I think that the difference you are indicating is that ritual technology is mostly subjective, so it doesn’t really carry over in terms of any sort of organized religion. These groups themselves tend to acknowledge this with the distinction that direct experience is exclusive to an initiated minority - everybody else is only there to watch. Certainly, with many large groups, the exclusivity of initiation can be tied up with obvious dogma and tradition. But, at it’s core, we are still dealing with something deeply subjective. The fervent assholism which occurs with religious followers (as opposed to practitioners) seems much like the obnoxious groupthink of football hooligans or fans of celebrities. And to extend the analogy, I think religious ideas are no more to blame than a kind of sport or music are for group behavior. It’s not the players who cause the problems, but a small number of people who exploit people’s fanaticism for personal gain.
Knowledge is only data or experience which has been consciously perceived. Raw data is not knowledge. Compared to the more mechanistic view put forth by scientific culture in the 19th century, later developments in science have re-introduced the unavoidable nature of human subjectivity. That a person needs to read the instruments and interpret the results. That a person needs to decide if a given thing is worth the effort. That the observer skews results and cannot be removed from the experiment. And even that human perception limits what people are ultimately able to know about any external reality.
Perhaps this relates to what I was trying to say, that I see this as more a confusion of categories. I agree that, as I like to say: “Everything is real, you just might not know what a given thing really is.” While scientific methodology is almost entirely about the objective world, religion (not unlike psychology and art) is almost entirely about the subjective world. And as history has, I think, demonstrated, there is a perceptual danger to dismissing entire subjective categories as being “unreal”, because at best one merely loses any vocabulary for discussing subjectivity, while these conditions themselves do not simply vanish.
Ah, yes it does… otherwise where does one draw the “fundamental concepts” from?
all it requires is a prescribed, right way of seeing things
…Which atheism doesn’t have, unless you include the only one which is: there is no god. Even then, atheists have a range of certainty about the non-existence of god about which each person makes up their own mind.
Science is a specific kind of worldview
Atheists and theists use scientific examples to prove their beliefs or lack thereof, so I really don’t know why this is relevant at all. Science is frequently used as ammunition in debunking nonsense such as intelligent design but there are plenty of things about theistic belief that can be debunked via philosophical or logical reasoning.
Hardly! What you are describing are petty personal crusades.
No. The religious expecting special exception from various rules and laws that apply to everyone else in secular society is petty, especially when their beliefs are demonstrably nonsense. The religious expect that we respect their beliefs while telling us we’ll go to hell for our beliefs (which, by the way, atheists find as hilarious as christians find the virgins in heaven for martyrs nonsense). My beliefs are justifiable while their beliefs require blind faith and an explicit ignorance of fact. Why do you keep talking about science? You don’t need science to understand that god is a farce, it’s just that science is used by atheism as ‘proof’ in the exact same way science is used by religion as ‘proof’ and since the atheists are doing a far better job of it, the religious seem to think they can hold some territory by attacking science.
Debates about whether or not religious ideas “exist” is beyond irrelevant.
Who is having that debate? My belief merely asserts that god doesn’t exist. Between this commentary and what jerwin & SheiffFatman have contributed it’s pretty clear to see that fundamentalism is a very hard concept to pin to atheism, irrespective of how desperate the religious are to throw this “dirty” word back at atheists.
[quote=“SheiffFatman, post:121, topic:52085”]
“Fundament”, via Latin “fundamentum”, may date back as far as you suggest, but hasn’t always had the sense of “foundation”[/quote]
Sure it has, they share the same root and origin. Very much in the same way people speak of “basics”, as to mean concepts which provide the base for future development. It’s simple English pseudo-Latin: fundament-al-ism. Meaning literally, “discipline pertaining to the basics”.
It predates Chaucer by quite some time, but fundament has often also been used as a euphemism for the “bottom” of a person. Which probably just as well apply to the feet if one is standing.
This is silly. There are countless things which can be considered fundamental concepts which don’t involve religious doctrine. You yourself mention secular laws, which can easily be said to be concepts fundamental to civil society. Like I mentioned in a previous post, most every discipline is based upon some fundamentals, although they do change over time.
I could quote from myself also, where I explained that atheism tends to draw its arguments from metaphysical naturalism, and specifically rejects that which does not fit this world view.
Which is, again, purely subjective. Debunking of philosophy is not hard science, it is merely replacing one idea of the world with one better suited to you. Good luck finding consensus with philosophers. But this is closer to the nature of the problem at hand. All of this still amounts to sophmoric squabbling over “What is Truth?” There are many philosophical systems which are more or less incompatible with each other, but still function as a system of thought in their own right.
