Writes Ross Douthat, in "Where Does Religion Come From?" (NYT). Douthat is contemplating the reaction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's announcement that she has converted to Christianity. Does she really believe? She said, as Douthat puts it, "that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism" and "she found 'life without any spiritual solace unendurable.'"
Some critics were Christians who noticed a failure to say that Christianity is true, and some critics were atheists who were sorry she didn't see the truth that is atheism.
Douthat goes on at great length and quite a bit of it is about UFOs and, more generally, weirdness.
Posts
77 comments:
"Some critics were Christians who noticed a failure to say that Christianity is true...'
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven.
What in the world? Ross is sucking in too much second-hand cannabis.
I also noticed that Ali didn't express a conversion of faith, but who cares? It's her business, and fake it til you make it is a perfectly valid approach.
>She said, as Douthat puts it, "that..."she found 'life without any spiritual solace unendurable.'"<
Whew, a hell of a reason to believe in magic! Opiate of the masses indeed.
My very smart brother, who is not particularly religious but like me was raised in the church, said much the same thing when I asked him how he could possibly believe all that fantastical heaven stuff. He said, "I don't think I could bear life if I didn't." See "opiate" above...
I don't care one way or another. Just don't shove your beliefs in my face or try to make me acquiesce to things I don't believe.
Religion specifies a behavioral protocol or model: morality, ethics, law, given by God, gods, mortal gods, experts, etc. Faith is trust, one of four logical domains. Some people trust in God, some in Stork, some in the democratic/dictatorial duality, some in experts, and others in themselves and each other. Judge a philosophy by its principles, not principals.
Let's see, Ross Douthat. He's important because .................................................................................................................................................
Oh, Yeah! Because the shitheads running the NYT pay him a bunch of money! Ross, how much do they pay you? We need to know that, so we can figure out just exactly how impressed we should be with your sophomoric pontifications. Clue us in, Ross. What is the precise monetary value that your owners have assigned you? Are they paying you we-should-get-down-on-our-knees-and-worship-you money?
You do not have to be a "true believer" in order to lead a Christian life, benefit from the rhythm and structure of the faith, and find consolation and meaning in a Christian community. Few Christians never entertain doubt, and many are - on many a day - agnostic. It is not so much about what you believe as how you live (at least for Episcopalians).
She said, as Douthat puts it, "that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism" and "she found 'life without any spiritual solace unendurable.'"
I do OK without "spiritual solace" (and public confessions, hand waving, snake handling, speaking in tongues, sucking up to the Pope, trying to become 'one' with the universe, other people, etc.) which might be because - since atheism ain't a belief system but just the denial of gods - it can't disappoint me that way. It would be like saying I've been saddened by gravity.
As long as there's an assumption there's more to life than the miracle it is, or that there should be more to life than the miracle it is, then you aren't grasping life for the miracle it is, but at straws, and atheists laugh at you.
The UFO thing is a more interesting point than the post gives it credit for.
What Ross is arguing is similar to what people mean when they talk about culture-bound psychological syndromes (the most famous being people in africa and south asia who believe witches are stealing their penis.) Psychological disorders reflect peoples cultural expectations.
Ross is presenting an argument that people are having culture-bound religious experiences. They are presented with supernatural phenomena, but are interpreting it within a modern scientific-technological cultural context, whereas people in the past who experienced the supernatural interpreted those experiences within the context of a traditional religion.
"Even if belief in invisible watchers has its social uses..."
Does this explain Elf on the Shelf and Mensch on the Bench?
He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake...
"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven."
So Elvis Costello is correct. Actions speak louder now than words...
the ONLY WAY, that Christianity makes ANY Sense; is IF it's True..
A couple of BILLION people think it does make Sense.
