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[Deathworks]

Hi!

With all the heated debates going on about religion and so on (just see the now-locked thread on Intelligent Design), I felt I should share my view on these things.

First of all, to be fair, I need to point out that I am a faithful atheist. That is, I am an atheist, not because I don't want to pay church tax, but because I honestly believe that there is no God or similar entity or entities.

Now that my own position is clear, I hope you can correctly evaluate the worth or lack of worth of my propositions.

First of all, I consider basically atheism to be effectively another religion - in the sense that I define religion as "a system of basic believes that can not be proven". Personally, I also feel that science as we are used to have it is only fully compatible with the atheist belief system as the latter does not include much that contradicts the necessities of the former (even though, as a belief system, by definition it has to make claims that are not subject to scientific analysis). However, this last point (the relation between atheism and science) is not an absolute one for me and if someone can show how another religion works well with science, I am willing to listen.

I know I am kind of muddling terms in the following argument, but I have the impression that many of the discussions we have witnessed already do this muddling to a degree as to make a clear distinction between scientific and atheist neigh impossible. So, in the following argument, please be aware that at times, I am equating science and atheism, while that is actually not completely correct as stated above. I hope that my meaning still remains understandable.

There seems to be some tension between a camp of followers of the "traditional" religions (the theistic ones, I mean) and a camp of followers of atheism (which, according to my definition is also a religion, which is why I used "traditional" to mark the others in contrast). The things I have noticed in the threads were on the one hand complaints about religion bashing and accusation of close-mindedness while the other side called the believes of the other "fairy tales" in a clearly derogative sense.

In my opinion, this issue has two aspects that are intertwined and are messing things up pretty badly.

First of all, there is the high prestige modern society places with science. The term "scientific" still holds a certain weight, even though it probably lost some of the power it had around the end of the 19th century. As such, things that are not scientific are subjected to ridicule, even if that is not really applicable. However, and I think that is what is causing some problems here, the term is also so prestiguous that people sometimes feel the need to include their own approaches under that term, regardless of whether it really fits them. Putting it bluntly concerning the Intelligent Design discussion: What does Intelligent Design gain by claiming to be scientific?

This brings me to the second issue at hand, which is part of what I consider a problem of identity of the atheist religion. As I stated before, atheism is a religion because in the end, you can find some basic beliefs that are not provable in any way but absolutely necessary for atheism to work. Just as an average theist religion has to postulate the existance of a God, atheism can only work if it categorically denies the existance of a God. The statement at the core may be different, but both rely on unprovable axioms, and there is actually no reason to make a distinction between atheism and religion.

If we are to subscribe to the previous statement that atheism is just another religion and has as much a claim to veracity as any other religion, we should then move to the question how religions relate to each other. Can we really say a religion is better than the other, or worse yet, say that a religion is ridiculous?

Personally, I really doubt that as any such claim would require a serious evaluation. It is true that we can evaluate the consistancy of certain mechanisms and claims and criticize contradictions within a system, but how are we to evaluate the very basis of the system? Criticizing applications gets us only that far, as can be seen with Christianity: What happens in the Catholic Church does not really have any correspondence in what I have seen in the Bible, quite on the contrary, but it is still considered a valid branch of the Christian religion based on the Bible. In other words, applications are derived and subject to change too readily to make them the basis for a final evaluation.

But if we want to evaluate the very basis of a religion, we are facing a truly unbeatable problem: On what basis will we ourselves argue? An argument does not stand in a void. It needs some basic mechanisms and assumptions itself. However, whatever argumentation method you use, a thorough investigation will undeniably lead you to realize that it is based on axioms similar or related to those very axioms you are investigating. Thus, by its very existance, your argument is already biased and can not give you clear results but rather a confirmation of its own belief system possibly at the demerit of the other system.

In other words, no matter what we do, we will always argue from the point of view of a belief system, so we can not evaluate belief systems without a bias.