Self-serving bias much? Belief in anything is a crutch. I think what you are describing is more like an extension of the problems of superficial contemporary attempts at multiculturalism. Basically, people do not agree how to live, to organize society. Even apart from specifically religious problems - many people are simply not interested in reconciling their culture and their view of the world to fit post-Enlightenment Europeans ideals, which is exactly what these are. It might not be your intention, but your rhetoric is extremely similar to that of colonialism, that others will accept your Justified, European model of the universe, or they need to go. Good luck with that, it has only ever created lots of resentment and self-righteous tantrums.
I keep talking about science because, if you have been reading, what atheists do is measure religious ideas with materialist metrics. They are two completely dissimilar ways of thinking. It’s like “scientifically debunking” cubist painting. Other than that, it sounds like you are mostly generalizing about people. I don’t doubt that there are huge masses of people who are gullible and ignorant, but taking away religion does not instantly make them into scientists. People following scientists and rationalists is exactly as problematic as those following religion, because followers do not need to think. What they use to rationalize their ignorance is beside the point.
Who cares? What does that have to do with anything? I can just as easily say that your sense of humor doesn’t exist, since I can’t see it, and it doesn’t improve my life. If you claim to feel it, you’re probably delusional. That’s what happens when you try to objectify the subjective, it just gets obnoxious.
You are demonstrating bias with this. If you are starting from the conclusion that “fundamentalism” is a pejorative term, then you have an incentive for explaining it away. This is an emotional problem rather than anything practical. You also frame this as a contest, that anybody saying otherwise must be “religious”. Needing to categorize somebody for using a term in a way you find objectionable doesn’t present a cogent argument - regardless of how many people may or not agree with you.
I am not interested in having a semantics argument with you. At least 3 of us in this thread understand the word ‘fundamentalism’ to mean one thing, and you are insisting on redefining the word to its basic components which is such a dishonest way to argue. We’re not talking about things that are fundamentals, we are talking about fundamentalism.
where I explained that atheism tends to draw its arguments from metaphysical naturalism, and specifically rejects that which does not fit this world view.
Thanks for your ‘explanation’ - also known as an opinion. You say that, but you provide no examples. Give me a single example of something that atheism (in your view) wrongfully rejects.
Belief in anything is a crutch.
Then I’m lucky I believe in non belief, huh?
It’s like “scientifically debunking” cubist painting.
No it’s not. The religious have for centuries used science as evidence to explain why they’re right. The claims that theists make can be put under scientific scrutiny because many of them are explicitly of a scientific or measurable nature. Any special pleading that there is something that only faith and belief can reveal is just a fucking load of shit.
This is an emotional problem rather than anything practical. You also frame this as a contest
Thanks doctor, same time next week? Give me a fucking break. It is a contest because religion still bears far too much influence on the lives of the non religious. Once they mind their own fucking business it will stop being a contest. I have no interest in further discussing this with you, lest we end up talking about the economy or whatever irrelevant tangent you care to go on next.
Consider the scientific and philosphical novelties that were being published in the first decades of the twentieth century. A person familiar with the intellectual undercurrents of the time might think that
a) The Bible isn’t literally true
b) Jesus wasm’t really born of a virgin
c) it is important to live an ethical life
d) Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead
e) most of the miracles described in the bible didn’t happen as they were described.
and so on. Fundamentalists essentially doubled down in the face of “modern,” “rational”, and “scientific” objections to traditional Christianity. It was if the rest of Christianity did not matter, if those core beliefs were stripped away.
There are some similarities between Fundamentalists, and say, Corey Robin’s interpretation of Conservatism as a “counter revolutionary” movement, rather than as the scattered remnants of the “ancien régime”.
But the arguments put forth have relied upon this one possible connotation of the word, to the exception of the other, far more numerous examples. When you insist that a word does and can mean only one thing, because your argument depends upon it, there is no reason to be surprised if/when somebody mentions this. If I wanted to add to the snark, I could say that you are being fundamentalist with regards to cherry picking your definition. And no, reminding people that the term has a more broad meaning than they insist upon attributing to it is anything but “dishonest”. Perhaps the distinction is irrelevant to you, but this does not make it counter-factual.
How the hell is this my opinion? You refute this? If you profess to atheism, you should have numerous examples handy.