[Robert Cook will say that HE is right and ALL THOSE PEOPLE are WRONG. He will base that on his faith in Himself]
Whether you call it original sin or the id or the reptilian brain, it's there all the time, and it doesn't take much for us to act in accordance with its dictates. This is particularly true during times of horniness or combat.. Whether you call it "the better angels of our nature" or the superego or the "small, still voice within", it's there all the time and it doesn't take much for it to chastise us for not acting in accordance with its dictates. This is particularly true when reading NYT pundits....I suppose some people and some countries strike a happy balance, but the fulcrum point is always shifting, and one frequently loses one's balance and goes splat......I don't know if I have ever sinned more than most, but I've certainly felt more guilt about my many small sins than, say, the average Hamas warrior. I don't know what's bedeviled me more: my selfish urges or my constant nagging to become a better person.....I don't think there's any help for it. That's the way it goes. "In life, there's much to be endured and little to be enjoyed," and there's no real help for.... It would be nice,however, if there was some kind of celestial bookkeeper who kept an accurate tally and at the end of the day told you whether you were in the red or the black.
We (admittedly lapsed) Roman Catholics have the solace of knowing ALL y'all heretics, from Berkeley nonbinary atheists to Afghan pederast mullahs, and all flavors of you Xtian heretics in between, and all pagan tribes of the third world, are not followers of the One True Faith and therefore will burn in Hell for all eternity, for your sins. I learned to use that argument against Southern Baptist evangelicals in my college years, and find it an effective deterrent to further discussion of the subject of religion in almost all cases.
Any denomination can use this same argument for their own particular denomination, to help others keep their own annoying prosyletizing to a minimum.
Potato Potahto.
I believe it was CS Lewis who said that he found being an Atheist required more faith from him than to believe in God.
Steven said
"what Ross is arguing is similar to what people mean when they talk about culture-bound psychological syndromes (the most famous being people in africa and south asia who believe witches are stealing their penis.)"
Hey, it's not just Africa and Asia! Behold my favorite part of the Malleus Maleficarum from Germany in 1486:
"And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? It is to be said that it is all done by devil’s work and illusion, for the senses of those who see them are deluded in the way we have said. For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest."
People were burned at the stake for laughing at that joke.
‘I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?’
‘Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.’
‘But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.’
‘Can’t I?’
‘I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.’
‘Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.’
‘But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.’
‘But I do. That’s how I believe.’ - Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
"Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument advanced by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), a notable seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. This argument posits that individuals essentially engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God.
Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and actively strive to believe in God. The reasoning behind this stance lies in the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, the individual incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries. However, if God does indeed exist, they stand to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell."
I am as unreligious as it is possible to get without fully disbelieving in a creator. Now, I was a full-on atheist after about I was about 10 years old, and it took me a quarter century to understand the flaw in my argument and the pretense of knowledge that undergirded that mistake. I am no longer an atheist, but I doubt the existence of a god or gods still- I guess I am agnostic on the issue. In my youth, I was dismissive of all religions, but not any longer. I think some are better cultural guides than other by large margins, and I can now see the problem with not having a belief in the after-life. If there are no eternal penalties for evil, self-aggrandizing behavior, and that this life on Earth is all that you will ever get, it is harder to enforce things like the Golden Rule. In short, why not give in to every base desire one might have regardless of the damage it does to others if one can get away with it right now? I think it is very useful, pretty much to the point of a requirement, for people to have a belief in punishment and reward after this life on Earth is finished. Without that belief in an after-life, I think we would likely end up where we were as a species 25K-50K years ago.
As for aliens- if they really are visiting the Earth, I will take that as confirmation that this entire existence really is a computer simulation and that all the laws of physics don't actually exist as anything other than computer code.
Science is a philosophy and practice in a limited frame of reference, the near-domain, a logical domain, relative to the observer. How many people indulge inferential logic, faith in experts, to harbor beliefs about the universe and beyond, to indulge color judgments, to justify the performance of human rites, etc?
>gilbar said...
the ONLY WAY, that Christianity makes ANY Sense; is IF it's True..
A couple of BILLION people think it does make Sense.<
Your conclusion that we are to infer being that Christianity is True.
Which is a classic Affirming the Consequent Fallacy.
But let's play with it anyway, just for fun.
Christianity: 2.3 billion adherents.
Islam: 1.9 billion adherents.
Hinduism: 1.2 billion adherents.
Buddhism: 0.5 billion adherents.
So let's see, perhaps that makes Islam 83% True, Hinduism 52% True, Buddhism...
A popular book of the 70s ("Jesus and the Magic Mushroom" or something like that) attributed Christianity and religion in general to ingestion of hallucinogens by people around the world throughout history. That might account for the similarities in religious experience across religions. Sightings of witches, demons, angels, the Virgin Mary, etc. have decreased in the modern era; God does seem to be making Himself scarce since the banning of hallucinogens and the advent of antipsychotic drugs.
