There has been militant anti-theism, for sure. And awful crimes have been committed against religious believers. But there seems to be some very confused thinking going on around the nature of atheism and communism and what an ideology is and isn't.

33 chapters of Capital.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index-l.htm

How many about atheism? None.

You've just described a socioeconomic theory that doesn't require God. Hence if you read Capital, you'll find it's 99.9% socioeconomics and almost zero percent theism vs atheism.

Must atheism be bad? No. Are certain iterations of it bad. Yes. — Hanover

Clumsy thinking still. Communism, for example, is not an iteration of atheism in the way e.g. Judaism is an iteration of theism. Theism is a broader category containing all religions, such that they can be considered subcategories or iterations of it--or "theistic belief systems" in a proper sense. Atheism is an element of communist ideology. There is no sense in which communism is a subcategory of atheism or an iteration of it. And to call it an "atheistic belief system" is misleading because it suggests that this element is the primary ideological force behind it when its not as it's a socioeconomic theory. I'm not going to deny communist ideologies have inflicted harm on religious believers in pursuance of encouraging atheism as part of their projects. But your approach to this is illogical and your reasoning is faulty.

So, is that all there is? Intolerance on both sides, which flares up whenever someone claims there is or is not a God? — Ciceronianus

Psychological insecurity which presents as intolerance maybe. In mixed and relatively open societies, I'd hypothesize that most atheists have an inner theist trying to get out and most theists have an inner atheist trying to get out. In argumentative situations then, these inner aliens are fed by opposing interlocutors with predictably unpleasant results.

Tend to agree. E.g. Trump could dismantle neoliberal economic policies and replace them with populist ones and simultaneously make the gun situation much worse. There's some connection but it's not the focus I'd go for.

I didn't even get one laugh out of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Just sayin'.

I can agree with that and still hold to my prediction. Give it six months.

Standards have never been much of an obstacle where politics is concerned. What's needed is a "solution" that both sides can find something to love and hate about.

I'm kind of with you on the first part but I reject the idea of accepting vs rejecting here in favour of creating vs being created. If your perfect world is theist, create for yourself that context and live in it. Whether or not it's "really right" or atheism is really right is a distraction imo--talking to ourselves about something that effectively makes no difference, i.e. the terms are defined so that we can't know in a way that we can confirm socially (someone can always justifiably doubt us). And I consider the dichotomy unhelpful as I said before. What matters imo is the degree to which we are consciously and purposefully creating our reality vs being created by it. We can do that both in a nominally "atheist" and "theist" world.

So, how about we define our ideal character, extrapolate from that our perfect world, and create to the best of our ability that world (starting with our immediate context and working outwards)? How "good" we are then is how good we are at doing that. How "right" it is is how well it works. The good becomes not some impenetrable free-floating idea nor defined from the outside in, but the experienced harmony between intention and manifestation that bonds us to ourselves and the world. And the "right" becomes the observable degree to which such a world becomes (as in fit) us.

As in, create the existence that justifies its own terms, rather than look for justifications to exist.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64455121

I expect what will happen ultimately is Ukraine will give up territory in return for NATO membership.

This is another way of saying it's not necessarily desirable to focus on the good vs bad person division any more than it is to focus on the theist vs atheist one. It gets you nowhere.

Too early in the morning for this. I'm sure you're right though. ChatGPT writes at least half my mod posts.

If atheists and theists are both naturally equally good people — T Clark

But what is a naturally good person? Nature doesn't create good and bad people; it creates biological strategies, which are then moulded by social contexts and judged through ideological lenses. To make the idea of a "good person" intelligible, you have to point to a social context and ask how that person fits in. Cultural beliefs are part of that context. So, if you want to find a good person, find a good social context and ask what kind of person would get along in it. If your good social context is theist, that person is a theist. If your good social context is an atheist, that person is an atheist. It all reduces to your ideological view. You can even find the perfect person. Just invent a perfect world and ask what kind of person best fits it. Unfortunately, philosophers tend to get things backwards and create perfect people that don't fit anywhere.

In the 'aesthetic' critique of atheism I often hear in these debates, there seems to be a notion that atheism robs the world of mystery and a type of beauty — Tom Storm

Ironically, it's just that sort of superficial view that robs the world of its mystery and beauty, reducing it to lazy categories and conceptual jars in which to trap them.

Unless I get a raise I guess. That seems like the sort of thing the profeist pope would say: "I did it for the money — Moliere

:grin:

:up: And maybe the final nail in the coffin of @sime's bizarre thesis is the empirical reality that the US is at once one of the least atheist and the most consumerist of the advanced nations.

Nice, you can be Archbishop!

Also, it's progressives (more likely to be atheist) not conservatives (more likely to be religious) that tend to take up arms for sustainability and against consumer capitalism. Anyhow, that's one of the wilder theses I've seen on here and underlines imo the silliness of the partisanship that the dichotomy encourages.

