are you an atheist?

Dawkins doesn't do philosophical stuff. He's good on evolutionary biology tho.

yeah, i'd say read anything he did up til ooooh say '87 not sure how much he's repeating himself after that tbh

That Diamond thing reads like someone who understands very little about the psychology of religious belief or of group dynamics in a religious community. I find the idea that believers spout irrational claims as a sort of badge of identity to be preposterous. For one thing, "rationality" is a lot more ambiguous and complex than Diamond gives it credit for. For another, I think the core beliefs of most believers are things that make sense to them on a deep level, and not necessarily without justification. The elements of their tradition that most strain credulity are usually the ones they privately struggle with, and not the ones they tend to focus on.

Or, to quote William James:

The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as rationalism. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result.

Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we know to-day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of "contrivances" intended to make manifest his "glory" in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being.

The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith.

we don't have to confess any such thing, paragraph two

I think you'll find you have lots of company. Neo-atheists place great stock in their own thorough-going rationalism. Which is particularly odd if they take the evolutionary story of the brain's origin seriously.

i think you'll find i'm not asking for company nor claiming any badge other than 'when we think about our individual feelings we must confess the following' is a tricky little fulcrum that doesn't convince me as an argument, tbh.

It's not an argument - more an invitation to self-reflection. If you don't agree, then you're not obliged to accept his conclusions.

i think james + diamond are looking at religion from different perspectives (ok, that's obv but) religion can be satisfying on different levels. it certainly relates to both the things our subconscious selfs find satisfying and give us meaning, and also ways of organizing our communities and families. they are not incompatible explanations bc one could always ask - why do we find these particular irrationalities personally satisfying, or why do we chose to arrange ourselves ideologically through these particular beliefs?

invitations to self-reflection, imo, are v often v little more than chastisement that lands softly due to the height of the horse from atop which twas issued

I don't think James is trying to chastise anybody. It's not a knock-down argument. He's pretty much admitting that the best-sounding arguments by definition issue from the rationalist camp.

i think there's perhaps two separate questions here. the first would be, a la James, what is a private, subjective, religious experience?

the second, and by necessity foregrounded given the nature of the first, is what constitutes a religious communication? or what is religion as a socially communicable thing?

i think rationalism a la Dawkins cannot help but interpret religion as a rival rationality (not sure it could interpret it any other way). that is, it sees religious communication as making claims about reality.

Niklas Luhmann points to religion as a kind of "world doubling" or "the observation of the unity of the observable and unobservable." what i like about these statements is that they start to point to how religious communication can identify itself as religious. and no wonder rationalism seeks to reject it, it should! but we're past a point in history where "claims about reality" having a binding quality in any one mode of communication.

I'm an it-takes-all-kinds type of guy and I understand that we all have ideas about the world that aren't based on pure rationalism or empiricism. I certainly do.

But it rankles me when people 1) see supernatural forces at work in natural occurrences, due to misconceptions about probability, or 2) attribute personal fortune to the will of a higher power.

You want to believe that it's turtles all the way down? No skin off my nose. The turtle tells you to be nice to people? That's great! You want to tell me about how the turtle made you run into that long lost friend in an unlikely place at just the right time? I will become irrationally angry and look for the nearest exit.

Whatever sort of a being God may be, we know to-day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of "contrivances" intended to make manifest his "glory" in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being.

For not believing in God atheist certainly do have specific ideas on what this God who doesn't exist is like. Often

The failure of words to describe the spiritual experience should not be a strike against it. In fact, this is crucial to understanding it. If words and logic and rationality were valid enough tools to transmit the religious experience, they would be the domain of religion and not science. Anyone who read a Bible would understand God as if understanding the plot of a novel.

This is why God must be believed in rather than rationalized. Words and logic do not faithfully (pun, sorry) describe the spiritual experience. Any God that is a being, is an external force, separate from the world, perfectly describable in words or math, is not God. It is science. It is logic. It is gravity, or calculus, or engineering, or FORTRAN, or a drawing of a tree. It is tied to the senses. It is not a mystical personal experience.

i think rationalism a la Dawkins cannot help but interpret religion as a rival rationality

Very well put!

thanks!

it's worth remembering that Kant saw his project in the first critique as essentially limiting the prospects of reason in order to "make room for faith." but that's at a historical moment where reason could be seen as a viable alternative for a return to a "pre-modern" holistic cosmos. too many contemporary arguments on this topic seem to take terms to be set in a pre-Kantian framework--and that's totally wacky!

"or FORTRAN"

FORTRAN is language of the devil! not of this realm.

