Posted on 03/26/2015 8:07:40 AM PDT by rickmichaels
In his Saturday column Conrad Black inveighed against “militant atheists”. He called them “shabby” and “shallow”. He attacked their “gratuitous disparagements of Christianity”. I’m not sure who set Black off this time. To be sure there is a species of self satisfied nose-tweakers on the atheist lecture and debating circuit but frankly militant atheism is just so passé. The fastest growing religious identity in the world is the new atheist. We really just don’t care.
Black and others have insisted non belief is a faith in and of itself. I can’t speak for all non believers but I have neither a holy book nor hymnal. I observe no special holidays and attend no services. My atheism is simply an absence of religion in my life. Outside of leaving me a few hours to myself on Sunday mornings this absence is not some kind of void that must be filled with something else.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
We’re a subjective species, we’ve been gifted with the ability to rationalize, which brings with it the ability to say “well that’s not really murder
I can’t disagree more.
Ability to rationalize, YES.
But subjective?
No way.
Lots of reasons. Most of which we only started to understand in the hay days of Madison avenue. There are certain looks, certain ways to color and arrange things, certain images, that trigger certain human instincts. Properly deploying those idea can make people respect you, obey you, and buy crap they don’t need.
I wouldn’t say they were better, smarter or more evolved. They just paid attention to stuff that most people didn’t then, and still don’t. They noticed the fact that most empires use the eagle as a chief symbol. They noticed the prevalence of red. The block fonts. The first guys probably stumbled on this stuff by accident, maybe a bit of watching how crowds react. The rest just read their Roman history. The funny part is even if you know about this stuff it doesn’t make you immune, just means you know how you’re being manipulated.
That rationalization is what lets us make things subjective. Once upon a time, not that long ago, it wasn’t murder if the person was a heretic. A century ago people regularly died in the Indianapolis 500 and the world just accepted it, racing had a risk, it was part of the spectacle, sad but not a big deal, certainly not immoral to be a race fan. Now there’s massive hand wringing over people getting permanent brain damage in sports that could lower the quality of their life 20 years from now, people are actually contemplating if watching these sports is immoral.
Yeah, subjective.
The funny part is even if you know about this stuff it doesn’t make you immune, just means you know how you’re being manipulated.
How do you know?
What do you know?
I understand propaganda and the media’s ability to influence thought.
I grew up with parents that instilled in me the idea that you can only believe in half of what you see and even less of what you read.
And while this is not the case among our younger generations, it still holds true.
It’s worth reading the article, because the argument is a house of cards. Here was one of the quotes:
“I’m never sure why the faithful feel such compunction to challenge atheists. Yes, there are deliberate troublemakers who file law suits against civic crèches but mostly, the new atheism is a live and let live affair.”
For a former Sunday school teacher, I guess the thing about being ‘fishers of men’ or ‘spreaders of good news’ didn’t register. Too many Sundays coloring in pictures of Jesus helping a sick baby, I guess.
His defense is tired - ascribing evil on Earth to ‘God’s hand being in all things.’ Gay shaming was on the list of things that turned him off too, which is telling.
And then, at bottom, is the use of the word ‘atheist’ over ‘agnostic’. Atheism is the pinnacle of arrogance - a declaration that there is no God. Of course, he doesn’t reconcile his definition - ‘the absence of religion in his life’ - with the actual definition of atheism.
Of course, the article wouldn’t have been as provocative if he were to use the word ‘agnostic’.
We need a word defined as follows - ‘a person in a state of anger with God, or any Supreme Being, such that the thought of anyone, anywhere believing in it or living by the precepts laid down by the followers of that being is beyond a persons ability to countenance or tolerate. One who cannot reconcile the concept of a Supreme Being with ones own worldview or life experience in a way that they have become activated against any others who can conceptualize or live by the precepts of the people who follow a Supreme Being.’
Anti-Theist might be a good word. Atheists don’t exist according to the definition of the word as it is today. Agnostics - no problem. Even the believers are agnostics, else they’d move mountains.
Atheists, indeed, are a faith unto themselves - believing no God exists. They are no better than people who are ‘dumb enough’ to be Christians, or Satanists, for that matter. Atheism is an article of faith, which makes it absurd, especially in the face of all the mathematical and scientific evidence to the contrary. You can’t finish a prob/stats course and still be an atheist.
Debating an atheist is one of my favorite pastimes. Most can’t see how pushing that crap is infinitely more annoying, and infinitely less litigious, to people than a couple of friendly, very good-natured Mormons showing up on your doorstep on a Saturday afternoon.
In fact, they are the only people in the world that are actually worthy of pity. Most are so deeply hurt and broken that all they’ve got in their life is an all-consuming rage that they’ve capped and marshaled for the sake of upholding the social contract.
I know because as an American I get just as much crap I don’t need as everybody else. I know what one can know by reading a couple of books about advertising and messaging and propaganda. But even having read those books, even having critiqued my companies advertising, I still find myself coming home with crap I don’t need with no internal explanation why I bought it. Noticing it more lately because the wife and I have decided to reform our spending habits, so I’m really spotting my auto-purchase impulses and putting a lot of effort into really forcing myself to make every purchase an active decision.
Skepticism is good. But I always thought that one was more of a joke than a rule. Really if you can’t believe most of what you read why are you spending so much time reading stupid crap?
I would recommend that you get stoned out of your mind.
For days on end.
Go on a metaphysical journey.
Start with nothing.
Your journey will likely led you to Buddhism.
Cool.
Until your questions remain unanswered.
And through the process on elimination,
You will find Christ.
I’m too old for that, too many bills.
Anyway I already found Christ, then stopped going to church anyway. I’m just not a worshiping kind of guy.