If that is so, why is especially the rejection of the "traditional" religions so common? Especially if we consider that "real atheists" are probably a minority (I also distinguish between people who are actually atheists, that is believing in the non-existance of God and those who claim to be atheists in order ot identify with political, mostly communist ideas while actually believing in some divine power).

I think the answer to that last question lies in the first issue: Prestige. As I stated before, I feel that the axioms of atheism are especially close to the scientific method and it seems that many people share that feeling. Because of that affinity and the resulting equation of the two, atheism has gained somewhat of a prestige advantage - leading to the absurd situation that it is at the same time rejected and embraced.

To sum it up, I think there are problems involving people putting unnecessarily high prestige on science, mixing up science and atheism, and finally believing that it is possible to compare religions while in my opinion it is actually impossible to propose a valid comparison between such fundamental belief systems. All this put together unfortunately results in a lack of mutual respect which leads quite naturally to the high flamability of threads involving these issues.

I hope some may find my propositions at least interesting and it would be awesome if they actually found at least some of the suggestions worth consideration.

Deathworks

[E. Albright]

Just as an average theist religion has to postulate the existance of a God, atheism can only work if it categorically denies the existance of a God. The statement at the core may be different, but both rely on unprovable axioms, and there is actually no reason to make a distinction between atheism and religion.

If we are to subscribe to the previous statement that atheism is just another religion and has as much a claim to veracity as any other religion, we should then move to the question how religions relate to each other. Can we really say a religion is better than the other, or worse yet, say that a religion is ridiculous?

I think you'll be on more solid rhetorical ground if you don't insist on applying the term "religion" to atheism. Set of metaphysical beliefs? Sure. Religion? Um... there's a lot of implications in that term which don't work so well with all varieties of atheism, foremost amongst them uniformity of beliefs.

Also, you are asserting that all atheism must be strong/positive atheism; you define weak/negative atheism out of existence. One can be atheistic without asserting a categorical belief that there is no god, but rather asserting a belief that one has encountered no existent entity meeting the commonly-held definition thereof.

Finally, your agnosticism is coloring your judgment here. This is more controversial than you imply. Not all parties will agree that "both [atheism and theism] rely on unprovable axioms". Theists may well assert that they have  incontrovertible proof of some stripe that the god they ascribe to does exist; strong atheists may argue that commonly-held definitions of deity contain fundamental logical contradictions and are thus precluded from having a basis in reality. While either side might be willing to accept your characterization for their opposite number, in many if not most cases they'll be unwilling to accept your (agnostic) characterization of their own position.

[Ignoro]

That locked thread was not on ID. It was on people's reactions to things such as ID, and they reacted just as I had rambled about in the same post.

we can not evaluate belief systems without a bias.

That was more or less what I was getting at back there.

I hope some may find my propositions at least interesting and it would be awesome if they actually found at least some of the suggestions worth consideration.

It gets my approval.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

E.Albright: Interesting points you raise and I don't want to argue too strongly about these things as my basic intent is to encourage an open debate that will hopefully help lower some of the tensions.

I am not quite sure whether the implications of "religion" really forbid the application to atheism. Actually, it would be nice if you could explain a little bit about the uniformity of belief as I can frankly not see much uniformity in Christianity and Islam with all the splinter groups and sects they are actually falling apart into - but then I am not really sure what you mean with uniformity of belief.

You are correct that I do not include that which you call "weak atheism" in the definition of atheism as I actually do not consider it to be technically atheism. At least the way you describe it, such weak atheism basically is still theistic (when supposing there is some kind of divinity, but its details are actually unknown) or really agnostic (when the very question about whether anything divine exists is left open). But then again, that is the way I categorize things. I think that for this particular debate, this categorization probably works, even if it happens to be a simplification.

I actually agree with you that the way people treat the issue sometimes does not allow for accepting that we are dealing with belief systems. I suppose this is again the prestige of science where fact is more important than belief.