I'm a big fan of the Bart Ehrman theory that Jesus was an apocalypticist Jewish rabbi that believed he was living in the End Times, and all of the nonsense about Heaven and Hell and most of what we know as today's Christianity came from future followers who had to bend over backwards to explain why the prophecy of the new "Kingdom on Earth" wasn't fulfilled.

but hell even without that, I see no evidence of the Judeo-Christian God in my own life (though haven't thought much about any other type of spiritual presence).

the worst thing about the yay-science atheist books is how fucking excited they seem to be about bleak shit, like the vast scale of the cosmos that renders human life less than insignificant or worst of all the fact that humans evolved due to evolution. of course i believe what they believe, but i don't think it's anything to celebrate, at least not as unequivocally as dawkins seems to.

lol "evolved due to evolution." but yeah, natural selection is kind of a brutal, amoral process and its not flattering to our conception of ourselves as ethical subjects and this is a real problem for people. it's not that they just don't get how cool it is.

I do hate smug and cloying atheists, but I actually find the lack of a clear, defined collective purpose to our existence to be more fulfilling and exciting than the idea of having to adhere to some rigid dogma. like some folks would ask me "isn't that sad, to think that we're here for no reason and that everything happens for no reason", and like, I don't think that at all. I've always felt like it was my job to figure out my individual purposes in life, and that they don't have to be some static thing.

(spoken as someone whose mind was almost wrecked by a Fundamentalist church in his late teens).

i think any version/vision of evolution is no less bleak than the notion of a creator who allows/compels vast swathes of its creation to damn themselves or condemn themselves to oblivion

All that shit is awesome, go get a teddy if u need comforting

xp neanderthal, i feel like that most of the time, but not when i am close to losing someone close to me. i think at the moments before death i am going to wish i remained catholic... i am not really unequivocally against all forms of catholicism and think my mom and grandfather had principled religious beliefs even if the institution of the church is not something i can get with.

although i also totally get the idea that i wouldn't want to worship any creator who would create a world with as much pain as our world has. but still, that's an intellectual position and it doesn't do much for the person in crisis who feels like they need something to hold onto.

Any ideas as to why this tendency to see atheism - agnosticism - theism as existing along a spectrum has persisted? Can't say I've met anybody who's belief (or lack thereof) has actually functioned in that way. There doesn't seem to be any system of classification that succeeds in splitting the difference where knowledge and belief are concerned.

the thing is that most religions broadly defined arent about validating your sense of yourself as a "subject" or individual and they sure as shit aren't about giving "meaning" to your own myopic existence. they are more often about trying to understand the universe/god on its own terms. they're pretty much the opposite of individualism! the idea that religion = i am a special snowflake is a relatively new idea, i think.

atheism isn't even necessarily opposed to a form of religion that pushes back against the individual self, but i think as atheism as currently practiced is pretty much an extension of individualism/selfhood/etc.

or mine is, at least. I dunno, years of being in a fundie church really fucked with me. I'd worry I was going to hell cuz I liked "Reign in Blood". We had green workbooks which contained such lovely logic as "Good people could not have written the Bible because they'd be lying (good people never lie, amirite?). Bad people couldn't have written the Bible cos then they'd be condemning themselves. Therefore, the Bible is a divine work.". I wrote so many criticisms in the margins of the workbook that the group leader pulled me aside to see if I wanted to talk about it.

Nice people, but really stunted my intellectual growth. I don't have quibbles w/ religious folk in general, I don't like to shit on other people's beliefs, but fundies are a whole other ball of wax. And sadly, in FL, we have a lot of them (and also a lot of these "best of all worlds" Unitarian churches).

they sure as shit aren't about giving "meaning" to your own myopic existence

Yeah, gonna call BS on that. Whether through dogma-influenced invoking of Jesus to save your personal soul or church-based community charity work or even the ultimate evil fundamentalist imperialist us-vs-them drama, pretty much everything involved with your broadly defined religion provides meaning to the people involved.

Fundamentalist Christianity doesn't do itself many favors by using 'sheep' and 'flock' language and all, but social systems providing individual meaning while simultaneously oppressing selfhood is IN NO WAY limited to religious organizations.

The ppl choosing to remain involved, you mean i think?

I am not aware of any mainstream religious tradition that claims to secure meaning in-and-through a personal self. a "soul," id argue is quite different, particularly as it comes down from Socrates/Plato.

things get more complicated with Protestantism ("sole fide" and all that) but in its early forms it drew a strict line between individual religious experience of faith and any access it may have to a grounding in a larger religious truth. (Jonathan Edwards' "Treatise on Religious Affections" is the masterpiece of this sort of thing.)

i've always liked Jacobi's famous line “God is, and is outside me, a living, self-subsisting being, or I am God. There is no third.” even though it is, of course, quite extreme and reductive, i think it gets at quite a double bind faced by modernity. incidentally the second option is how he defined "nihilism."

