everyone agrees with that assertion. I personally don’t care because the end result is the same. I don’t know or care if a real Santa Claus does or ever did exist because I don’t act in my life as if he exists as anything more than a marketing figure and he doesn’t appear to affect my life in any real way. When Santa Claus actually shows up, I’ll start showing more interest in him and questioning more of my disbelief. Same goes for any deities that might be out there.
My point is that there is no such thing as capital-T truth, it’s a fantasy. I know that because when I say I know something I mean that I have reliable evidence of it. I know that’s what “knowing” means because I have reliable evidence that’s what knowing means. With capital-T truth, we can’t even know what we mean by “knowing” or “truth”.
I mostly doesn’t matter since we’ll all go around saying we “know” when our kids’ birthdays are and whatnot. In practice, the only difference between the two epistemological standpoints is that with mine if someone tries to derail a conversation with profoundness by saying something like , “But you don’t really know, do you?” I get to just say, “Yes I do, your idea of knowledge is useless.”
Not to say that people can’t identify themselves as anything they want, but people who identify themselves as atheists and have that as a significant part of their identity strike me as playing into the game of religion. If that’s what you identify yourself as, you are implicitly agreeing that it’s an important or relevant question, and it’s not.
I don’t go around calling myself an a-copenhagenist, (or copenhagen-agnostic, to me more pedantic about it) and that question is about a million times more important and relevant than the question of whether gods have any existence independent of humans.
I thought about the UUs here. They were pretty cool in my last city. But the local congregation, and there’s not another in an hour’s drive, is, well, flakier than grandma’s piecrust. I think Medievalist nails it: there’s a lot of variation in UU congregations. There’s a big humanist group in Alabama, but they’re up in the north, drawing on Huntsville and Birmingham, and I’m down in south Alabama.
Now, if I were a KKKer, Neoconfederate, or something like that, I’d be spoiled for choice.
“Everyone” is an exaggeration - but nature or nurture a lot of us have a “god shaped hole” inside of us waiting to be filled, and it’s painful that it’s empty. If you don’t have that experience then I can understand seeing the word “atheist” is just as silly as “a-unicornist”. For me knowing there isn’t a god is a discomfort I’m aware of. I’m just also aware that my discomfort has not bearing on whether or not it is true. So the question is relevant to me, but that’s not a game, it’s just what I’m stuck with.
I’d like to see people stop saying “god shaped” hole - that’s like saying that puddles are in “puddle shaped” holes. Seems that the “god shaped” hole is really more “parent shaped,” but that our brains are kind of plastic and many seek, or are inculcated to believe in, an Uber Parent - an invisible parent figure we call “god.” A figure that provides the same kind of answers and feeling of protection and justice we seek from parents when we are young, even as we outgrow that role for our actual parents.
Well, I’m not trying to convert you or anything, but I am a Buddhist, after my fashion, and I’ve found that there are practices that will fill that hole, independent of any particular intellectual belief in anything. ymmv
Which is insane, since Dawkins is very much not like that. He goes out of his way to accommodate people with beliefs similar to my own, and is very much less vehemently outspoken against the mainstream religions than many religious people themselves are.
But here’s a fundamental truth: as there are so many more theists than atheists, there will likely always be more aggressively offensive theists than there are atheists in toto. I apologize for my species; I wish this were not true.
Well, perhaps they have not been so lucky as you, and have met some of the same people I have. I’ve met horrible people of every creed and ethnicity - it seems to be part of the human condition. Let’s not elect any of them for a change! Whoops, almost hijacked the thread.
My take is that atheism is sufficiently taboo that many atheists want to separate themselves from “those other kind of atheists” - regardless of weather such people exist in any significant numbers or not. And why so many atheists call themselves “non-religious,” “non-theists” or “agnostics”, in spite of their utterly atheistic lack of belief in any god or gods.
I agree, although my god shaped hole is much smaller than I was told it would be. Even as a Christian I didn’t see myself as that important in the grand scheme of things and it wasn’t always clear why having a predefined meaning to life was necessary. I think it was Augustine who said that his heart was restless until it found its rest in God. That hasn’t been true in my case, and if anything it’s been nice to feel released from the obligation to live a life worthy of eternity.
(Not that I don’t care how I live, but the things that matter are different and more related to improving my own life and the lives of others).
I’m not trying to convert anyone either! BUT I LOVE AARON DIAZ SO MUCH I WANT TO DO SCIENCE TO A BISCUIT.
For me, it’s that I need things to make sense. I can’t function happily without a global framework that lets me root out and destroy my own cognitive dissonances. I wouldn’t personally describe a lack of this as a hole, but I do know what you mean; for me it manifests as a need for a way to relate every single thing into basic principles.
Eventually I found something that works for me, and I was very surprised to find out (much later in life) that it wasn’t my own novel invention. My reasoning had been worked out independently by hundreds if not thousands of other people long ago (the most famous being of course Spinoza) and the final result was pretty close to what Kneeland told the Massachusetts Supreme Court at his blasphemy trial in 1833. Understanding my place in the totality that I inhabit is profoundly helpful to me; it lets me have the real and objectively measurable physical and mental benefits of religion without requiring that I bend my will to the beliefs, instructions or systematized hatreds of others.
