Extinction Rebellion.

Only the devil wants to make work; luddites want to make a living. they have the reputation of being against progress, but they were against starving in the street because the price of the cloth they produced had collapsed.

Dogma warning: Donald is not Jesus.

Could there not be reasons we are unaware of, or dimly ware of? We are attracted to people for reasons that are, possibly, hard wired in us. We go for certain types of people or genders and we are attracted to certain types of appearances, — Tom Storm

I like reason, and I use it. It keeps our thinking straight. What you say about unconscious desires, hard wired or not, may very well be true. but to call that a function of reason is to equivocate rather badly. Having a fetish for large breasts may be hard-wired by natural selection to favour generous feeders, or it may be an internet induced perversion of ordinary male desire, or just a random fixation, but what it most certainly is not is the result of conscious reasoning from premises to conclusion – nothing like.
And this is the kind of reasoning that the religious are being accused of not following. I think they are still mostly just about capable of eating when hungry, despite the impediment of faith, as can other non-reasoning beings like frogs and horses.

Why did you choose to ignore this part of my rationale for the emotion of human love? — universeness

Because saying something is natural is simply saying it is; life evolves so as to survive but for what reason does it survive? No reason, it just does. Reasoning is something people can do but often don't. it is a way of thinking dispassionately Ie without passion. One brackets off how one feels, what one wants and so on and leaves them out of account in order to be dispassionate and thus rational.

People in human communities who do not do so, are considered less sociable and less able to be a useful partner, such people are often ostracised and that can mean there is less chance of them surviving or reproducing.
This happens all over the animal kingdom as well. — universeness

And for what reason does one want to survive and reproduce etc? For no reason except one happens to be made that way by the blind watchmaker, who as you know does not care about anything.

But this is boring now, I'll leave it there and stand with idiot Zizek in opposition to your reasonable love which is what we used to call 'cupboard love' - the love of personal advantage.

That is not an argument. I am not interested in who is eviler than whom, because it is not relevant, nor is who by and large has had the political power historically.

Do you really feel like that? — universeness

It's a foolish question to my mind because rationality is about reasoning verbally mathematically and conceptually in a logical way. Feelings are an attitude one has to things. So to feel hungry is to want some food. there is no argument that convinces someone to be hungry, any more than there is an argument that convinces it to rain. Loving is commonplace and normal for humans; it's a feeling that comes over one as a response to another. But your rationalising of your response to these feelings makes no sense to me. They are your thoughts about your feelings not any reason for having them.

love is a very powerful/dangerous/wonderful human emotion. That's my rationale of love. — universeness

That's not a rationale, that is a conflicted feeling about your feelings.

So yes, love is an emotion, and does not arise out of arguments and measurement of ratios. There is no reason to care but we do, there is no reason to love, but we do. That it promotes the survival of the species is perhaps why such attitudes have evolved in us; but that could only be the cause, not a reason. What you are calling rational and irrational feelings are distinguishing feelings you are happy to try and fulfil, from those you prefer to suppress.

If you truly believe 'caring is not rational,' then how would you ever be capable of experiencing love? — universeness

Having the feelings I have is no effort at all for me, I love my wife and my children unconditionally or a Zizek says, 'for no reason' - unreasonably. And when one of them screams at me and rushes off slamming the door, it hurts, and I still love them. And there is no reason why.

What about peanut butter? Or electric cars? Or Hemingway? May one judge them according to one's inclination? Where there is no authority, or set criteria, how can there be dogma? — Vera Mont

Of course, Dogs like dog food, but it's not a dogma, because if you don't like dog food, no dog will argue with you. But the position here is that religion is evil, not that someone personally would rather be without it, but help yourself if it floats your boat. If there were no authority being asserted, there would be no atheist dogma being exhibited and the thread would have been quite short. But the authority of science and of rationality is very much being claimed and asserted against any form of religious talk, even and especially talk that embraces metaphorical meaning.

If there is evidence for anything, it is evident to someone who is conscious. Therefore, all and any evidence is evidence of consciousness.

This will not satisfy, because you do not want evidence of your consciousness, but of mine. But then you are trying to make my subjectivity objective, and visible to you, which would be to deprive me of my consciousness and make it yours. Don't be so greedy. :razz:

Whaaaaat? Do you really feel like that? Is that unenlightened or just sooooooo sad?
If you truly believe 'caring is not rational,' than how would you ever be capable of experiencing love? — universeness

What do you feel? Do you feel rational? It appears you are incredulous that I even mean what I say. But perhaps you can tell me the rationale of love? I would be most interested...

