Speaking for myself, I start and then stop at 'what we say about g/G', that is, 'what religious scriptures attribute to (the) deity', and assess them as claims which are either true, false or incoherent. I don't bother with addressing g/G itself. As far as I can discern it, theism – its sine qua non claims about g/G – consists of both false and incoherent claims; and an idea (e.g. theism) of a deity ascribed false or incoherent properties is a nonsensical idea, no? So theism is not true, to my mind, whether or not '(the) deity is real'. — 180 Proof
It's not a belief. Anything I can't make sense of is nonsense to me. — Dawnstorm
Once I try to understand a concept I sometimes make progress. With God it's a random number of steps in a random direction (I can't even tell where forward is). Since I need a worldview I made mine with placing God into the category of things that other people say but make no sense. I fear I'm old enough now that there's a crust of dust around it. I can't scale back my own worldview far enough to make sense of God and still have enough concepts left to think with. But maybe not. There's always the chance that someone says something, or something happens, that makes me suddenly experience a... shift? Maybe a change in the hardware'll do it? A stroke, maybe?
Cool. I understand. — Moliere
I figure you have to understand truth at some level to survive -- I am a realist of some kind, though I get confused in the discussions there -- but the specific meanings and claims of various religions, while wildly different in that particular sense, seem to have some kind of general coherence that got our species this far (just assuming the scientific picture true) — Moliere
So, if you stand in the middle of the road, you're likely to get run over by cars. Now, let's say you have some cognitive impairment that doesn't let you conciously perceive cars, and you don't like admitting something's wrong with you. So you develop a worldview without cars. There's a divine taboo to stand in the middle of the road, and you still instinctively detect movement on the road (you're brain just doesn't make them into cars). So you're convinced that cars don't exist, but you still won't stand in the middle of the road, because some sort of divine taboo, and you don't cross a street when cars are about, but you edit out the actual vehicles, and in its place you have some sort of intuition which you interpret as divine guidance. (And this is where this analogy becomes to silly to continue, because how you avoid getting rides is sort of harder to explain; but luckily the point is about not dying in the road here, so it doesn't need to be plausible or coherent, just sort of illustrative - which I hope it is):
Anyway: as long as you don't get run over, it doesn't matter whether it's because of "the truth". "Truth", unlike reality, needs some system of... axioms and transformation rules? Not sure. Something. Truth conditions. And for such a "truth" to be useful, it needs to compatible with reality. How much compatibility you need? Well, reality's the judge of that. So not just anything goes (and that's why the no-car example above is ultimately silly, but to me it feels more like extreme hyperbole than a category mistake).
Of course, "truth" is always social, too, which complicates matters. — Dawnstorm
I just think some things are so high up the abstraction ladder that the meaning of this is most closely related to the one making the abstraction. And an abstraction can be so habitual, that it's just felt backgound and not accessible to introspection without difficulty. A lot of it can just be random variation that cancels out statistically: some theists survive, some atheists survive - none of it matters from a survival point of view. Is that true? Who knows?
I'm skeptical about anything that sounds like evolutionary psychology. It feels a little too much of a mix between hermeneutics and empirical pea counting to be useful. But then I have sociology degree and that discipline isn't all that different in some of its incarnations. — Dawnstorm
While I'm rambling about playfully, I might as well share my hermeneutical indeterminacy principle: of a proposition you can either know whether it's true, or what it means, but never both at the same time. There you go. That's the sort of atheist I am.
Individual a/theists and their beliefs aren't as important as the success of general social structures — Moliere
More generally, the liberal capitalist state is an atheist organization, at least intentionally speaking. — Moliere
As a muddler-through, they don't really represent me. — Dawnstorm
No, not at all. The have two goals: (A) in America, to advocate the deliberate transition of the US into a much more secular state and civil society more like Western Europe (esp. Scandanavia), and other developed nations in East Asia, Australia & New Zealand and (B) to keep ringing the alarm bells about the clear and present danger of theofascistic JCI & Hindu fundamentalisms so that complacency and lack vigilance doesn't return to either developed or developing countries. The faults of "New Atheism" are conspicuous enough that you don't have to caricature it, Moliere.I think it's fair to say that a goal of New Atheism was to make the, in your terms, the secular state into a strictly atheist state — Moliere
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.