Atheist/Anti-theist/Agnostic Troper Group

I don't remember what I've said about Buddhism here now. Anyway, a Christian acquaintance once recommended to me Chesterton's Orthodoxy. It was very underwhelming. There is some humor that I appreciated in it, and fairly obvious deconstructions of things like philosophical skepticism. A lot of it boils down to "I know you are but what am I?" type critiques though and really shallow stuff. I'm not sure why people find this compelling. The same goes for much of Lewis's writings that I've read.

edited 20th May '17 3:25:14 PM by Fireblood

I referred to the comment where you said that Buddhists are atheists yet believe in a transcendental reality in response to me relating Baggini's words.

I can't speak for Lewis or Chesterton. From what I've read here on Tv Tropes about certain works by Lewis and his depiction of Satan as really petty, obnoxious and vile, maybe that speaks to some people's experiences about some other types of people, who act in a similar way to that Satan. This is purely a conjecture of mine nor do I believe everyone can have the exact same reasons for liking something.

edited 20th May '17 3:40:10 PM by MerryMikael

Well many Buddhists, yes. So far as I know they all disbelieve in a creator deity, but some believe in lesser deities.

Could be. He has his own version of hell too. It seems he didn't feel very bound by the orthodox views of things.

Seems so dead here. Well.....

Perhaps another reference to Baggini's in order. Bought What's it all about? I like his simple and easy-to-understand philosophical analysis. Also some things I saw in the very short introduction to atheism repeat in this book - y'know, just like any non-fictional author with accumulated publishings has concepts and themes repeating throughout their work.

I'll have to check out more of his work in the future. I have one book of his on free will called Freedom Regained, but haven't read it all yet. Another English atheist philosopher I recommend here is Stephen Law. So far I've read a couple of his books. They were both good, and he has a blog too which is neat. He has a funny thought experiment called " The God of Eth"[1] showing that the standard arguments in favor of an all-good God work just as easily for an all-evil one. Check it out.

edited 13th Jun '17 7:24:13 AM by Fireblood

so my family wants be to go back to nigera for 2 weeks. 2 weeks. without any of my stuff. i don't want to go to get my head swat million times by some priest. apparently, they think it would prey the fat away from me.

I'm sorry, I don't really know what to say, except you have my sympathies. That was a first for me-I've never heard any who think prayer can make you lose weight before now.

Christopher Cotter's book on new atheism has been published.

Sounds interesting.

Looks like this turned to a book club....

Well not really. But if it goes along with this thread, I share it.

Also there's something about Christianity dialoguing with new atheism in a book Inconvenient faith. It also got published this year. It's by Bond, Travis J. Bond.

If you read any of these, please let me know what you think.

edited 1st Jul '17 9:53:05 AM by MerryMikael

I haven't read anything so far that you've posted.

At least yet. Anyways...

Baggini criticizes Abraham for blindly obeying God and almost killing his own son, but then again, if an argument was presented that God wouldn't ask anything like that, then wouldn't it be an externalized value system? An individual wouldn't do that and that's why he'd assume God would never ask him anything like that, because it's really his/her own value system projected outwardly and abstractified. I don't think this is a new idea nor am I going to be surprised that others have probably pointed it out several times.

Not yet, no.

If you mean people seem to project their own views onto God, then yes. To me however it seems that the point of that story (at least partly) is the virtue of faith in God and obeying his commands without question. Some have also said there is a metaphorical allegory for Jesus, others abandoning human sacrifice among the ancient Hebrews.

edited 2nd Jul '17 11:07:58 AM by Fireblood

Yes, that was what I implied when I went on to elaborate.

Abraham's story puts the "virtue" of obedience over the virtue of ethics. Abraham succeded by defying ethics for blind obedience. God could've rewarded him for defying an obviously evil demand but he didn't.

It's the value system of an authoritarian, patriarchal society.

That's what I was about to say. The moral is basically do whatever an authority says without question, even if it feels wrong

Now I wonder what would happen, hypothetically speaking, if you went around asking people "If God told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"

Presumably they would assume that they would somehow miraculously survive the fall.

Like I clearly said, my point was: "What if God didn't really command anything like that?" Then it must be because a person himself wouldn't do that. Yes, indeed, to repeat, that would make God an externalized, abstractified projection of values a person himself possesses.