As for what atheism wrongly rejects, I did already explain that it rejects the subjective nature of individual experience. People have created millions of gods, and you can read about them. That people made them up does not make them any less real than the rest of human culture which we just made up. How about the entire “entertainment” industry? Why not outlaw literature since it’s just made-up bullshit? It must be harmful, right? Doesn’t its fictitious nature make those who read it ignorant?
Apparently not. Get your argument straight. You are starting with your conclusion and then backfilling.
Even just this one sentence is overly general in so many ways. Who are “the religious”? Does this category automatically encompass anybody who subscribes to anything you consider religious? What about religions such as Buddhism which do not assert the existence of gods? Science as evidence of what - you were saying in a prior post that religions rely upon faith instead of evidence? And what can they be “right” about?
Then we would be making the mistake of evaluating religious ideas based upon the claims of people who don’t even understand their professed religion in the first place. And like I said, addressing somebodys metaphysical misunderstanding with a materialist critique is bound to be unconvincing and ineffective.
No argument from me there! People tend to be busybodies and armchair critics because it’s easier than making anything of themselves.
Tends to draw its arguments from metaphysical naturalism, true. But there are also arguments rooted in a rejection of solipsism. As an “as close as you can get to atheist without being atheist”, I think my main source of revulsion to much religious thinking is that it completely rejects the value of community, a collection of individuals that are different, yet the same. When you (not “you”, of course) reject the “same”, you abandon empathy as protection against hate. When you reject the “different”, hoo boy!
Many among the religious will gather in groups, and avow their adoration of community. Do they really think that their neighbour on the pew believes exactly as they do? If the differences were truly known, the schisms would scatter like shards of solipsistic shrapnel.
Though I see science as but one tool to suss truth, I see one huge advantage in that it recognizes an objective model (perhaps one of many), where we all may share in a common method of understanding. Religion, not so much.
So there are also arguments rooted in a rejection of solipsism.
I think ‘militant’ or ‘militantly’ are better words for that. I know what they’re trying to say but I don’t think they are saying it very effectively. Words by-themselves can not be metaphors, or if they are they begin to lose their actual meaning as words. When this happens, English becomes like a palette of paints that have become so mixed that they’re all brown messes. Nothing is gained by being poetic with words, outside of poetry.
there exist atheists who seem particularly partial to blasphemy. Not the sort of “god doesn’t exist” type of blasphemy–which is to be expected, and is eminently defensible–but the “I’d really like to fling faeces inside a sanctuary” type of blasphemy. Have a bit of class, folks.
True that. I’d rather fling metaphoric shit on their ideas than actual shit in a sanctuary since that kind of behaviour would be equivalent to the pompous faith and certainty of belief that is a particularly unpleasant characteristic of theism.
I’m pretty certain the Catholic church is actively shielding child rapists from prosecution, and refusing to comply with the laws of the countries it operates in.
In this case, I’d be happy to literally throw shit on the pope.
That was happening with frightening regularity in recent history, but it seems like those days are coming to an end as the payouts they’ve had to make to victims are jeopardising the size of the church’s big pile of everyone else’s money.
The Catholics are just assholes selling salvation from your sins in exchange for a pile of money and unquestioned access to our children’s precious little asses/dicks/mouths/vaginas. I am somewhat less inclined to fling poo on this pope so far (he seems like the most sensible and ethical one they’ve had in a while) but until he (at the very least) tells the African continent that it’s OK to wrap your junk he is a fucking shitbag in my view.
Pope Frankie is also delighted that parents beat their children as long as it’s not in the face:
The pope said: “One time, I heard a father in a
meeting with married couples say ‘I sometimes have to smack my children a
bit, but never in the face so as to not humiliate them’.“How beautiful! He knows the sense of dignity! He has to punish them but does it justly and moves on.”
That’s pretty outstanding, coming from an old, ostensibly celibate man who never had kids of his own and never married.
Who the fuck does he think he is to counsel married couples? Hubris at its finest. Fucking pack of dirty old child fucking child beating conmen.
Alright, that I’ll definitely agree with. But to rephrase what I said above, I think football hooligans might be seriously disappointed with the reality of what their football team is (though at least some of them are presumably just there to get drunk and fight and don’t actually give a shit about their football team).
Which is why I use the word “knowledge” to mean something that has an element of subjectivity to it. People outside of philosophy discussions say they know things all the time, so whatever we are trying to get at when we say we know something isn’t some unattainable certainty. Plato thought that knowledge was a kind of fairy dust, I think that at this point we know better and we should stop giving credence to a definition of knowledge that doesn’t match with the reality of knowing things. I know the sun is going to come up tomorrow morning - if someone disagrees I would say it is clearly a fault of their understanding of language, not mine. I don’t think this is merely semantics.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think the majority of religious adherents would disagree with that.