My maternal grandmother has all her children baptized Catholic. None of them knew it until she passed. Nor did my grandfather- who I can remember, though I was a very young age, his muttering about "D--n Papists!". Don't know or recall what exactly he was muttering about...
In her will she stated she stated she wanted to be buried by a Priest, and have mass said for her. Which came as a shock, well not so much shock, cams as a big surprise to the family. And to the minister at the Methodist Church which she had faithfully attended for many decades. At the funeral he stated she was the best Catholic member the Methodist Women's Sewing Circle ever had.
Ah, sewing circles- another bygone American tradition. If any exist anymore I'm unaware of them.
But anyhow, Christians of all stripes can get along because they all believe in the same basic things. Arguments about literal vs. figurative transubstantiation can be left to the theologians. History's wars between Catholics and Protestants? Mostly driven by dynasties using religion as a cover. Between different groups of Protestants? Much the same. Between islam and (insert any other religion here)? Religion. Or, if you prefer, islam itself.
My maternal grandparents are proof that Protestants and Catholics can live together in peace. As well as the marriage between my good Roman Catholic wife and I.
And even with firm beliefs- and a good upbringing - people don't always live up to all the tents of their faith. My wife has 4 siblings who married, one who stayed that way. Like my wife, he married a a Methodist. The others married fellow Catholics, and ended up divorced...
Many atheists, true believer atheists, are beginning to recognize that they're safest in a Christian society. A fully atheist society is dangerous. Even for atheists if you don't subscribe to the ruling junta...
I'm not worried about God/Allah/Yahweh/Jehova etc watching me. I know he is holding my right hand. If he wants to watch me too, that is fine.
What I am worried about is all the invisible watching that the govt does of me. cameras all over. Bluetooth trackers every mile or so along the streets and highways (strictly for traffic control, doncha know) Doorbell cameras, in home recorders like siri/echo/alexis, cellphone tracking, credit card tracking, phone call and email tracking and a million more ways they are watching over me. More of less invisibly. (How many here know about bluetooth tracking of your car, for example?)
Nikki Haley, who claims to be on our side and against the fascists, wants to make it illegal to post anonymously. Sounds as fascist as any democrat.
Nope. I've known since I was about 3 y/o that god is watching me and it has never bothered me.
As far as govt watching me, at world, federal, state and local level? It bothers the bejabbers out of me.
It has never been "invisible" but they do go to some lengths to hide most of it.
It may be time to break out the PGP and start implementing it on everything.
John Henry
I learned long ago that if Atheism is a faith based on reason. We're in deep shit. Most people in this world don't know how to reason plus they're morons. So the Holden Caulfield school of theology tells us. At least make some sort of effort to commune with god. Because you never know.
Isaiah 41:13
For I am the Lord your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you.
And he has clung tightly to me for 75 years now, even when I didn't believe he was there or even existed. Didn't matter. He still believed in me.
John Henry
--- the realm of U.F.O. experience is a landscape waiting for someone to make sense of it
He has come; he has done this. Fox Mulder. He saw, he struggled, he suffered under TV pilots. He will come again to judge the quick and the U.S. intelligence community.
She's had quite a journey.
Her husband writes a lot and well. Not sure about his faith, if any.
Atheism, like it or not, has never been at the heart of Western civic liberalism anyway, so relying on it alone as an antidote to Islamic idealism is a mug's game.
I don't have NYT access, so won't be reading the piece, but it would seem that Douthat is laboring under the false idea that Christian faith and reason are in tension with each other. In fact, being about the Logos (as Jesus the Christ is termed in the Gospel of John), Christianity is about the Ultimate Reason. In fact, reason compels the existence of the Trinity if one understands who/what God is.
And if Christianity is simply some made-up fiction, then the people who came up with it were the most brilliant people ever. A LOT smarter than the geniuses of today.
It emanates from a penumbra of faith, hope, leverage, and profit. Religion originates with mom and dad, in community, and often by force in democratic/dictatorial regimes. There is no one who exists in a universe unto themselves, so we reconcile our differences through commonly held principles and interests.
