Is atheism a religion?

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Santa brings gifts to a large portion of the world in just one night, that is pretty miraculous is it not?

You are aware that I can't take your word that you are speaking to god right? Do you believe that David Koresh, Muhammed or Joseph Smith was speaking to god? Or even the pope? Well, I guess you do, what I think you are doing I am going to give you the courtesy of not calling you a liar even though I am certain you are embellishing and your experiences grow even in your own mind the further back they are is that you are thinking. What I call thinking you call talking to god. You must lack faith in yourself if you even label your own thoughts as coming from god, either lack or you have tremendous faith in yourself. I think you and most aware religious people know how stupid it all is but you *want* to believe, you want to keep the comfort you want to keep your nice social life in the church you want to belong. Reminds me of women who wants to believe that their abusive husband is a good person deep down, keep making excuses and lying even to themselves. You want your faith to be true because if it is not what do you have left? Well, you do have yourself which is the exact same thing you have always had except now you know it for what it is.

 

You have "proof" - that's only your proof. And I've seen and experienced things like that, divine touch even - after which I got on antipsychotics and the end result is that I no longer believe in anything supernatural.

Correction - the medical community is afraid and unwilling to diagnose Christians as delusional.

That's still completely absurd. You're right it's no more *probable* because probability still doesn't deal in things such as faeries from dimension X. We have no samples, and a sample size of zero means that probability doesn't even begin to deal with it. Quit misusing the word.

Flipping a coin 5000 times and it ending up all heads? It's completely possible, yes, a probabilistic freak. Now, add onto it that the coin is flipped until it ends up 5000 times on heads and other results aren't counted, and you've got something to compare this situation to.

Too long; didn't read: Neener neener, broken logic based on unprovable assumptions proves nothing, still.

 

Probably cause there isn't enough money in it for them. Half the time they don't know what they are talking about anyway. It' like your coin - flip it enough times and half the time you will get your desired results.

Joac - We had a really great dialogue about religion with Nataraja and others on the evolution thread. It was really an excellent thread (and you made some good posts on that thread). I really don't feel the need for - after a million times - rehashing, religion, gay marriage and abortion (in no particular order). Even Bush is pretty much a "dead horse" now (I can see the flies from here). I really have nothing more constructive to add to the debate at the moment.

...And I'm sure that you are "praying" that those of us on the other side are just plain wrong. Good luck.

 

Your misunderstandings of my religion are sad. They show me, yet again, that you haven't actually tried to understand anything about it. You have your pre-concieved notions and that is all you are willing to consider. Your misunderstandings of my experiences are understandable, and even expected to a certain degree. Let me challenge you with this: about 2 years ago, three women in my church had very particular dreams (on the same night) that a very particular event would happen on a particular day about a year later. Due to the nature of the even, I won't give you details on it here. It was catestrophic and completely unforseeable. Those of us that believed in prophecy took it seriously, though it was still rather unbelievable. Those among us that didn't, well, didn't. On the exact day they had said it would happen, it did. This is not an event that could be influenced by the prophecy. Furthermore, there are records of both the dreams and the event, including dates. There were emails sent. There is scientific proof that about a year before an unforseeable catastrophy struck our church, three women had dreams predicting it. Because of that, some sections of our church were prepared for it. The rest are still dealing with the consequences of not being prepared. You now have to either believe I am lying, or that, at the least, something strange was going on.

No, they can't. We don't fit the definition of delusional. There are none of the accompanying symptoms, nor any of the causal associations. This would be like someone seeing their dead grandmother, yet there being no mental distorder, no physical defect, no mechanism by which modern science could explain a halucination. You have to remember, these aren't terms that are just tossed around at people psychologists disagree with. There are strict definitions of the terms here. You're misusing 'delusional' as much as I was misusing 'probability' (which I'll try to fix).

Ok, replace 'probable' with 'likely' or 'reasonable'. When presented with a continuous and long string of highly 'coincidental' incidents, it is perfectly reasonable to believe there is more at work than chance. In fact, it is the basis of science and inductive reasoning.

Ok, aside from the childish gibe, the fact that you admit you didn't even read some of it yet are still certain I'm wrong speaks volumes. Even more volumes are spoken by the fact you're still convinced I'm trying to prove something when I never have been and have repeatedly said so. Also, the logic isn't broken, it's just based on unprovable assumptions you don't agree with.