I mean in your OP you explicitly state that atheist dogma created fundamentalism; are you now backing away from that? — Janus

No, I'm not backing away, but that is a matter of fact, not a matter of argument, which I support with a wiki link. Clearly there are other sources (psychological) of dogmatism, fundamentalism and literalism which are to do with identification. But that happened and was noticed at the time as wiki says. And you can see the same process at work in reverse too. I make a criticism of some atheist argumentation, people take it personally and their position hardens, even to the point of my explicitly being blamed for setting them up, for some trollish reason. This is what happens when someone's identity is felt to be attacked, because people are not nearly as rational as they would like to think they are - that is an identification, that also leads to dogmatic thinking.

My moral position is that this is a 'good thing', because rationality becomes robotic and dehumanising, because human nature, and the nature of all living things is to care about things, and caring is not rational.

Yes, you are on the side of the angels! Hurray for you! So rational and freethinking.Thank goodness you have put us all straight at last! Hang on while I nail you to this cross.

I think what unenlightened (he can correct me if I am getting this wrong) was aiming at in creating this thread was anti-theism, and that is dogma, just as much as theism is, taking both as political stances; as claims as to what others should believe. This kind of theistic or ant-theistic dogmatism from either side is socially divisive, and is part of the problem, not part of a solution. To put it plainly, an anti-theocracy is as bad as a theocracy. — Janus

No. Not my argument at all. I have said more than once, that I am not even interested in who the good guys are. On the contrary, that is the vacuous argument I am complaining about. But It's unsurprising that you get drawn into it even as a non dogmatic atheist.

My argument is very simple, and resolves to the question of by what authority is theism judged? If one sticks to the facts, and to the fact/value distinction, the judgement cannot be rationally made. That it is made, and has been made throughout this thread, is the dogma of atheism. It was all laid out in the op and not a word has been said against it that I have seen. I have no criticism of the judgement, it is the claim to fact and rationality that I dispute.

Let's get personal:

My dogma is the stuff you have to already assent to to even make sense what I'm saying. The disbeliefs you have to suspend.

What's yours?

Some people's dogma seems to be that only the other chap has dogma.

And when confidence is lost, the economy goes to hell.

I studied economics back in the 1990's and what I found was a largely faith based dogma. — Tom Storm

[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. — Adam Smith

Of all the criticisms one might make of this, and they are serious and fundamental, I think the weakest and most pointless would be to argue that invisible hands do not exist. But the comparison is apt and you are right. Economics is entirely faith based - but they call it "confidence".

unlike you, I would add religion as one of humanity's many problematic ideas. — Tom Storm

I think religion is highly problematic. This is very binary, and rather the problem with this thread - and that is my fault for framing things that way. But pointing out a binary conflict that leads to sterile arguments, I did not honestly expect a dozen pages rehearsing the the sterile arguments.

I have made no defence of religion. I am appealing for an attempt at understanding the meaning of religious texts to people, which I believe is rather more than mere the commercial advertising bullshit of the marketplace. Just as I would recommend understanding the Communist Manifesto, or The Rights of Man.

Do economists really believe in the invisible hand? This is a fatuous ignorant insulting question, surely.

Science does not do politics very well. Margret Thatcher was a chemist. she had opinions about what was wrong with society - which was that people thought it existed.

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. — Thatcher, 1987

Rationalist politics is necessarily dehumanising, because the defining feature of life is emotion. to be alive is to care about something. Having a home, for example. Accordingly, a worldview that rejects everything that is not rational or factual, is inimical to life.

I do wonder what Maggie thought a government was for, if not for solving people's problems - her personal hobby, I suspect.

Here is a relevant modern lesson gleaned by an atheist from Saint Paul.

... there exists a despicable complicity between the globalized logic
of capital and French identitarian fanaticism.

What is being constructed before our very eyes is the communita-
rization of the public sphere, the renunciation of the laws transcendent
neutrality. The State is supposed to assure itself primarily and perma¬
nently of the genealogically, religiously, and racially verifiable identity of
those for whom it is responsible. It is required to define two, perhaps
even three, distinct regions of the law, according to whether the latter are
truly French, integrated or integratable foreigners, or finally foreigners
who are declared to be unintegrated, or even unintegratable. The law
thereby falls under the control of a “national” model devoid of any real
principle, unless it be that of the persecutions it initiates. Abandoning all
universal principle, identitarian verification—which is never anything
but police monitoring—comes to take precedence over the definition or
application of the law. This means that, just as under Petain, when min¬
isters saw nothing wrong in surreptitiously defining the Jew as prototype
of the non-French, all legislation would be accompanied by the required
identitarian protocols, and subsets of the population would come to be
defined each time by their special status . This arrangement is taking its
course, as successive governments each bring to it their own special
touch. We are dealing with a rampant “Petainization” of the State.