Religion is a figurative version of ethics. When it goes literal it gets into trouble. That's "virtue that goes public turns into the worst sort of evil" territory.
Levinas _Difficult Freedom_ p.17
"The moral relation therefore reunites both self-consciousness and consciousness of God. Ethics is not the corollary of the vision of God, it is that very vision. Ethics is an optic, such that everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say to Him must find an ethical expression. In the Holy Ark from which the voice of God is heard by Moses, there are only the tablets of the Law. The knowledge of God which we can have and which is expressed, according to Maimonides, in the form of negative attributes, receives a positive meaning from the moral "God is merciful," which means "Be merciful like Him." The attributes of God are given not in the indicative, but in the imperative. The knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzvah. To know God is to know what must be done. Here prophets preoccupied themselves not with the immortality of soul but with the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. The relationship with man in which contact with the Divine is established is not a kind of spiritual friendship but the sort that is manifested, tested and accomplished in a just economy and for which each man is fully responsible. "Why does your God, who is the God of the poor, not feed the poor?" a Roman asks Rabbi Akiba. "So we can escape damnation," replies Rabbi Akiba. One could not find a stronger statement of the impossible situation in which God finds himself, that of accepting the duties and responsibilities of man."
There is a compelling interest for civilization to develop religions that are democratic/dictatorial-agnostic, hence the rule of law and similar developments.
Opiate of the masses indeed.
Quoting Marx is always a mistake. You might as well quote Hitler. But the statement is also idiotic because opiates, then and now, are used to dull your senses to your feelings, your wretched condition. But that is a sad and wasted way to go through life, as is chronic alcoholism. None of that offers hope. Belief in a Higher Power as some say, God and His promises I say, does offer hope, a reward beyond this life, which the Bible clearly says is full of toil and misery here on Earth. Hope for the future is a wonderful thing. Most of us experience that through our children and grandchildren as well. I think the decline of Faith over the last 100 years is the main contributor to declining population growth. The proof is that th stronger a family's faith the more likely they are to have larger families.
Hope and faith are the opposite of invisible watchers and opiates. And Marx is the opposite of Jesus, with the dismal gospel of envy that Marx wrote.
if you're counting on Ross Doughtnut or Rod "Primitive Root Weiner" Dreher, to make a strong case for Christianity - forget about it.
These two "rightwingers" are wishy washy nambypamby about everything except: Israel, antisemitism, hating racism, and disliking A-rabs. Those things get some geniue passion from them.
But what Mr. Doughnut says is correct, most people believe in Gods, or God, and have done so since forever. WHy do athiest Jews (who don't believe in the Jewish God), believe they are bound by blood and have some mysterious link to other Jews all over the world? Thats not based on science.
It just shows that people either believe in religion or they believe in a religion substitute.
It was either Joseph Campbell or James Frazier who postulated that religion owes its primitive origins to Neolithic incomprehension and fear of death and the newly human dead.
"that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism" and "she found 'life without any spiritual solace unendurable.'"
The question of where morality comes from is central to any society. Having an moral authority outside of ourselves is necessary to establish a fair and just society. Anything else devolves into might-makes-right. Under atheism, and by extension, natural determinism, there is no external intelligence, and everything is a result of random chance. That ultimately means that morality cannot exist. We cannot be responsible for our actions because are actions are, at the core, a simple stimulus response, a culmination of all data inputs from the beginning of time. Free-will is illusory. We can't even claim relativism, the "true for you" paradigm. That is why it is unendurable.
"It would be like saying I've been saddened by gravity."
I can't count all the times I've been saddened by gravity.
Religion is not about finding meaning. It is about constructing meaning . It is about creating a framework that gives us a sense of order and control of our lives. The same is true of all ‘isms’. This construction is an illusion that fulfilled a psychological imperative. Those that fail to construct this illusion achieve freedom of thought but at the price of never belonging. Freedom is a very lonely place.
I’m listening to the series: Exodus.
It’s on YouTube w/Jordan Peterson, Dennis Praeger and a few other super fellows- verse by verse/chapter by chapter.
All of life’s lessons are in there. It’s very thoughtful.
Just an fyi.
In the Book of Enoch the 'Watchers' were fallen angels.
Does she really believe?