Chandos, I would appreciate it if you would treat the psychological community with a bit more respect. Most of them know what they're doing, and know when they get over their heads. It's like medicine. There's still a lot unexplained, and a lot we don't understand, and when doctors start acting like they do know about that stuff, people usually die, but most doctors know to stay away from those aspects.

 

I have been watching a lot of videos of sections of the cable tv show "The Atheist Experience" filmed in Austin, Texas, and Ive come to the realisation that I am most likely an atheist. I already knew I was an a-'theist', theism is a very primitive concept of god, with god being the alpha male in the sky who watches incase you step out of line, presumably so he can give you the bash, ie send you to hell, just like the alpha male who was head of any tribal hierarchical system. But as for belief in any form of god, well...these days Im skeptical, even of my long held belief of panentheism, which is god is outside the universe but maintaining the universe, so the universe is a manifestation of the mind of god...or something along those lines. Note that this isnt pantheism, which is god is the universe. I think that my bottom up approach to understanding the universe, which is a scientific understanding, limits the places for which a god can be and can act inside the universe. For a very long time I imagined a tiny Shiva Nataraja dancing the Anandatandava at the very heart of 'everything', but Im not sure these days. Ive come to the understanding that I was superimposing my idealized self-image on to the universe. Shiva is who I would really like to be, it is my idealized self-image. So I was making god in my own image.

Hmm...Im probably just an agnostic panentheist.

Anyway, I saw a video about whether atheism is a religion or not, I will try to find it sometime when I have time, which I dont at the moment.

 

...And I thought I was the Jungian Christian here. Oh well, I was referring to the medical establishment - like the AMA - not psychology or psychologists in general. So, within that context, it would appear that we agree? Judging by your comments above that would be the case. Nevertheless, Jung was a well-known depth psychologist and probably knew more about personality than anyone alive. If you wish to discuss pyschology, I would be glad to do so on a different thread, before our atheist friends accuse us of getting off topic, NOG.

 

This isnt what I was looking for, but it is pretty good nonetheless.



Ok I just found what I was looking for, for some reason I thought it was from The Atheist Experience, but it was actually Edward Current.

 

Sorry, Nataraga - Nothing new there. We covered all this same stuff in Philosophy 101 (zzzzzZZZZZ). I just can't explain why all these ranting atheists remind me of religious fanatics. I know, just remove the words "atheists" and "religious" and what am I left with?

Well, in that case you can forget about becoming a Baptist, since they worry that sex (and everything else) may lead to dancing. But I hope this is not a serious crisis for you, Nataraja. It is hard to be objective regarding one's own feelings. There is no such thing as objectivity anyway; we all share a strange dream. It reminds me of the philosophy instructor who asked his student to objectively explain how the desk he was sitting at existed. The student looked down, and then asked: "What desk?"

 

Oh no, not DANCING
Chandos, are you sure you didn't mean 'dancing leads to sex'?

 

Now I have a strange desire to watch the movie "Footloose"

 

Definitely, I think theyre quite weird. Only group more weird than them is Seventh Day Baptists or Adventists.

Last year at the start of classes I kept seeing this really attractive woman in all my classes except one, and I thought to myself "Wow, she seriously has to be the most attractive woman Ive ever seen on campus in all my many many years here", and luckily I ended up in the same chemistry lab stream as her. I managed to score a seat opposite her, thinking it would improve my odds, which I thought were slim to nil since she was a scorcher and I had very very long hair which was starting to naturally dred up, and a huge beard (ie I looked like a stoner hippy). Anyway, as we got talking over a few weeks of working together there was some flirting, nothing too serious, but I was going to ask her out casually to see what happened. This all changed when I asked her if she was interested in joining the journalistic social club on campus that I co-founded, my selling point being "We mostly just meet at the Foundry* on a thursday afternoon and drink beer etc", and she said that she had never drunk beer and never planned on drinking beer. I looked at her with a "What the...?!?" kinda look on my face, and then asked her "What, are you like some sort of christian or something?", and she said she was indeed a christian, a Baptist nonetheless. It was an instant lust killer. I then asked her "If you are a christian then how come you are studying science?", and she replied that it was so she could get a good job, and that you either had to go to university to get a good job, unless you were a pastor, implying that you dont need an education to be a church pastor?!? Later on I asked her why she likes the bible so much, and I offered her the Gita, and she didnt even know what it was...I mean, seriously...has she never encountered Hare Krishna missionaries?

