Slashdot Mirror

Oh, I know what it means, I simply reject it is a concept representative of theism. I've noted that atheists much prefer debating what they decide to say we say, rather than what we actually say, though, so carry on.

I fully suspected you knew what it means... however you seem to be unaware that Omnibenevolence is not some label that atheists have attached to Christianity but one a very large portion of Christianity has assumed for itself.

"The acknowledgement of God's omnibenevolence is an essential foundation in traditional Christianity; this can be seen in Scriptures such as..."

You may believe otherwise and that is fine but you are wrong to believe that this is some hasty generalization foisted upon Christianity by atheists.

Oh, I know what it means, I simply reject it is a concept representative of theism. I've noted that atheists much prefer debating what they decide to say we say, rather than what we actually say, though, so carry on.

How can one reconcile the long suffering and blundering low and cruel works of nature with the notion of a powerful omniscient and omnibenevolent being?

Assuming god exists, the obvious answer is that god chooses not to interact or interfere with mortal undertakings (yikes, that would make liars of nearly all mainstream religions). The next possibility is that god exists, but is unaware of our existence (hey, the universe is a big place, not to mention what lies beyond). Another possibility is that god exists, and is also aware of us, but is unconcerned with mortal undertakings (i.e. god is apathetic towards mortals). The last possibility is that god exists, but chooses to commit aggression against mortals.

If you can't tell, I am agnostic, and to an agnostic, atheism is as much a religion as theism. With that said, I certainly do hope that god exists and that I spend eternity in heaven. Who the hell wouldn't?

I am replying to my own post with a correction.

I said, based on some recollection, I think from the book, Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries", that Martin Gardner was a self-professed liberal Christian. But I can't find the reference, so I figure I am wrong on that. My understanding is that he was brought up in a somewhat fundamentalist Methodist home. Perhaps he did have a liberal Christian phase, but I have no evidence for it.

But I did find this from an online interview:

My wife Charlotte and I were a mixed marriage, by the way. She was Jewish, but we were both philosophical theists. When we got married, I wanted to affiliate with a reformed synagogue, but Charlotte refused because she had no beliefs in traditionalJudaism, any more than I have in Christianity. She countered by saying that we could join a Methodist Church, since my background was Methodist. I refused. So we didn’t go to any church, but we profess a kind of philosophical theism which enables me to admire many religious writers like Chesterton.

So Gardner was a philosophical theist, had no beliefs in Christianity.

If this question is selected to be sent, could our slashdot overlords please change "liberal Christian" to "philosophical theist"?

Thanks.

Absolutely rare, not the normal. The majority of atheist are bigoted and won't learn about any theism. Just read /. for a while. The same stereotypes or childhood memories always repeat. Actual knowledge of Philosophy and theory do not exist.

I call bullshit. If you think that /. represents atheistic thought, then you are being willfully blind. Hit google for a moment, and you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of pages debunking theological concepts from virtually every religious tradition. Most of the "modern" theology I've read recently is just flabby rehashes of Aquinas, which fail for all the same reasons that his original proofs do. Hell, it's sad when the most interesting thing you've read in a while theology-wise is Plantiga's weak attempt at reviving the Ontological argument. And don't get me started on the rampant abuse of the term "quantum" by some philosophers(I use the term loosely) and theologians. I can't count the number of times some theist has popped onto a board I frequent and promised that if we just understood his "sophisticated theology" we would all be converted. This generally ends with "well, go and read this library of books" or "you just have to have faith" and the poster promptly disappearing for some site where they won't be held accountable for their claims. They never can seem to make their theology work when non-theists are observing it. Maybe it is just too "quantum"...

Not my experience. Quite the opposite really. Because of the general default of religion, most atheists I know have had to come to those conclusions by themselves. As a result they tend to be quite knowledgable.

Absolutely rare, not the normal. The majority of atheist are bigoted and won't learn about any theism. Just read /. for a while. The same stereotypes or childhood memories always repeat. Actual knowledge of Philosophy and theory do not exist. Perhaps you are an exception, or you have met a couple. I admit to meeting a few knowledgable atheists, but it's maybe 1% that know anything about 1 Religion. To be fair, most theists only know about their religion and don't know the Philosophy any better than an atheist.