I can remember a time when to question the word of someone who professed Christian belief - especially a black person of east African ancestry who'd become a political figure in the West - was regarded as the worst kind of heresy.
Not heresy against Christ of course, because who cares about that anymore, but heresy against the Lightbringer.
Yancy Ward said:
I think it is very useful, pretty much to the point of a requirement, for people to have a belief in punishment and reward after this life on Earth is finished.
That's all well and good if your religion espouses the golden rule as your golden ticket to heaven. But that is not true of either Christianity nor Islam. In Christianity, they should do good because of the good done for them by God. No one gets to heaven by merit, only grace, and good works are the fruit of the acceptance of grace. Unfortunately for Islam, people are teaching that to get glory in heaven you must inflict atrocities on those whom Allah has declared to be his enemies. So their punishment is based on whether they touched pork, and their reward is based on how many Jews they raped and beheaded. This is why mothers in Gaza are rejoicing in their son's martyrdom. More virgins for you my little Mohammad! Maybe the mothers get some reward for raising up warriors, like not having to be one of the eternal virgins at the disposal of the men?
And for Pascal's consideration.... It matters which god you believe in.
>Yancey Ward said...
If there are no eternal penalties for evil, self-aggrandizing behavior, and that this life on Earth is all that you will ever get, it is harder to enforce things like the Golden Rule. In short, why not give in to every base desire one might have regardless of the damage it does to others if one can get away with it right now? I think it is very useful, pretty much to the point of a requirement, for people to have a belief in punishment and reward after this life on Earth is finished.<
Well, you can go that route to accomplish that goal if you wish and, sincerely, good for you.
But that is what character - also a learned quality - is for. Without the mystical, magical stuff. I believe that my character - my feeling of the necessity of doing right rather than wrong - decidedly learned from temporal sources, does precisely what you seem to think only fear of eternal penalities can accomplish.
Take your pick, of course. Neither one is perfect at keeping one on the straight and narrow but basic character development works at least as well for that purpose as fear of afterlife horrors does, IMO.
It’s those Hebrew prophets. From Moses to Jesus those guys created Scriptures that the Spirit of Holiness uses to create faith in chosen sinners.
'And for Pascal's consideration.... It matters which god you believe in.'
True. These days I've been praying to the golf gods : )
You're all fooling yourselves - and not even convincingly.
Blogger Ice Nine said..."But that is what character - also a learned quality - is for. Without the mystical, magical stuff. I believe that my character - my feeling of the necessity of doing right rather than wrong - decidedly learned from temporal sources, does precisely what you seem to think only fear of eternal penalities can accomplish."
Amen.
Ice Nine: In re taking Karl Marx as an authority.
As the late Coleman Young said about Jesse Jackson "The only thing he's run is his mouth." In a broader sense taking any German philosophy - especially 19th century German philosophy - as a way to organize life and society is a very bad idea.
As an example - the history of the 20th century.
Vegans Taylor Swift fans, and cross fit adherents get more respect than any person of faith.
Strange the athiests are so strident, about something that doesn't exist. What drives that?
With just a little bit of effort you discover, God exists in you. Not out there.
What is Douhat talking about?
The concepts of the Trinity and the Resurrection and the appearance of angels, all that, did not appear in a vacuum in the first-century Levant.
Blogger Ice Nine said..."But that is what character - also a learned quality - is for. Without the mystical, magical stuff. I believe that my character - my feeling of the necessity of doing right rather than wrong - decidedly learned from temporal sources, does precisely what you seem to think only fear of eternal penalities can accomplish."
It offers an independent frame, and nothing more. Other sources offer the same integrated bias, incentive, and punitive model, albeit under secular authority.
Some people prefer a boot. Some people respond to bennies. Some people like to have their egos massaged. Some people take a knee, beg and hope that they remain a viable commodity. Let us bray: In Stork They Trust.
"But that is what character - also a learned quality - is for. Without the mystical, magical stuff. I believe that my character - my feeling of the necessity of doing right rather than wrong - decidedly learned from temporal sources, does precisely what you seem to think only fear of eternal penalities can accomplish."