From that point onwards I completely ignored her unless I had no other choice. It wasnt all bad either, since she had only just turned 18 and Id have felt guilty...you know

Makes me wonder though as to how christians can balance rational thinking with irrational thinking. Most of my beliefs were at odds with science, and I have had to increasingly put my beliefs aside to the point where I basically have no beliefs left at all. My belief in the gods and goddesses is dwindling more and more as I have to push them into increasingly smaller boxes of influence in the universe.

*The Foundry is the main bar on campus, basically the equivalent of a pub.

 

Wait, wait, what? Baptists believe... excuse me? Ok, let's clear some things up. I'm a baptist. Well, actually, my church (and my beliefs) is becoming something we like to call Baptismatic (jokingly, but it works), as we're kind of Charismatic Baptists. Anyway, I've grown up in baptist churches, and I've never heard dancing dissed, preached against, or called a vile product of sex ( )! In fact, we had some church dances up in New Hampshire, and absolutely no sex was involved at all! As for alcohol, that's really just an American church thing, and it's pretty wacko at that. It originated in the same movement that lead to prohibition and it's never really died (unfortunately). Now some of these people are seriously deranged. They reject that Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding, and instead say the word there actually means grape juice, despite the fact that everywhere else in greek literature, it's translated as wine, and despite the fact that Christians are later warned against getting drunk on it (grape juice?). This is just nuts, but it's a wild fringe, not the heart of the group. Unfortunately, it's still a rather influential fringe. The anti-science movement is even worse, though actually far rarer. Nataraja, I'm guessing you ran into a one-in-a-million fringe group with that girl. My church is filled with people of all walks of life including doctors, researchers, teachers (of science among other things), and at least one psychologist. The idea that Christianity is somehow anti-science is just plain wrong.

As to the videos, well, the second one didn't really add anything to the discussion except insults. We can really do away with that stuff, I think. The first one brings up some interesting points, and I'd like to say this: The firm belief that gods do not exist requires just as much faith as an equally firm belief that gods (or any particular God) do exist. What requires less faith is open doubt. The same is true for Bigfoot and Leprechauns. If you claim to be 100% sure Bigfoot doesn't exist, in the modern age, you are working on faith just as strong as those that claim to be 100% sure it does exist. If you say you doubt it exists, you are working on the same amount of faith as someone who claims to believe, but not to be sure, that it does. If you say you really don't know and/or don't care, then you aren't working on faith.

I'm perfectly happy to say that, by faith, I am 100% sure that Leprechauns, as presented in legend, do not exist, that I'm fairly sure Bigfoot doesn't exist (not 100% here), and that I am 100% sure my God does exist. All of these are faith-based and supported by evidence of one kind or another.

As to the claim that personal evidence is a standard only clung to in religion, that is 100% false. Even science clings to personal evidence. Why do you think experiments have to be repeatable? The answer is so that multiple people can report the same personal experience. These then persuade others to believe them, and any who doubt can test it for themselves. Hard science, however, makes the claim that it is working in a standardized, regular, organized system, so that what is experienced by one person can be repeated and witnessed by many. Soft sciences (psychology, sociology, some levels of biology, meteorology, etc.) are far more likely to admit unrepeatable personal evidence, so long as the claimant is reputable, simply because their systems are far less controllable and so the exact same situation frequently can't be reproduced. What one person saw in one place may never happen again, not even the exact situation that caused it, and what seem to be two identical systems can produce two different outcomes (presumably there are differences at levels that aren't readily measurable), so even a replicatable system (within what was measured) may not produce the same results. Christianity takes this one step further. The situation is not at all controllable by humans. Trying to 'experiment' on God is like a child trying to 'experiment' on a parent. The child may do the same thing 100 times and get 100 different responses because of changes in everything else. Time of day, how recently the parent ate, are they tired, are they asleep, have they had their coffee, did they have a fight with the spouse recently, how is work going, how about the stock market, even the very fact that the event being repeated has already happened (and the parent remembers it) changes the outcome of a repetition. Expecting God to be repeatable and predictable is like expecting the adult to be the same. Doubting God because He isn't is like doubting the parent is a rational, reasonable adult when they respond differently to the same stimulation. Is it a supportable arguement? Yes. Is it a certainty? Far, far from it.

 

Ok, scientific tests need to be repeatable...but the repeated tests need to have the same results. This is not the case with christian religious experience. One persons internal personal experience is not the same as the next persons internal personal experience. This is why atheists say that personal experience of gods is not proof that gods exist.