And for mainstream parties, it's true to a first order approximation. Sure, there's some fiddling round the edges and leaning left or right (neither of which are remotely choerent positions in either way), but mostly they do more or less the same as each other. That's why I put in my protest vote

I can't agree with you, and defer my beliefs to the person you responded to. Many people get in to politics because there is so much shit in the system. I don't mean to imply that it's a large percentage, but to deny they exist is not fair to those trying to make things different/better.

Now if you did actually protest vote, and vote for neither of the John's and voted off party or penciled in someone.. Kudo's to you! We need everyone to do that in order to flush the shit out of the pipes. I may not have understood your point exactly.

Here, , and here.

Your citations will be appreciated as well. As for point 2, it is important to distinguish between those who go through the motions and those who truly believe someone is watching. It's also worth considering that the observations I noted may hold in cases where the threshold is something other than crime/not crime. Various rationalizations and sophistry might also be involved, particularly where the requirement of deep sincerity (and perhaps penance) to receive forgiveness and absolution through prayer has not been emphasized. Perhaps that is more important in the case of the adult mind.

On point 3, note that I do not claim that atheists cannot be ethical or moral. I am quite certain that it is possible. As for the relative likelihood of ethical behavior, it is worth considering that in a society where theism is the default, people who think more deeply about things will be over-represented amongst atheists and that such reflection likely has bearing on ethical behavior. The results might be much less pretty if atheism was the default.

As for your conclusion, Princess Alice seems to disagree :-)

Stronger than your 'strong atheism' is a term used by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins etc. This is 'anti-theism'. For them it is not enough to personally disbelieve in supernature, but it is important to also try make the case to others using rationality that supernature doesn't exist.

We have to carefully define terms. You're mixing wikipedia's definition of religion with your own definitions of atheism and agnosticism (which aren't uncommon but also aren't universal). I think snapping to the wikipedia definitions for all three terms is reasonable, and according to those definitions, on the pages for atheism and agnosticism, condensed and paraphrased:

Mere atheism is the lack of belief, not necessarily belief of lack.
Strong atheism is belief of lack.
Weak atheism is atheism that is not strong atheism; that is to say, weak atheism is lack of belief without belief of lack.
Agnosticism is taking the position that whether theism or atheism is true is basically unknowable.

Agnosticism is therefore compatible with non-fundamentalist theism and with weak atheism both, and you could stretch the definition of religion around "strong atheism" or even around agnosticism, but I don't think you can stretch it around weak atheism, and therefore you cannot stretch it around atheism either. This said I do think that's a stretch of definition even to encompass agnosticism or strong atheism.

Practically speaking, any weak atheist will almost certainly disbelieve in every specific religion they've heard of in a "strong" manner -- eg. outright disbelief in Catholicism or Scientology or Hinduism or what-have-you -- but I don't think many reasonable people call disbelief in Hinduism a religion, even if you can technically shove not-belief in specific religions into the definition of "world views that relate humanity to spirituality".

Pretty much by induction, I'd say that strong atheism isn't a religion simply because it collects up disbeliefs in all possible specific theistic religions without advancing its own religious ideas beyond said rejections. Like the semi-famous quote which I'll paraphrase, "atheism is a religion in the same way that baldness is a hairstyle".

Also, you can go on all day dismissing Occam's razor, but even mentioning it is an outright admission that accepting non-existence of a higher power is not necessarily predicated on "faith alone", unless Occam's razor is dismissed as faith.

Meanwhile I'm tempted to call agnosticism pretty much self-evident to all thinking people except for the vast evidence to the contrary. I wouldn't generally call myself agnostic since I'm basically 99.999999999% sure of the strong atheist position but by technicality I'd admit that I am agnostic along with any person who is even halfway reasonable, whether theistic or non-theistic (even freakin' Richard Dawkins has admitted that much, and he's about as strong a strong atheist as you'll find in any public figure). You yourself casually professed an agnostic position by saying "because there is no explicit proof of it, nor can there be". But if you really wanted to call agnosticism a trivial religion, well, fine, semantic arguments bore me greatly. I imagine such agnosticism (under the definition in this post) would rival Christianity and Islam for membership numbers, though.

Theism is belief in the existence of a higher power. Atheism is belief in the non-existence of a higher power. Agnosticism is the lack of belief.

Atheism may be different than other religions, but at its core, atheism requires that one accept the non-existence of a higher power on faith alone, because there is no explicit proof of it, nor can there be. Sure, you can go on all day about Occam's razor, but that is still belief. Wikipedia say that "Religion is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values."

Because all non-mono-theistic philosophies, religions and traditions are the same, right? Granted that we could even ignore the fact that ancient Aztec priests are all dead today...