Anyway I already found Christ, then stopped going to church anyway. I’m just not a worshiping kind of guy.
I admit that the whole “Praise and Worship” thing can seem cultish.
I have my own problems with that. But to continue to suggest that morals are “subjective” is simply a way the rationalize personal behaviors or beliefs.
It’s not even the cultishness. I’m just not capable of it. I’ve never really hero worshiped either. I just don’t seem to have the pedestal necessary to put people or entities on.
One person figuring out a way that act isn’t immoral is rationalization.
A whole society agreeing is subjective morality.
Sure you can make the case that underlying all that is some core objective moral concept. But we as people will never deal with that, it’s always going to be filtered through our subjective filters of society, family, personal desires and laws. Which also means we can never truly define those objective moral concepts. Even when you get a nice bulleted list like the 10 Commandments we’re gonna find a way to weasel it, is it “thou shalt not kill” or thou shalt not murder”? Well sometimes you have kill so it’s murder, but what’s murder? Well...
People are subjective being. Subsequently everything we deal with is subjective. Did you see the articles running around social media earlier in the month on whether or not people could see blue in ancient Greek times? Which brings up the interesting implication if when we see blue is it really blue? The very color of the ocean turns out to be subjective and changes depending on our ability to see it.
Agreed. However, as was previously argued, Europe is still heavily influenced by Christian thought & traditions.
...only relatively recently that some societies have evolved...
I disagree. "Western" societies on both sides of the pond are becoming increasingly fragmented and polarized. Ironically, one of the sad aspects of an atheistic Europe is it's rapidly declining birthrate.
With the exception of the devout (who are more prone to procreate), Europe will see itself in the next 20-30 years sliding into cultural obscurity. Perhaps Europe may yet catch itself from sliding into the abyss which is Sharia, if not you would (methinks) be remiss to describe the resultant society as "evolved".
Well sure, Christianity owned Europe for over 1000 years, there’s going to be a lot of influence left over there for centuries. But that just makes the question a strawman, history really hasn’t had the opportunity to build a society in a religious vacuum yet.
I don’t think we’re as fragmented and polarized as the media turns a buck making us look. Most folks really don’t give much care about most of the things that supposedly polarize us. Just look at voter turn out, there’s lots of sturm and drang about the issues but when you get down to it most of society isn’t even interested enough in these things to vote 2 or 3 times a year.
Europe already slid into cultural obscurity. America took over the production of culture in the 50s and 60s. It’s got really nothing to do with religion or procreation so much as money. Our entertainment industry makes a lot of products, which makes them make a lot of money, which gives them a wide influence. And England turning the language universal helps too, we don’t even have to translate our junk for a good chunk of the population to be able to understand it.
And it never will.
Depends on what happens. Could get to a point where a region has had very little religion for a couple of centuries. Other planets. Mad Max. Never say never, it’s a long time, strange things can happen.
Something will always fill the void.
But it doesn’t have to be filled by the same thing. You could argue that’s a big part of why religion has been falling out of favor. From a sociological point of view religion seems to exist largely to explain the world, how did it get here, why are there animals, what makes rain and snow. Stuff science is answering. We don’t need giant turtles carrying the world when we understand gravity and orbits.
I understand.
I would recommended that you should explore Buddhism.
The works of Joseph Campbell is really good.
Shortly after I found Christ I went on a journey to prove myself wrong. To prove or disprove anything but what I had discovered. I could do neither but disprove virtually all alternatives.
My conclusions are that we are either the Creation of God or the result of extraterrestrials.
Evolution is mathematically impossible.
Extraterrestrials seeding our planet is equally an insane proposition.
There is no other conclusion than Creation.
I don’t need to explore any of that. I’m good as is. I know who I am, I’m comfortable, I can identify the things that need changing and change them. I used to be looking for “my” religion a bit, but it always followed the same pattern, I’d get hot on it for a bit and slide away and a couple years later I’d decide I “needed” a religion and go another round. Then one day I asked why I “needed” a religion, I’d spent most of my life paying no attention to it, I was only anxious about it when I’d bought into the societal concept that you need something, when religion wasn’t part of my life things were smooth. So I stopped.
Actually evolution makes perfectly good sense. As does extraterrestrial seeding. Creationism is magic. Which is fine if you want to believe it, but magic is never a good scientific answer.
If proof of God’s creation were to fall into your world, would you change your thinking?
If on every TV station the reports of scientific evidence proving the existence of a Creator, would that change your beliefs?
During my devotional time I sometimes like to close my eyes and give glory to Him as I marvel at His creation, at how sublime and elegant it all is. The Lagrangian of the Standard Model is so beautiful, how the motions of everything in all of physical creation from the largest galactic superclusters down to the smallest elementary particle are all controlled by just 4 simple forces based on 5 basic supersymmetries that can be expressed as a single set of coupled partial differential equations that can all fit on just a single sheet of paper. That is so amazing. Gloria in excelsis Deo!
What is particularly cool is that God created a creation that we can actually see. That is so wildly improbable in a randomly created universe. It is a big knock against hard atheism. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is a dead giveaway that the universe was definitely designed and not random. Why? Because in a random universe the UDF photo ought to be all black or a gray fog. The matter density gradient has to be absolutely perfect to see large structures like galaxies at cosmological distances. It requires a super-finely tuned matter density gradient and alpha opacity function that is absolutely perfect, one that is more improbable than hitting the Powerball Jackpot lottery several times in a row.
God designed the universe very carefully because I think that He wants us to marvel at the sheer majesty of His creation and see what He hath wrought. He wants us to see it. And in doing so we cannot help but be forever humbled by it.
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