For example, part of the meaning of modern atheism are the unsustainable life-styles we associate with consumer-capitalism, life-styles that Baby Boomers in particular often justify on the basis of their metaphysical belief that "you only live once" . Atheism both drives, and is driven by, consumer capitalism, e.g. retailers preaching to us that we must live this 'one' life to the fullest. — sime

"You only live once" isn't a metaphysical belief, it's a slogan embraced regardless of religious / metaphysical belief; in fact, probably because of its wide appeal. It far predates Baby Boomers and currently in YOLO form means the equivalent of Carpe Diem, which was employed by writers and poets from the Roman, Horace, to Robert Herrick--who was a clergyman (was he secretly yearning for a pair of uninvented sneakers?). Absolutely no connection to atheism whatsoever. And I'd gladly take your "atheist" Baby Boomers and raise you the prosperity Bible crowd (they do love their sneakers!) if it helps demonstrate that the issue you're raising relates to superficiality of engagement with culture and is a cross-cultural problem of the sort I've alluded to above.

Of course, I'm still hoping my sacreist/profeist dichotomy will catch on and someone will make me Pope of the sacreists. :halo:

I think I'm attracted to apatheism because it has this "third way" quality -- and around here, where having a blessed day is just a way to say goodbye to an absolute stranger, it strikes people as not quite as aggressive (but, when you think about it, it's almost more aggressive -- because the relevancy of the belief decreases) — Moliere

Yes, I think because the idea is that your behaviour does not change regardless. If you can say "I behave thus because it has value in itself", rather than "I behave thus because a god exists/doesn't exist", it's quite powerful. It's not my idea and I can't remember who said it originally but if you deem yourself an atheist who relies on that non-belief to direct your behaviour (you would behave differently if God exists) then you need God in some sense--the concept is relevant to you and tied to who you are (as defined by your actions). And so having a term that dissolves that issue while keeping a different kind of meaning alive is useful.

I'm not overly optimistic on that score. It's not so much about things to do but ways to think. We tend to like ideas that are under threat from some other idea because it gives our idea more emotional salience. And I think that works for all sorts of categories.

Hallelujah :cheer:

America is more the exception than the rule in advanced democracies on that score. But yeah, I'm saying the categories themselves are destructively ideological and should be rejected. Sacred theists/atheists (sacreists) ought to join forces against profane theists/atheists (profeists) and dance naked around burning television sets while @T Clark watches and nods approvingly.

Theism minus historical dogma = ?
Atheism minus response to historical dogma = ?

At the most advanced levels, theists present a god so abstracted and atheists a physics so abstracted, there''s hardly more than terminology between them. But naturally we want to lump people into categories that allow for a good ol' scrap.

More and more I'm more attracted to the label apatheist. Postmodern Beatnik introduced me to the term and it took a minute but now I like it — Moliere

Australia is largely secular and most atheists I meet here have no interest in the arguments about god in either direction and have no internet in atheism as a thought system. They just take it for granted that god ideas are irrelevant — Tom Storm

I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out what theists expected me to believe and what, therefore, I was supposed to not believe as an atheist. And it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. Not that there aren’t good political reasons to combat religious intrusion in state functions, but there are good personal reasons to not let this battle distract us from our immersion in the symbolic, as if having saved secularism, we are ideologically pure and free.

Seems to me the conflict functions largely to create pointless distinctions among those whose everyday lives are mutually defined and confined by a more powerful cultural conditioning. At least where I’m from, if you subtract the nod to ritual, you’d never be able to tell an atheist from a theist. It’s all about the “inner life”, apparently. But what potency therein? Seems like this inner life is mostly either folks congratulating themselves on their piety or on their lack thereof, and entrenching their effective uniformity.

Our cultural salesmen tell us theism is clearly intellectual bunk and atheism wins; and that atheism is clearly moral bunk and theism wins. This is the "intellectual" and “moral” ground on which we're supposed to line up and fight. But there's another level where the dichotomy itself is a symptom of a cultural disease where the sacred, as @Wayfarer calls it, is always lost or degraded. Because it’s supposed to be. We’re either supposed to blindly follow mommy and daddy’s stories or blindly reject them, and then go back to watching TV. Seems a better route might be to divorce ourselves from that whole deal and those peddling it.

I hope the charges against me are limited to quality issues. — Agent Smith

Other than that, you're charitable and friendly in your interactions and we would like to be able to keep you here if we can.

And if someone wants to present a worldview in an OP, try this. That might be interesting.

"a worldview is an ontology, or a descriptive model of the world. It should comprise these six elements:

An explanation of the world
A futurology, answering the question "Where are we heading?"
Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?"
A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action: "How should we attain our goals?"
An epistemology, or theory of knowledge: "What is true and false?"
An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks", its origins and construction."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldview

But six words in a list, no.

I'll add that being apparently very cooperative in this way:

Okie dokie mon ami — Agent Smith

as AS usually is, is nice, and he certainly comes across as a nice guy. But it has to be followed up with actual changes in posting behaviour. We're not being unreasonable to ask for that.