Isn't there a thing about discernment of spirits? It could still be justified as "True God would never command me to do something like that and the Devil is a sneaky, vile, deceitful bastard anyway". It doesn't seem to me, though, that consequences and effects of getting swayed by "the Devil" are seen as desirable.

What's seen to be of the Devil (from sect to sect and person and person) would be another matter, but I digress.

Speaking of externalised conceptions of the divine, most of the people participating in this thread have probably heard of the bicameral mind hypothesis, popularised by Julian Jaynes. I'm presenting it here as a curiosity that the conversation above reminded me of; it's considered a fringe hypothesis in psychology and philosophy of mind - it has some mainstream popularity among the general population, but next to none among experts in the relevant fields.

The idea is that in the original, natural condition of humans, there are two mostly distinct parts of one's mind: one that produces thoughts and decisions, and one that experiences them or carries them out. The thinking, decision-making part of the mind, for the most part, would be perceived by the other part as an external entity, like a disembodied voice, that the experiencing/obeying part must, well, obey.

This paradigm, then, would have broken down when the degree to which the members of relatively small societies came into contact with other cultures (through migration caused by various crises) and had to adapt to be able to communicate outside of their own cultural and linguistic frameworks became too much for the mind to process without the two spheres merging. Hence, consciousness as we know it, and people who regress are diagnosed as schizophrenic. Hallucinations of gods and other such entities (especially if anthropomorphic and/or commanding) would be the way the commanding half of the consciousness would manifest to the obeying half.

Jaynes did provide some circumstantial evidence for his hypothesis, but it is rather weak. It is also quite difficult to come up with a proper, falsifiable formulation of the hypothesis and follow it up with a feasible experiment. It's also worth pointing out that if his hypothesis was true, you would expect that different cultures would have gone through the transition to full consciousness at different times, leaving behind different kinds of (literary) records from the time before and after transition - and you might even expect that some isolated cultures that were relatively recently (discovered) might still be at an earlier stage in that transition, if it is not sudden.

Anyway, my point was that the idea that the commands from God(s) are coming from a hallucinated, externalised conception of one's own mind is actually part of a fairly significant hypothesis in psychology. Even if the bicameral mind is not generally accepted, there still might be useful ideas either in the model or in the discussion around it.

I'm familiar with the bicameral mind hypothesis. It's actually a major plot point in Westworld.

edited 2nd Jul '17 11:25:06 PM by Xopher001

If you're going to discuss it, please use spoiler tags. People reading this thread might not have seen it. (Well, I for one haven't yet, and I intend to - but also, in general, if you're talking about a fairly recent work of fiction, or one with a plot twist, the use of spoiler tags is advised.)

Sorry. basically its aknowledged as fringe science in the show, but was originally used as a model for artificial intelligence- that only made the robots go insane. However it does ultimately work for the prototype in the final ep.

I'm skeptical of psychological explanations for theism. Which is not to say there aren't any ever, it just doesn't appear to cover the idea. Theists also offer theirs for atheism, with the same problems. A lot of it can simply be explained by tradition and upbringing. Hallucinations are unneeded.

edited 3rd Jul '17 6:59:55 AM by Fireblood

There are enough religions, and enough people with claims of incidents where they have personally witnessed the divine, that it becomes statistically certain, or just about, that some of them did start with hallucinations.

That said, it would be silly to propose any one explanation for the origin of all or even most religious phenomena. Chances are, for every 10 religious narratives you can explain with one hypothesis, there are 100 others that your hypothesis cannot explain. You can offer explanations that cover a tiny fraction of the range of religious experience at a time, and as you accumulate such explanations, you begin to have at least a somewhat comprehensive overview of most of the causes of religious experience (but still with outliers everywhere).

I suspect that a very large percentage of all claims of religious belief through history are at least partially insincere, and made due to the mainstream position of the religion(s) that are most powerful in one's culture. Obviously, it is next to impossible to accurately estimate how many billions of the people who were counted as member of their culture's religion really did have doubts, so I wouldn't claim any sort of certainty about this.

On top of the people who pretend to believe, there must also be millions and millions of people who just believe because that's how they were brought up. Without any personal experience of any supernatural power in their life, they trust those that came before, or those who claim to have direct experience of the divine, and go along with it. Arguably, the people who just believe based on the testimony of the religious authorities in their own culture might very well be an overwhelming majority of religious people, but again, it would be very difficult to know whether this is the case. (I could very well be wrong, and maybe most religious people do sometimes get some sort of experience of God(s) watching over them - I wouldn't know.)