How clearly Pauls statement rings out under these conditions! A
genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient
world: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free,
there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3.28)! And how appropriate, for
we who will unproblematically replace God by this or that truth, and
Good by the service this truth requires, the maxim “Glory, honor, and
peace for every one that does good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
For God shows no partiality” (Rom. 2.10).

https://archive.org/stream/BADIOUSaintPaulTheFoundationOfUniversalism/BADIOU%20-%20%20Saint%20Paul%20The%20Foundation%20of%20Universalism_djvu.txt

Link repeated from @Paine back on page 3, who seems to be about the only person to have noticed that the thread is primarily about atheists' understanding of religion, or the lack thereof.

Absolutely nothing!

But try telling them that!

At this point, I think I'll take a break before starting a new thread.

But the conclusion of this thread for me at least, is that personal identity is always a narrative, always questionable, and always made out of whatever social constructs are available. And social constructs are fictions we have to believe. You know like money, property, government, marriage, and who the good guys are.

To live in time is to live a narrative that is always negotiated, never entirely free or original. This is of course the story that I am telling, and I am illustrating it with a cultural artefact of undeniable power that is also a story of personal identity – an identity that changed the world.

Most of us live in an uncompleted story, the hero or heroine has yet to triumph, yet to meet their nemesis. But as a hint or a tease, I suggest the universal complete story of the story of human identity is to be found in outline, beginning in genesis and concluding in the crucifixion and resurrection. Next time...

The story, which is what each person is, is radically subjective - "my priority". As such it is not in the purview of science, or of rationality, those are priorities one might have, but their priority cannot be 'objective'. All of this is my story, which i have borrowed and relay to anyone who has ears, "let them hear." Nothing to see here, you've heard it all before.

The book is holy, but the what the priest says, goes. — Vera Mont

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” (Matthew 23:27) — Jesus

I'm not in the business of defending any church, priest, or book. But look, the story says what you say! Only it says it more forcefully. That is interesting, is it not? Either you are influenced by the story, or the story has something to say about humanity that is universal. Or perhaps you can think of another explanation story about the story.

My priority remains ensuring that I don't surrender my skepticism and critical thinking to unsupported conjectures and the esoteric imaginings of others alive today or in the past. — universeness

Yes, I rather gathered that was your story that you live by and defend. I certainly don't want to force another on you, but I'd be grateful if you could see your way to letting us talk about some other stuff.

Are the traditional Judaic scriptures any more reliable than the bible, as a guide to how a human should live their life? — universeness

On the whole, I prefer Lao Tzu and Zen Buddhism, personally. But when one is brought up within a Christian and post Christian culture, one has to wrestle with the local mud one was born in first, before one can get to the calm waters of comparative religion. But you're not actually asking seriously, are you? I think you are just carrying right on with your rhetorical defence of your own fiction that you have identified with.

When a thread suggesting that arguments about the existence or nonexistence of gods entirely misses the point of religion which rather is about how to live, nevertheless becomes dominated with a back and forth argument about the existence or non-existence of gods, I feel like the proselytisers on both sides are being rude and domineering in insisting that they continue to make that very argument over and over. It's not as if we never hear these arguments is it?

IT'S OFF TOPIC, CHAPS! GO AWAY!

The Lord of the Flies taught me that people can also descend into violent barbarity and cruel superstition when their civilising restraints are removed by circumstance.

Winnie the Pooh taught me that people can be all different and all have different weaknesses and strengths, and yet be good friends to each other and live lovingly together even if they all make mistakes.

That's a fairly small snapshot — Vera Mont

It is. As if we have overcome already, which of course we have not. Other religions are also available.

But I am waving vaguely at a story, not a fact about the world. It is (I claim) a story, rather than a fact, an act by a pioneer, that makes forgiveness a possible move in life. Other stories are available...

I have in mind another thread that might attempt to tell a story of human nature - of individual identity as an incomplete story, and the completion of the story as the purpose of a human life. Maybe.

I don't know you, except that you are alive and have access to the internet, and have decent literacy skills.

But that is already a couple of things that not everyone has. (This is called 'counting your blessings'.) I guess, that you also have enough to eat, shelter, and do not live in a war zone. Hopefully, you are not suffering constant physical pain.