Actually, my post was also an appeal to acknowledge that we are all discussing this from out of our own belief systems and then acknowledge that the people we are talking to are also discussing things from their respective belief system. I hope that an active awareness for this and respect of each other's beliefs could somehow help avoid unpleasant incidents like flame wars.

Anyhow, as I said in the beginning, I do not really want to do a fighting argument, but rather a lose discussion that invites people to critically review all things that are said and come to their own conclusions. For as when I acknowledge that I am in the end confined to choosing a single belief system for my argument, I also have to acknowledge that I can't really push people around.

So, I hope that you will take my attempts at responding to the issues raised as my attempt to positively contribute and not to attack you.

Ignoro: Ah, I am sorry. I have to admit that the ensuing flame war which seemed to center on the definition on ID did hog my attention there. I am sorry, I really did not mean any harm - I was simply typing of my memory there.

I am glad that you liked my post despite my blunder concerning your thread.

Deathworks

[penguinofhonor]

Off topic: Ignoro got banned?

[E. Albright]

I am not quite sure whether the implications of "religion" really forbid the application to atheism. Actually, it would be nice if you could explain a little bit about the uniformity of belief as I can frankly not see much uniformity in Christianity and Islam with all the splinter groups and sects they are actually falling apart into - but then I am not really sure what you mean with uniformity of belief.

This is actually essentially the point. Muslims of different sects will agree on certain metaphysical assertions beyond "There is no God but God and Mohammad is the messenger of God". Perhaps many, perhaps few. But they share certain fundamental metaphysical (and possibly cultural) attitudes, varied for the strength of belief of each individual. They will share general assumptions about the origin of the universe, the place of man in it, materialism-vs.-dualism, the afterlife, etc. There will be variations and dissimilarities, but two Muslims of different sects will most probably have more metaphysical beliefs in common with each other than with a random Hindu, Christian, or atheist.

Can you say the same for two random atheists? Will a Buddhist atheist share metaphysical assumptions with a Unitarian one? Will a spiritualistic atheist who believes in ghosts agree in even the vaguest terms with the cold Cartesian materialist as to what happens after death? Will there be any shared cultural experience between a nihilist eliminativist and a secular humanist? Is there any shared belief beyond a lack of belief in deity?

Could you safely assume there to be more metaphysical belief in common between a teenage Eastern Orthodox convert and a middle-aged Southern Baptist convert, or between a former Anglican priest who became an atheist after the death of their spouse and a teenager who embraced atheism after being raised a practicing Jain?

Saying that "atheism" is a religion is the same as saying Shintoism is Christianity is deism is Islam is neopaganism is pantheism is Hinduism is Judaism is all one single religion. If you wish to lump all metaphysical stances that include a rejection of divinity into one religion, you'd best be willing to do the same to all theistic beliefs. I'd be very hesitant to do so, myself.

Atheism is a metaphysical belief. It is not even, as I had previously overstated, a system of beliefs. It is as much a religion as "theism" is. Which is to say, it's not unless we want to mess with the definition of either atheism or religion rather noticeably.

You are correct that I do not include that which you call "weak atheism" in the definition of atheism as I actually do not consider it to be technically atheism. At least the way you describe it, such weak atheism basically is still theistic (when supposing there is some kind of divinity, but its details are actually unknown) or really agnostic (when the very question about whether anything divine exists is left open). But then again, that is the way I categorize things. I think that for this particular debate, this categorization probably works, even if it happens to be a simplification.

Let me clarify it then. Negative atheism is atheism. It's not compatible with theism, nor with the wishy-washy popular usage of the term agnosticism (though it can be compatible with the more original, more technical sense of "agnostic"). Weak atheism is a belief that no god exists, but one that leaves open the possibility of having one's mind changed; it states that there is no evidence that a deity need or does exist, but the concept is not inherently logically impossible. Strong atheism is a positive assertion that no god exists, and no god can exist.