Jacobi's big misstep came with his blithe assumption that "me" and "I" are definable.

ryan, mainstream religious traditions in their early incarnations might have been interested in describing the universe "on its own terms", but they certainly gave humanity, and human moral life, a central place in that universe. the idea of a god who loves individuals personally might be new, but the notion that our individual actions have cosmic significance is old. i realize that the latter seems stressful and undesirable to us, but still, i get why certain people aren't willing to let go of that paradigm, and i also see why it can help people feel more at peace with death.

the notion that our individual actions have cosmic significance is old

what im trying to say is that there is a difference between an individual life having meaning because it is individual as opposed to to because it part of some cosmic/divine narrative or hierarchy. that's an important distinction, imo, and it's one that gets lost in the current ethos of "you're special/meaingful because you're unique." by contrast, what is of value to me in the religious tradition is the "you're special/meaningful insofar as you're part of a larger picture that goes way beyond you."

so i want to agree, but only to the extent that "our individual actions have cosmic significance" insofar as they aren't significant because they're individual but quite the opposite!

so im saying religious traditions do provide a means, and have historically done so, for evading the modern supposition that individuality is meaningful qua individuality.

Can you give an example of any social organization that says individuals are significant because they are individual? Any clubs or subcultures or cults or companies or sports or anything ... Because "you're special/meaningful insofar as you're part of a larger picture that goes way beyond you" doesn't seem to be something strictly limited to religion but built into pretty much any social/cultural system.

Funny enough, the idea that our individuality derives meaning being part of a larger picture seems to be a big theme among atheist/agnostic/materialists.

adam do you think hitler's relation to atheism is relevant here?

you could start here: http://www.amazon.com/Political-Theory-Possessive-Individualism-Wynford/dp/0195444019/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382913201&sr=1-1&keywords=possessive+individualism

there's also stuff like a nietzchean "will to power" (meaning derives in and through the individual) or even Heidegger's "being towards death" (every death is singuar/unique, "my" death).

but you're also right, in that there's an enduring tension in something like the atheistic movement due to the fact that atheism is evolving into some kind of communitarian ethos. i actually think earlier atheistic movements, like existentialism, probably grappled with this issue more directly.

that's the thing about "individualist" philosophies though, they're basically inherently paradoxical. Derrida's critique of Heidegger's early attempt to ground the singularity of Dasein in "being towards death" basically boils down to noting that, well, everybody is being-towards-death--so the very means of singularity is in fact also the very thing that is the most universal irrespective of particularities.

Can you give an example of any social organization that says individuals are significant because they are individual?

america

Also the no god thing

Can you give an example of any social organization that says individuals are significant because they are individual?

This is very close to the defining feature of Objectivism.

why do i have this thread bookmarked?!

maybe you're waiting for the answer to the thread title?

maybe.

I kind of wonder if perhaps the reason I made a smooth transition to agnosticism and later, atheism, after temporarily being a Fundamentalist in high school, was because I wasn't raised in a strict religious household? We went to church and all, but neither parent forced it on me, and acknowledged its shortcomings (Hell, my father didn't really care for organized religion). Though perhaps it was also due to my rational mind clashing with the stunted logic of the Fundie church - the four years (!!!) I spent there largely warped my brain, sent me into constant Hell-induced panic attacks. It was probably easier to let go because Xtianity wasn't presented to me in childhood as the "default" option, so there was none of that false-binary bullshit (ie "Xtianity is" or "Nothing is").

what also contributed was a few tragedies I indirectly witnessed. Like a heartbreaking tragedy a few years back when a theatre friend of mine and his wife lost their daughter, who was not even one year old, due to not previously diagnosed health complications. just seeing everybody's post after the child tragically died, despite their 'prayer chains', their candlelight vigils, etc, posts like "we know Jesus was always in control and this is what he wanted". Like, I don't want to shit on anybody's belief system (and I didn't, just offered support to them), but it was kind of disgusting to me how the tragedy erupted into Jesus-cheerleading among his friends. Yes! This is what he wanted! Sorry your baby died and I didn't get back to you, I just really need her to help me put up some wallpaper in Heaven!

while skimming i only read the first & last sentence of ^ post and it was hilarious. recommended.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/is-atheism-irrational/

H8 theists, such arrogance!