On an individual basis, this works well with people like yourself (and me, for example), but I am looking for things that work at a more general and broader level of society. I fear that without a religion like Christianity, for example, you won't be able to instill the character necessary to not act like sociopathic barbarians, or to maintain a high trust society going forward. I think it is extremely foolish to discount the beneficial effect that certain religions have on their societies- especially that which arose in Europe and was transplanted to big parts of the world, and I also think it is foolish to think this is easily replaced/replicated in its absence.
I guess I think humans are innately violent and self-serving and it took thousands of years and various attempts at religious development to work out ways of suppressing that nature to create Japan, for example, or The Netherlands.
Some of the Christian arguments do seem weak, yes. However, the fact that commenters, even here among the wise and good, misrepresent what is actually believed by Christians should give the undecided and the agnostic some pause. If Mere Christianity is so obviously wrong, why do its critics describe it so inaccurately? Wouldn't it be sufficient to criticise the real article? Do they not apprehend what is said? Are they intentionally lying? Is there a laziness in thought? I don't know, but in discussions such as this it seems the most obvious fact in evidence, whatever the explanation.
I was taught in highschool debate/speech that when your opponent has to misrepresent you or change the subject to something they like better, they have admitted they have lost the intellectual argument and are moving on to social and emotional ones. It is pointless to continue the argument after that.
America was founded on the belief we have God-given rights and the responsibility to try and adjudicate laws and society based roughly on Natural Law and the Ten Commandments. The farther we get from that ideal the worse off America is. If you believe you are a moral authority independent of this tradition of Judeo-Christian values then you are the exception that proves the rule. Which is unlikely. More likely is that your idea of right and wrong roughly adheres to the traditional American system, yet when tested will have no absolute truth to base critical decisions upon, and like humans tend to do you will choose what is best for you. We now have a society with a large percentage of adults who are their own highest authority and therefore all the high trust systems sustained for two centuries by shared values are crumbling around us as the powerful try to accumulate the most possessions before society completely breaks down. A just liberal democracy or representative republic cannot exist independently of the Christian values this country was founded upon. That we kept it going longer than the rest of Western civilization is a testament to its strength but really we’ve outlasted the typical democratic Empire model and are moving at AI speed towards direct democracy, which is simply mob rule.
Wa St Blogger:
Under atheism, and by extension, natural determinism, there is no external intelligence, and everything is a result of random chance. My bolding.
You do not understand atheism then. Atheism is simply living without god(s); a-theism. The bolded part is too general to be correct, and it isn't, as humans influence the chances.
The simplest answer to "Where does religion come from?" is your parents/clan. Gods are just a projection of the parents and their rules for survival and a desire to explain things beyond their control like weather, floods, etc.
rcocean:
WHy do athiest Jews (who don't believe in the Jewish God), believe they are bound by blood and have some mysterious link to other Jews all over the world? Thats not based on science.
It just shows that people either believe in religion or they believe in a religion substitute.
You seem to have forgotten atheists who don't believe in mysterious links thus rendering that last sentence of yours incorrect.
Wa St Blogger:
Under atheism, and by extension, natural determinism, there is no external intelligence, and everything is a result of random chance.
As I stated before, that's simply incorrect.
That ultimately means that morality cannot exist.
Supposition on your part as one premise is faulty.
We cannot be responsible for our actions because are actions are, at the core, a simple stimulus response, a culmination of all data inputs from the beginning of time.
Mathematical fabulism.
rcocean said: ..."WHy do athiest Jews (who don't believe in the Jewish God), believe they are bound by blood and have some mysterious link to other Jews all over the world? Thats not based on science."
It's based on the fact that Jew-haters everywhere don't differentiate. If you're Jewish, they want to kill you. If you said, Wait, I'm not religious at all, my name just happens to be Goldberg! They'd still kill you in a heartbeat, you know that. And that's why all Jews are bound by blood.
WA ST blogger at 3pm, a lovely encapsulation of my problems with atheism.
And for Pascal's consideration.... It matters which god you believe in.
And this too. The risk-reward balance matters.
And Ice Nine and Original Mike (I think it was you, OM), you swim in Judeo-Christian waters. It's easy for you to say, and even to believe utterly, that you have reached your moral conclusions without recourse to those waters. But I would like to see your work, especially since both theists and atheists around the world come to different, apparently significantly culturally influenced conclusions.