Paganism is a bit of a derogatory word coined the "big three" mono-theisms to deliberately alienate competition as they conquered. Let's not just ignore the differences between worldviews simply because they aren't humanist atheism, mmm?

Wasn't the death of every other person that died on a cross a much bigger sacrifice?

No, because they weren't of equivalent value.

I could go into how they fully got what they were offered (their life previous to their death), how they got far more than they could deserve (in terms of providing it themselves, that is, no life at all), or that you're making an unbacked assertion that they didn't/won't come back to life per the worldview you're evaluating, but that doesn't really seem necessary. It's the Christian worldview that has some basis for evaluating the event as more significant than, say, the equally "horrible" event of slaughterhouses for beef; theism, unlike Naturalism, has a basis to say their permutation of DNA is of particular value relative to animals and therefore should be considered differently--yours doesn't.

Half joking aside, would you agree that the only atheist sub-group(s) that come close to understanding this would be the Buddhists because it frees a person of all the dogma & symbology?

It depends on the Buddhist branch. Buddhism, being faithful to the middle path, isn't actually atheist, but indifferent to the debate. Certain schools go about not talking about gods at all, such as Zen or Jodo Shinshu; others acknowledge gods but don't care about them, such as Theravada; and others still fully embrace them, such as the Vajrayana schools. Also, all of them have dogmas and tons of symbolism, the freeing of which comes at the end of the process, not its middle. So, not quite.

But there are self-professed Atheist schools that almost get there. The Bayesian one is the most advanced in that regards, at least as far as I can judge these things. See for instance this essay of theirs for an example: Timeless Physics. It's the closest I've ever seen a non-mystic getting to grasp the notion of the Absolute. IMHO, if there's actual potential in Atheism, it's going to be developed by them, just give it a few centuries or, best case scenario, decades.

I'm very curious how you were able to come to see/be the full potential of Atheism -- knowing both its strengths and weaknesses? It is very rare to find a person who has that deep grasp of the fundamentals.

Well, I've had this habit of going after both sides on any argument then attempting to identify the common ground upon which they're battling and build from there for as long as I remember myself studying anything. and as such my intellectual references ended up spread all over the board. Over time it adds up. :-)

By the way: Currently I'm a polytheist, following both Shinto and the Shingon Buddhist school (esoteric Vajrayana), with a background in Continental Philosophy and the Traditionalist School of Rene Guenon. I've also written more on the theism vs. atheism debate replying to questions on Quora, so maybe you're interested. Too bad I still haven't had time to collect these bits and pieces into more permanent texts. Anyway, let's keep in touch!

Ah, thanks for the term: chronocentrism

There are two philosophies that politics like to fall into:

* Why change, it worked for the past? (wisdom of elders)
* The past isn't working, we need to change (flexibility of youth)

The hard part is balancing between the two extremes!

Your example of Buddhism is most excellent. My brother's father-in-law has this definition of religion: "Living the lifestyle necessary to prove your philosophy."

As a mystic I would even say the same meta-concept can be applied to Theism and Atheism. There are many different paths to understanding God. Even the path of "no path" is valid (for a certain time frame.) Something the theists and atheists don't understand.

Great post BTW!

If you don't have a belief in god(s), you're just as atheist as I am. Atheism and agnosticism aren't two incompatible positions, they're in two different axis. (A)gnosticism refers to the knowledge, while (A)theism refers to the belief.

http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/09/25/8419/

Personally, I think the only really rational position is Ignosticism, but I'm an agnostic atheist for any definitions of god(s) I've been exposed to.

What you're describing is antitheism. It's something that builds on top of atheism (or even deism). To describe that position as atheism is about as correct and useful as saying that theism is synonymous with Catholicism, or that pets are dogs.

This whole discussion is why I strongly dislike single-word labels for such complex positions.

Not athiestic, polytheistic. I spent a year in Thailand while in the USAF and knew a LOT of Bhuddists. They burn incense to various gods, and have ornate little "spirit houses" outside their homes so the spirits will inhabit the beautiful little spirit houses and not their homes.

