On Medium: The Atheist Writer’s Conundrum in Engaging Religious Commenters
Here's an article about a downside of not having an atheistic playbook or authoritative scripture that script's the atheist's life and is liable to relieve all of his or her doubts.
Do atheists and believers share anything in your opinion? Anything?
ReplyDeleteSure we do. First and foremost, our common existential predicament of having to muddle through life's absurdity.
DeleteIf your goal is to open minds, then there is no formula that would be any better than another. It would be like trying to find the best way to square the circle or turn lead into gold. Even if it were possible, the effort & time involved wouldn't be worth it. However, those very analogies suggest the true value in these confrontations. What we learn through our failures is often more valuable then what we aimed to accomplish.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I find stupidity fascinating & I've learned more from contemplating it than I have from any book. It's a subject that really deserves serious, formal study & it may well be the final frontier of human knowledge.
My goal might have been more selfish than that because I'm aware that few minds are ever changed by these online exchanges. I try my best to get my point across, but I'm not optimistic about opening minds. My immediate goal in replying to religious folks is to challenge myself, to test my abilities. This raises the problem with having an embarrassment of riches. There's such a thing as having too many good options: you never know which one to pick, or you might suspect that the choice between them is arbitrary. In that case, the exchanges seem more game-like and absurd, which is discouraging.
DeleteI think there are three types of skepticism: low, medium, and high.
ReplyDeleteWith three examples: genetic influence on human intelligence; existence of extraterrestrial life and of god/eternity.
The first example, rationally, is recommended to have a low level of skepticism because there are already patterns, which are indirect evidence, that corroborate its veracity.
It's like having a jigsaw puzzle to assemble and having many pieces, but several are missing. At least some of the pieces you have are the most relevant to getting an idea of what the figure consists of.
In the second example, it is rationally recommended to cultivate a medium level of skepticism because there is no palpable even indirect evidence that extraterrestrial life exists.
Much of the argument in favor of its existence is based on the thinking of what exists: terrestrial life, an absurdly giant universe, many planets similar to our own, which indirectly corroborate its possibility.
There is a real possibility that there is this jigsaw-puzzle, a reality to be known.
As for religious belief, there is absolutely nothing minimally palpable that corroborates its veracity.
Even the possibility of a jigsaw puzzle to assemble.
We cannot say that god or eternity perhaps exists any more than we can say about extraterrestrial life.
That is why it is rationally recommended that the level of skepticism about religious belief be very high.
Ideologists of any faith, even secularists, have a kind of hypnosis about the key words they are constantly believing and saying.
ReplyDeleteIt is also important to appeal for the literality of words, in fact, for their primordial function, to delimit physical and derived realities.
When a person says that he sees God in the beauty of the world, he is literally corrupting this primordial function of the word.
In any case, it is extremely difficult to convince these people, since religion, for them, works as a protective factor against philosophical maturity that inevitably leads to existential depression.
The most important thing is to focus on the basis of arguments [facts] to safeguard the future of atheism in the present.
And to understand that these people suffer from a particular and very common type of psychosis that is self-induced, but that unlike a common psychotic delusion it has the opposite effect, of feeling good to them.
When we argue rationally, we argue cognitively, we expose in the light of evidence, of sanity, and religion becomes a ridiculous little thing.
For us, it works, because we are born predisposed to overcome this low level of consciousness, despising the many atheists who are very superficially awake.
But for these people, religion has a psychological and therefore deeper root.I also think they don't praise God but what it is supposed to offer: protection in earthly life and eternity in heaven, in eternal life.
If God didn't offer anything, maybe it wouldn't matter to them whether they believed it or not.
I agree that mental problems are relevant here, which is why it's so disappointing that psychiatrists give religious ideologies and practices a pass. This is also why I talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect in the article.
DeleteCertainly, the discussions between religious and nonreligious people about God are seldom perfectly rational. Indeed, hardly any discussions at all are so because there's an undercurrent of irrationality in everything we say or do. But when an ideology is anachronistic, the irrationality stands in stark relief when paired with modern norms. So religious folks end up being extra defensive to avoid cognitive dissonance.