If that is the case, then your dissatisfaction is not a physical matter, but dispositional. Now one does not have to be rich, or famous, or hugely successful to be happy, and those things when obtained, do not always result in happiness.

I think happiness comes largely from making a connection with others.

But all I see in your post is a comparison with others, and one focused on those who have something you do not. This leads to ambition, envy, resentment, and a sense of failure and inadequacy. If you turn your attention to those who lack something you have, and see if you cannot help them a little, you will be more likely to make a connection, feel significant to another, and have some satisfying success on a small scale. You will start to feel privileged and fortunate in relation to those who have almost nothing.

No. I think I just used it in my last post.

Observation: there is a Story of a man who taught love and was killed and lived again. That story has permeated the culture of what its inhabitants like to call 'the civilised world', and transformed millions of lives.

Conclusion: it may not be true, but it certainly has huge significance. Use the razor to outline the significance, not to to chop away the fact of it.

If that's all Apo is saying then I agree, probably. — bert1

He's saying a whole lot more than that. But the cell as a self-defining self, as membrane and contents seems to be the beginning of that caring that gives meaning to anything. Cells have attitude! From that plus many more layers comes the predictive model that includes a self-model that becomes human consciousness

I'm sooooooooooo not interested in the scoreline.

But there is a story, sometimes called "The Greatest Story Ever Told", of a unique moment - but every moment is unique - yes but this was different - an injection into history of a new factor, a new start that made every moment thereafter also potentially a new start. Like the way no one can run a mile in under 4 minutes, everyone knew that, until Roger Bannister did, and thereafter, it became possible. Like the way society was caught in an eye for an eye mutual blindness, until someone invented forgiveness.

And the question that interests me is not whether the story is true; the story reverberates through history for 2,000 years, and that a made up story can have such power is more miraculous than the miracles it recounts. that it can change a life at this great a remove is utterly fantastic, and an everyday occurrence.

History is broken and remade by - fiction? That much is undeniable. And that is worth consideration by any philosopher.

Could you explain Apo's point to me? — bert1

It is almost certainly impossible to explain @apokrisis's point to his satisfaction, but I might manage to provoke him into saying something more, just to put me right.

The fundamental unit of consciousness is the 'fuck given', or as Gregory Bateson put it, "a difference that makes a difference". The negative space of this is a difference that doesn't make a difference. Thus for example one might say "I don't mind whether the cheese in my sandwich is cheddar, or cheshire." It makes no difference to me. So the beginning of mind is not the particle that doesn't mind what happens to it, but the living cell, that for yeast, say, tells the difference between sugar that it ingests and alcohol or CO2 that it excretes. The difference makes a difference to the cell response, which is an active one rather than the inanimate passive reaction that happens differentially between molecules.

But lovers of freedom might be at least interested in the idea of a personal, individual, liberation from history, through the lovely economic concept of 'redemption': the Idea that though history grinds on, you yourself, or Mr Grayling himself even, can be relieved of the burden of history, and be renewed, because self is history.

Of course the Church of Rome is Greek, and if the Nazis are Christian, then the Nazis are Greek.

Do I have to point out that this is the doctrine of original sin? Turns out the atheists are Christian too, because there is no escape from history, and there is Grayling, expounding Christian doctrine in his attack on it.

The distinction between believers and unbelievers may be far less important than Grayling and the New Atheists like to think. At any rate it cuts right across the rather interesting difference between the grim absolutists, such as Grayling and the religious fundamentalists, who think that knowledge must involve perfect communion with literal truth, and the sceptical ironists – both believers and unbelievers – who observe with a shrug that we are all liable to get things wrong, and the human intellect has a lot to be modest about. — Grauniad

I wouldn't say I'm a sceptical ironist, but I sure as hell ain't no champion of the enlightenment.

We have forgotten the root meaning of disease. In the good old days folk went to the doctor with a "complaint", for which they sought a "remedy".
I'd suggest that it is something of a fundamental freedom that anyone who has a complaint about their condition, or is un-easy or dis-eased in their relation to themselves, has the right to seek a remedy.

Which does not entail that anyone else is obliged to provide them with satisfaction on that score, even if they have the means.

However, in matters neurological, it can be the case that a cure, while solving the immediate problem, leaves the patient with a sense of incompleteness. It is as if without what one feels as an impediment or a difficulty, one feels somehow incomplete. I seem to recollect Andrew Oliver Sachs recounting such a case in relation to ticks.

So the right to seek a remedy, and the equal right to reject one, and beware of getting what you want.