Since Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy, one can certainly incorporate the religion into other spiritual or religious practice. Hinduism, for example, just made the Buddha into an avatar of Vishnu (and hence a bona-fide Hindu god). Thai Buddhism is derived from this branch of the family tree. In China and Tibet it often was mixed with Taoism or various forms of spiritualism, giving rise to e.g. Zen and still other flavors. In a similar way, Quakerism is sufficiently broad that there actually exist atheistic Quakers and Buddhist Quakers. However, the words of Buddha himself, to the extent that one believes that e.g. the Pali Canons preserve them, do not teach of God or Gods, but rather the contrary:

http://buddhism.about.com/od/basicbuddhistteachings/a/buddhaatheism.htm

To put it more literally, Buddha argued that believing in Gods is not useful. It is pointless. Even if they exist it is pointless, because they too are bound the the wheel and must seek enlightenment, and then, there is no evidence that they exist. To the spiritually enlightened in Hinduism and Buddhism alike, the gods are viewed as metaphors, as crutches to aid human understanding by personifying traits both desirable and undesirable. A perhaps better summary is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism

which also explains the minor differences between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, where Theravada is more abstract and less religious. Buddhist "devotion" should not be confused with theism, and Buddha explicitly stated that he was not a God and that the entire idea of God is a distraction from the path to Enlightenment. Of course, Jesus explicitly stated in the New Testament that he wasn't God as well, but look how well that worked.

People want to believe that the Universe is personal, not impersonal. They want to believe that there is a point to it all. They want to believe in cosmic/divine justice, because there ain't no justice here on Earth in any living being's actual life. They will invent Gods or deify innocent philosophers given half a chance, if that's the only way they can have them.

This is not clearly presented even by Buddhists. They often prefer to present Buddhism as "non-theistic" but not atheistic without recognizing that "non" is the literal meaning of the "a" in atheistic. They also often present atheists as people who assert that they can prove that there is no such thing as God. Neither of these is true. Atheists don't assert that there definitely is no God. They assert that there is no good reason to think that there is. On a really good day, a really famous atheist like David Hume might go so far as to logically prove that there never can be good reason to think that there is, any more than some finite observation can prove the existence of something infinite. Buddha asserted both that there is no good reason to believe in a God, and furthermore, that worrying or arguing about it is equally pointless, establishing himself as both an atheist and a reasoner who anticipated Hume's argument 2100 years earlier.

A Christian doesn't NEED a church. Any Christian can perform a baptism or communion. Christ himself said "whenever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be there."

Depending, of course, on what kind of Christian you are. Christianity isn't a religion -- it is many. We could also go down a list of what Christ is supposed to have said -- For example: "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are

If an atheistic regime kills its people, is not because it is oppressing religion (the clergy and the followers). It is because they are psychotic fucktards. Are you stoned?

You're missing the point. Let's see if I can get it across to you without the snark.

Atheism is a lack of belief in a god or gods. There's no dogma, no "book", no canon that says "oppress" or "murder" or anything else. Atheism carries with it no political philosophy. So if a person is atheist, and they're being nasty, it's not a consequence of the atheism. As I implied in the grandparent, the place to look is at personality disorder (because generally speaking, if you want to screw with other people's lives, liberties and free choices, that's what you're looking at.) Personality disorder knows no bounds of theist or atheist.

Many forms of theism -- and in particular Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- do present instructions in various forms to do away with, convert, or otherwise harass those who don't agree with them. History is replete with examples of them specifically exercising those instructions.

So the bottom line here is that superstition contributes directly and materially to pogroms, crusades, witch burnings, repression of science, subjugation of women, jihads, censorship, blue laws, vilification of sexuality and so forth. Atheism does not.

When you examine cause and effect, atheism comes up a dry well. There's nothing in the idea "I hold no belief in a god or gods" that has a defined or recommended next step.

That's not to be confused with the reaction of an atheist when a superstitious person tries to enforce the rules of their superstition on the atheist. No one reacts well to being told what to do, and/or being threatened, by people and philosophies with which.they have little in common. But it is important to realize that atheism isn't directing that response: it is a reaction to repression brought on by over-reach of the superstitious.

An atheist is a not(theist); someone who not(believes in deities). The person may or may not be religious, but atheism itself is not a religion, since it contains no belief system.

Atheism is the belief that there is no god. Theism is the belief that there is. Jedism is the belief that there is a "force" that pervades the universe.

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief

This is mostly word games though.

Close, but not quite.

(a)theism is about belief, and (a)gnosticism is about knowledge.

A theist believes in a deity, an atheist does not.

You can be open to the idea of a deity while still being an atheist, or you could be an anti-theist. If you do not believe in a god or gods, you are an atheist.

If you know there is no god, you are an agnostic.