The OP consisted of writing a list of five or six fairly unrelated categories, e.g. classical logic, pessimism etc., called doing that presenting a "weltanshauung", and then asked posters to make a similar list. That's not philosophy and it doesn't invite philosophical thought. E.g. Does "My worldview is classical logic" make sense to you? It's more "I like these philosophical flavours; what philosophical flavours do you like?"

A worldview would be less a list of unrelated philosophical stuff and more an orientation towards the world that integrated philosophical ideas in an individual way. If he had done that, it might have been a worthwhile OP. Otherwise, it's Lounge or bin and seeing as AS has been asked many times to rein in his tendencies towards this type of thing, I'll be choosing bin more often than not.

There was nothing philosophical about the OP, so I deleted it. (This is a pattern with AS in OPs and posts, which is why he's been suspended several times.) @Agent Smith Please stop spamming us with low effort OPs or you will be banned.

It's you who seems not to have read me. We may agree on that part, but this is the specific point that un took you up on and I also think is problematic. It's not so much an objection to your politics but to your reasoning.

I'm calling to my assistance statistical data to make the case that racial profiling is, though lamentable, justified. Let the numbers do the talking - any statistician will come to the same conclusion as me. — Agent Smith

If racial profiling is contributing to the numbers then letting the numbers do the talking is part of the problem. It's bad enough ignoring the cause to treat only the symptoms; it's worse to aggravate the cause and use the symptoms as a justification for further aggravation. You're sterilizing the concept of racial profiling here by simplifying the context to exclude factors relevant to its employment, i.e. its integration into the causal system of (social) disease and symptom its supposed to address.

There is a perfectly good thread here. Our interlocutors have every right to share their own opinion, as well. — NOS4A2

:up: + A thread on the same topic would likely be merged anyway. It's fair to ask that your question be directly addressed here by whoever can address it.

Must keep chipping away. — 0 thru 9

:pray:

It’s all too much. I need some CBD. And need to watch The Lord of the Rings again to convince myself that tiny Hobbits can overcome an army of demons. — 0 thru 9

:lol:

@Agent Smith

Community A, Time 1: 50% of Crime is by members of X subgroup; 50% of Crime is by members of Y subgroup.
X subgroup is socially dominant, so police find it easier to concentrate on Y subgroup, over-policing and alienating them (exacerbating social conditions for crime in Y subgroup).

Community A, Time 2: 45% of crime is by members of X subgroup; 55% of Crime is by members of Y subgroup.
Police now have a justification for profiling and even more over-policing of members of Y subgroup (the stats back it up!) which they pursue with gusto (further alienating Y subgroup and exacerbating the social conditions for crime therein)

Community A, Time 3: 35% of crime is by members of X subgroup; 65% of crime is by members of Y subgroup.
The police are not allowed to come out and say it but it's pretty clear these Y subgroup guys are genetically predisposed to crime; extreme methods are probably necessary to keep them under control--which the police pursue enthusiastically (Y subgroup is now so alienated, generalised violent resistance against the police seems justified).

Time 4: Do we still have a recognizable Community A?

Don't just do the maths AS. Think about where the maths came from.

Prejudice produces injustice.This has been known for long enough that the depiction of justice personified has a blindfold. But Agent Smith and the police do not care about justice so much as they care about their own interest. — unenlightened

:up: ...+falsely generalised to a social interest.

Crime prevention that's conceptualised in purely instrumental terms--low crime is good (+ points), high crime is bad ( - points)--with social incubators of crime being either wilfully or resignedly ignored, clearly leads to socially destructive practices (e.g. profiling / harassment / over-policing) being justified and encouraged. The methods superficially work (Look! Number down!) but seeing as the underlying social disease is not only left unchecked but exacerbated (community alienation increases), the only way they can continue to be seen to work is through an ever-widening schism between the image of enforcement (protection, service, justice etc) and its practice (bullying, contempt, injustice etc.) which collapses in these events where the practice becomes so extreme it returns to and threatens to become the image, and only then is endangered by the refusal of the image to identify with it. But the solution always seems to protect the image by focusing on methods of disidentification that allow the cycle to repeat, rather than realizing there's nothing in the mirror. The image has no substance because justice is not unidimensional or ungrounded. There is no justice without social justice. There is no social justice without structural change. And there is no structural change without ideological change. >>Prejudice produces injustice.

Is JSTOR access some kind of flex? You guys are cute. :love:

I doubt they are getting paid. But would probably respond to polite questions and challenges, even though that's part of their free time they don't need to give you. — Bylaw

:100:

Just to elaborate, I often think that the ideas we’re most emotionally attached to are the ones we have the least justification for. That makes us somewhat insecure so we compensate with “passion.” — Pinprick

It's a funny dynamic. In fact, people have been shown to argue passionately for positions they were convinced by researchers they chose on a questionnaire even though they chose the opposite. (Source). Any idea can (theoretically) take hold of us and use our passions to spread itself around.