As an aside, let me get up on my hobby horse and attack your (admittedly standard) usage of agnostic. The term has lost its original sense in popular usage, but retains it in technical discussion. I would argue the popular usage ("undecided on religious matters") is not particularly useful. Originally, the term was wholly orthogonal to "atheism" and "theism"; it denoted a belief as to whether or not it was possible to know if a god existed. Hence, one could be atheist or theist, and still be agnostic (or not). One discussed knowledge, the other belief.

[Psyco Jelly]

I prefer to think scientifically rather than religiously, and I think that a nation shouldn't expend resources for religious purposes above the personal level. I do feel a particular bias against organized religion, because it can't adapt to the individual.

Science, and education in general, should be any nation's largest priority. The more people know, the better their lives are, correct? Reality is absolute, right now at least, so it should be understood to improve peoples lives. Knowledge for it's own sake is fun too.

[Strife26]

I just like to thank you Deathworks for reconizing that Atheism shares enough similarities with religon to be classified as one.

[Grek]

Saying that "atheism" is a religion is the same as saying Shintoism is Christianity is deism is Islam is neopaganism is pantheism is Hinduism is Judaism is all one single religion. If you wish to lump all metaphysical stances that include a rejection of divinity into one religion, you'd best be willing to do the same to all theistic beliefs. I'd be very hesitant to do so, myself.

Atheism is a metaphysical belief. It is not even, as I had previously overstated, a system of beliefs. It is as much a religion as "theism" is. Which is to say, it's not unless we want to mess with the definition of either atheism or religion rather noticeably.

I think it's possible to divide atheistic "religions" and theistic religions into a relatively small number of groups.

Anthromorphic monotheistic
Pantheistic
Dharmic
Taoistic
Syncretistic pantheonistic
Nonsyncretistic pantheonistic
Nihilistic
Empiristic
Rationalistic
Sophilistic

[Shades]

First of all, I consider basically atheism to be effectively another religion - in the sense that I define religion as "a system of basic believes that can not be proven".

I find this, which appears to be the core of your post, fatally flawed. Firstly your statement includes all knowledge so is irrelevant as very little is 'proven' as such. If, for example, you jump off a high building you expect to fall. Would you count this as a religion of gravity? (I'd love to see you prove that you'll always fall in this case, it's a non-provable belief)

I'm sure what you meant to say was "a system of basic believes that cannot be disproven" however in the case of atheism this is still flawed.

Proving something exists only requires it to be there. So if, for example, a god-like entity appeared on earth there is evidence of existence. Proving something doesn't exist, for example, a god-like entity not being anywhere, would require perfect knowledge and so is not disprovable.

This is the fundamental difference between a belief in something existing and belief is something not existing. As such atheism is not a religion in such a classical sense.

[Cheeetar]

Deathworks, do you think it is possible for people to simply not have a religion?

[E. Albright]

Proving something exists only requires it to be there. So if, for example, a god-like entity appeared on earth there is evidence of existence. Proving something doesn't exist, for example, a god-like entity not being anywhere, would require perfect knowledge and so is not disprovable.

Actually, no. Perfect knowledge is required to exhaustively disprove something's existence. However, one can still logically disprove it exists with imperfect knowledge. E.g., without turning over the whole of existence, I can safely conclude that a circular square does not exist simply because it can be trivially shown that its definition is inherently logically contradictory.

[Deathworks]

Hello!

First, let my stress again, that while I am interested in seeing a discussion going on, I do not plan to fiercely argue for my position. I hope people will not be disappointed if my replies fall short of what they may have hoped for.

Penguinofhonor: Now that you mention it. I haven't noticed before.

Personally, I consider this another reason for us to pause a little bit... If the debate was heated enough to get someone into such trouble, I find this rather worrisome.

E. Albright: Thank you for your clarifications to my own question and also engaging other members in the discussion. I  was hoping for a free exchange of ideas/thoughts and felt a bit uncomfortable about the focus being currently just on my position (^_^;;

I guess that I technically over-stretched the term "religion" there, but I do stand by my position that atheism and the theistic religions have a similarity in their basic nature as being fundamental to the argumentation and thought of their respective adherents.