↪universeness If you guys are interested in Hitler's religious beliefs, you can read them here: — Hanover

And then start a thread about them somewhere where I don't have to read about it. Recruit for your enemy's team somewhere else, please.

But what I want to talk about is the phenomenon of literalism in particularly Christianity and Islam, but also Hinduism and even Buddhism, that seems to have begun in the 18th Century
— unenlightened

Ah. As opposed to the literalism which resulted when the early Church through Councils and otherwise tossed out what's been called the Apocrypha, or which resulted through the Protestant Reformation, or the division of the Church into western and eastern Christianity, for example. — Ciceronianus

The first printed bible was in latin mid15th century; Tyndale's English translation was 1522-35. It is my contention that though the great and the good might agree amongst themselves a definitive canon and ritual and so on, and enforce that upon the great unwashed, a religion founded on inerrancy and literalism cannot become a popular religion until the masses can read the text in a language they can understand. Up until at least the 16th century, the Good Book was a closed book to almost all, interpreted and translated on the fly by the local priest at his whim.

While there appears to be some uncertainty about when and which Bibles were first brought to America, authors generally agree that the first complete Bible printed in America was in 1663 at the Cambridge, Massachusetts printing house of Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson. — google

Before one can start hitting people over the head with the Bible, one needs a Bible.

I need to look at that more carefully, I'm not sure yet what you or Badiou is saying.

Why invoke and analyze
this fable? Let us be perfectly clear: so far as we are concerned, what we
are dealing with here is precisely a fable. And singularly so in the case of
Paul, who for crucial reasons reduces Christianity to a single statement:
Jesus is resurrected. Yet this is precisely a fabulous element [point fabu-
leux ], since all the rest, birth, teachings, death, might after all be upheld. — Badiou

I never liked Paul, I was always happier with the parables as teachings. But Paul is the fundament of the fundamentalist, and as Badiou is an atheist, I'll have to engage with this. Tomorrow...

In the interminable litany of nastiness perpetrated by humans, most examples will be of religious people and religious groups simply because most people are assumed to have been religious for most of history. Atheists have done their worst, but haven't had long enough as an avowed group to remotely match the religionists.

It is entirely possible that religion makes folks horribler, and atheists are a nicer bunch of people just because of their atheism. But what I want to talk about is the phenomenon of literalism in particularly Christianity and Islam, but also Hinduism and even Buddhism, that seems to have begun in the 18th Century and and reaches something of an extreme in Modern US with stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_Inerrancy

This to my mind is mad, ridiculous, politically motivated and dangerous, and a perversion of the Christian tradition. (Add extra negative epithets to taste.) I think it is clear that it is reactionary, and specifically reacting against science, particularly evolution. But also the deep time of geology, that predated evolutionary theory This is not Darwin's fault. :grimace: It is also probably a reaction trying to defend against loss of authority and power, the connection with conservative politics is clear enough. Literalism attracts the ire of atheists, judging by this thread, and it also attracts the ire of liberal, psychological, esoteric or moral interpreters of religious traditions and texts.
—————————–
With regard to truth, consider The Handmaid's Tale, by Margret Atwood. A fictional account of somewhere a bit like N. America in which the religious right has taken over, so appropriate to this thread.
It paints a sufficiently dark portrait of the religious right wing in terms particularly of sexual politics an misogyny, that it has been banned in parts of the US.

One can speak truths in fiction that would get one into serious trouble if not fictionalised. See also Rushdie's Satanic verses for the serious trouble one can still get into even with fiction. See also, Orwell's 1984, a prophetic warning against totalitarian Marxism.

These are all 'not true'. But they tell important truths in story form. But the op already made this point using Aesop. I clearly should have made a much longer and more confusing op with lots of quotes and links, to slow folk down a bit.

None of this is the fault of atheists. — Darkneos

Of course not, why suggest it? It is a very common reaction, in my experience, when someone attacks one's way of life, to become defensive and reactive. You can see it happening in this thread, and a glance at history will yield many examples. It's not a matter of blaming atheists, but of a misdirected argument that leads to an unnecessary conflict. It is perfectly possible to be a Christian atheist.

'Forget Jesus, be Christlike!' Is this the kind of thing you mean? — Tom Storm

Yes indeed. If you love historical research, you might look into the origins of the Jesus story, why not? But the meaning of the story is that love is taking pains; painstaking research, or painstaking self-sacrifice. The results of research do not change the meaning.

Does this come form a broader philosophical system or school? — Tom Storm

Not really. I might wave vaguely at Maurice Nicoll, and J Krishnamurti, along with the usual philosophical suspects – there's nothing very original in what I'm saying.