Example...



Religious proof/evidence is not the same kind of proof/evidence that can be tested, and repeatedly tested. The reason why scientists do multiple testing of their hypothesis is to make sure everything happens the same way, everything works as it should. Religious experiences cannot be tested in this way, they are simply not quantifiable. You cannot quantify dream sequences in which your brain gives you the illusion that something is going to happen to a church, no matter how many people have vaguely similar dreams. Not only that, but religious belief has a natural explanation.

The next video is linked to at the end of this, and so on...theres quite a few.

 

What is the point of the 2nd video? It appears to be a professor talking about the history of evolution. That only matters in terms of disproving religious theories in that it messes up fundamentalist understandings of the past. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist (a number of Christian churches have no problem with the theory of evolution) and to assume a successful argument that evolution is occurring means there is no reason for religion is based more on lack of knowledge in regard to the wide variety of Christian (as well as religions in general) understandings.

The first video was more related to this discussion. I would put out a few points related to it. It is a generally excepted idea of society that unicorns don't exist. Comparing unicorns to religious experiences is to compare apples and oranges. A good number of people have talked about having a religious experience. It can be debated as to if they were just "seeing things" or not but that a there are a decent number of people who have told others about said experiences. I don't think I've come across anyone who claims to have seen an actual unicorn. In one case you have people who serve as witnesses and in the other you really don't.

The only exception to the unicorn thing I've come across is a group of people doing odd things to goats that I read about on the internet.

And yes the atheist speakers did try to pull apart the caller's comments but here is the problem. The caller tried to describe what he saw as a miracle. We don't really know if there was a well done and proper medical diagnosis of the woman he talked about and her condition. It is possible that her body was able to recover beyond others' expectations but it is also possible there was a miracle. A proper medical diagnosis (perhaps beyond what the doctor did at the time) would help provide evidence that she had a condition and may or may not explain her recovery. If it doesn't explain it, that is either grounds for further medical research so that medicine one day may learn the reason if there is one non-religion related or it may serve as grounds for belief in religious understandings if medical knowledge is not able to explain her recovery. Thus a lack of medical understanding (as we tend to think of it) of the situation may or may not be present. When someone just drops dead, as the atheist speaker referred to, there often is a medically understood reason why-such a heart problem (which are thankfully rare but have sometimes killed otherwise healthy people while they were quite young). So the atheist dismissed the caller without getting an understanding of what modern medical knowledge can easily explain relating to the 2 different situations.

 

That's actually a very good point. Saying that the atheist position embarces only science, and that the religious experience rejects science is oversimplifying things. It is possible to believe in eolution and call oneself a Christian, provided you do not think that the Bible has to be interpreted literally.

It cuts the other way too. It's also oversimplifying to say that science can never "prove" anything. While techinically true, many scientific theories are so well understood that the chance of them being proved incorrect is extremely remote. A theory isn't just a scientist's best guess at something - in order to be considered a theory it has gone through intense study and testing. We're not likely going to have a major rewrite on the Theory of Gravity, Genetic Theory, Theory of Relativity, or Evolutionary Theory.

But the bigger point is there is nothing inherently un-religious about any of those theories (again unless you insist that the Bible must be interpreted literally). On its most basic level, evolution can be defined as the study of how plants and animals change in morphology over time. We have fossils of plants and animals that show there were once organisms on this planet that existed prior to humans, and that are no longer seen today. This is observable fact, and there's nothing that goes against religion when one tries to explain it.

 

That's actually fairly well-known about Baptists and dancing. My wife's family is almost entirely Southern Baptist and "no dancing" is the rule.

http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/denominations/baptists.htm

 

I thought baptists were those predominately black folks who sang gospel and had some groove in their sermons?

 

Not only is there more than one type of Christian, but there is more than one type of Baptist denomination. I know for a fact there is more than one type of Baptist church and beyond that it is possible that some Baptists within the same denomination have different cultural understandings. Either are possibilities.

 

That's the stereotypical southern baptist - and yes there are quite a few churches that are like that. In fact, you go to the Bible belt in the deep south, that type of baptist is quite common. However, I have a sister-in-law who is baptist, and she and my brother were married in a baptist church. Thier congregation was mostly white, and it was about as dull and stoic a ceremony as I have ever seen.

 

I believe you're thinking of Parliament Funkadelic.