I have to admit that I failed in my formulation concerning agnosticism. What I tried to say is that agnosticists (as in a belief system) believe that the God question can not and will not be answered. I consider this something completely different from those who say they want either side to bring proof following which they would join them.

I am actually glad that people realized that while I am an atheist, I used an agnostic argumentation, doing exactly what you suggest :)

Psyco Jelly: You are addressing a very complicated issue there. I too am for a strict separation of state and church. The state should remain neutral in the matters, but this does not prevent it from, for instance, informing about various religions in appropriate school classes.

My personal belief is that a modern democracy can not identify as a state with any theist religion simply because they usually have fundamentally contradictory claims: Modern democracy says that "all power derives from the people (=human beings)" while at least Christianity and its related religions (I have to admit that my knowledge of Buddhism, for instance, is rather limited) say that "God stands above the human". Mind you, I am not saying that a truly faithful Muslim or Christ can't be a good democrat. But the state as an institution can, in my eyes, not combine these two claims without getting caught up in contradictions. If politicians choose to base their personal decisions on their religion, that is their right and that is okay with the state, as the state is accepting the decision of them as humans.

Despite my rather extreme position concerning the state as a whole, I also feel we should be careful when judging individual things like religion classes at school. There are extreme suggestions on both sides of the fence and we should be careful as usually, the best way lies not in the fringes.

Strife26: Well, as some responses have shown, it can be argued whether the similarities are great enough to warrant the usage of the term "religion". But I do think it is important to see that these similarities are there.

I consider this especially important since, besides the relatively neutral similarities that you end up with axioms if you dig deep enough, there are also more negative similarities that both theist religions and atheism includes members who very aggressively attack those with a different belief and claim the ultimate superiority of their own approach.

Grek: An interesting list you propose there. I have to admit that I am not familiar with some of the things you mention there. Allow me to say that it is nice to see some support at least for the thesis that there is some similarity.

Shades: Actually, I think the fundamental nature of the claims on either side makes either side similar again.

You are right, of course, that bringing forth one example of an item to prove the existance of the item is easier in general than proving that the item does not exist.

However, we are not dealing with apples here but with "Gods". First of all, you need to define what your God looks like or how else that God can be perceived. Then you have to ensure that you don't get a false alarm when someone drags something into the ramplight and claims that this is their God.

Usually, Gods are associated with certain powers to change their environment. While this itself would make for a nice test, again you are facing the problem of weeding out fraud.

And also note that proof is not the same as interpretation. Referring to a now infamous public figure, just because Hurricane Katrina destroyed the brothrels and abortion clinics in New Orleans does it not become a direct punishment of God (^_^;;

Taking these things into account, I don't think the theist religions have so much of an advantage over atheism.

Cheetar: If you use the term to refer to a general belief system, that is including atheism et al., my answer would be "No.". As I said in the beginning all argumentation, all thought has to have some fundamental assumptions to start off on. The human mind can not really create itself without a basis, so something has to be there - be it a world view based on one or more Gods or be it a world view based on the belief in an atheist universe, or be it something else. Otherwise, there is nothing you can describe and nothing you can relate information to.

Deathworks

[Toady One]

(side note, no need to reply: Ignoro wasn't banned -- he self-deleted.  I did warn him once prior to that.)

[Psyco Jelly]

Separation of church and state is something I like to debate against with some of my friends. Most people seem to believe in separation of state and science as well, which seems like a highly illogical concept. If a nation spends 5 billion dollars on genetic engineering research, people would most likely get somewhat upset. I wouldn't mind paying 300 dollars to help fund some really fascinating project, but I wouldn't want to spend a penny on promoting Christianity.

A number of people tend to argue that 'science' is something similar to a religion, and that you can 'believe' in science. Alabama is weird.