There’s a book I really loved called “God: The Failed Hypothesis” by Victor Stenger in which Stenger goes over the evidence for the existence of a being like the one described in the bible. He’s upfront at the beginning about what he is proposing to do: examine the evidence for a kind of anthropomorphic god that hears prayers and performs (or at least performed) miracles.
Now sensible religious people might say, “Hey, that’s not the point,” because, as you say, religion is more about the subjective than the objective and they never thought there was a proverbial bearded man sitting on a cloud anyway. What I like about what Stenger did was that he drew a clear line: Insofar as you make claims that whether or not your god exists matters to objective reality those claims are in the domain of science and can be tested (does praying for people make them get better, etc.). If you don’t want to argue that god matters to objective reality then your claims are not going to be proved or disproved by science. I think that extremely few religious people would be happy with that conclusion. Like I said, I think that there is probably some reality to gods, I just don’t think that very many people who believe in gods would be remotely satisfied with that reality.
That’s not true of everyone. I know-well at least one person who I am absolutely sure believes the value of their religious belief is in their subjective experience and understanding (and thinks that I dramatically undervalue the subjective). But I think for most people if a thing exists then that means it has some effect on objective reality and can be interacted with objectively, so by this understanding of gods, they would characterize what you’ve said here as another way of saying that god does not exist.
Personally I reject the distinction between subjective and objective as a kind of failure to understand reality (like wave-particle duality - light isn’t like a wave and like a particle, it’s like light and we just have trouble conceiving of that). Sorry if I’m repeating myself from another discussion as I know I’m fond of saying this, but I recall reading Žižek and coming across him saying “How, out of a dumb, flat reality that just is could something like perception come to be?” and thinking, “Well, obviously it did so that’s a practical rather than a philosophical question.”
This doesn’t make much sense to me if we take religion to be expressions of subjective experience. Religions are what their adherents make them, of course Christians understand Christianity because Christianity is their understanding of it (among other things).
I totally agree with you that “fundamentalist atheist” is sort of a nonsense phrase, but on the English becoming a palette of paints that have all been mixed to brown messes, I think the ship might have sailed on that a long time ago and we’re doing sound poetry at best. (A palette of browns… A pa-lette of browns… A palette of browns)
[quote=“LDoBe, post:134, topic:52085”]
In this case, I’d be happy to literally throw shit on the pope.
[/quote]I’d much rather throw an arrest warrant at the pope. But I’d especially like to throw an arrest warrant at the ex-pope, since that guy seems to have been especially supportive of the whole abetting child molesters thing. I’ll tell you, if I were a leader of my nation and the pope was coming to visit, I think I’d muster the diplomacy to warn him in advance that if he landed on our soil he’d be arrested, but it’d be pretty tempting to just let him come and have the cops snatch him at the airport.
Of course I don’t know how much of a shield religion actually is in this case. Cosby hasn’t been arrested for rape. The Vatican is both rich and a nation. If the British government was shielding a bunch of it’s former ministers from charges of child molestation (just for example, not like they are currently doing that… oh wait!) they’d be getting the same, sweep-this-under-the-rug-because-we-can’t-go-and-arrest-powerful-respectable-people treatment.
Yes, if there is anything I recall from that period of time, it was the administration’s desire to have a real debate, with input from all sides. No one was called a traitor for questioning the rationale for war. Certainly, no one was accused of “hating America” for speaking against the invasion of Iraq or wondering if the WMD claims were bullshit. It might have been phrased for other countries, but it was aimed at the US populace as well.
By all means do, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the folks who see no difference between throwing shit at the Pope and throwing shit at the sweet little church lady who volunteers at the soup kitchen, because they’re both ZOMGRELIGIOUS and are therefore jointly culpable for the Crusades or something.
See, the funny thing is, I’ve known multiple vegans and they’ve all been quite pleasant people. In fact, I’ve known people who are both vegan and atheist, and are reasonable about the first but douchey about the second.
And of course I’ve known atheists who are quite pleasant and tolerant as well. It takes all kinds.
The point of the “fundamentalist” tag is that it clearly says “you have become just as bad as the thing that you are fighting.” It’s meant to be explicitly insulting, and to draw a parallel. “Militant” doesn’t do either of those.