I'm not saying "You gotta believe!" I'm saying you're (and I am) the product of a culture based on certain beliefs, and in a different culture, I think it likely that you could have drawn different moral conclusions.
I totally effed up on the Iraq war because of my culturally based moral conclusions. YMMV, but I'll bet you could find examples in your own lives in which your "self-evident" presuppositions didn't hold.
"As long as there's an assumption there's more to life than the miracle it is, or that there should be more to life than the miracle it is, then you aren't grasping life for the miracle it is, but at straws, and atheists laugh at you."
Sorry, Crack--if you really are an atheist, you don't get to rely on "miracles." You certainly can't laugh at those who do without being a hypocrite.
boatbuilder said...
Sorry, Crack--if you really are an atheist, you don't get to rely on "miracles."
You can't read.
"Strange the athiests are so strident, about something that doesn't exist. What drives that?"
You are mistaken. Only some atheists are strident. As to what drives them, it's a good question. I don't know.
"Jamie said…"I'm not saying "You gotta believe!" I'm saying you're (and I am) the product of a culture based on certain beliefs, and in a different culture, I think it likely that you could have drawn different moral conclusions."
I think this is right, and like Yancey I think society is better of with a good religion (and worse off with a bad one; look at Gaza). All I'm saying is that, having reached adulthood and subsequently concluding with my own powers of reason that I see no evidence for the existence of God, I have not abandoned my moral compass because of some idea that now I can "get away with it".
Assistant Village Idiot:
I was taught in highschool debate/speech that when your opponent has to misrepresent you or change the subject to something they like better, they have admitted they have lost the intellectual argument and are moving on to social and emotional ones. It is pointless to continue the argument after that.
Very interesting, as I've been pointing out in my comments how misrepresenting religious commenters here are of atheism. So I reflect "inaccurately", "criticize", and "apprehend" right back at them.
"Wouldn't it be sufficient to criticise the real article? Do they not apprehend what is said? Are they intentionally lying? Is there a laziness in thought? I don't know, but in discussions such as this it seems the most obvious fact in evidence, whatever the explanation."
That as well.
If Ross Douthat disappeared from everyone's memory tomorrow, it would be hard to tell that it made any difference.
Mike (MJB Wolf):
America was founded on the belief we have God-given rights and the responsibility to try and adjudicate laws and society based roughly on Natural Law and the Ten Commandments.
No we do not. Commandments 1-4 are Judaeo/Christian specific and our laws are antithetical to a mono-religious culture. Numbers 5,7,10 are societal, but only in idea. Bad parenting usually voids 5; while 7 can get you divorced, half the population partakes; and 10 barely show up.
That leaves you with 6,8,9; don't murder, don't steal, don't lie in court. Pan-human laws (edicts, beliefs, etc) passed down for millennia.
Code of Hammurabi, king of the Old Babylonian Empire, reigning from c. 1792 to c. 1750 BC.
The Ten Commandments were traditionally estimated to have been given around 1446 B.C. However, most scholars propose a date between the 16th and 13th century bc for the commandments, though some date them as late as 750 bc.
Both from Wikipedia.
Speaker Johnson was on CNBC yesterday making comments germane to our discussion, after being asked about Jefferson's often misquoted "separation of church and state" missive. Here are two of my favorite Founding Fathers:
George Washington’s Farewell Address, delivered in 1796 included, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
John Adams’ letter to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798 said, “Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
Adams has a much pithier and more powerful way of putting it than I did last night.
Gospace:
Ah, sewing circles- another bygone American tradition. If any exist anymore I'm unaware of them.
Yes. They call them fabric clubs now.
History's wars between ... itself.
Nice dismissal w/o support.
Many atheists, true believer atheists, are beginning to recognize that they're safest in a Christian society.
CURRENT Christian societies, not even a hundred years ago. You can substitute Democratic for Christian.
And what, pray tell, is a "true believer atheist".
A fully atheist society is dangerous.
ANY "fully" society is dangerous.
"you swim in Judeo-Christian waters"
Thank you, Jamie, for succinctly outlining the thought I was trying to convey above.
If God exists, it wouldn't be the strangest thing in the cosmos.....Up until very recently everybody believed in God. There was some doubt as to how much Providence was involved in human affairs, but everyone was agreed that there had to be a Prime Mover. Atheism is a fairly new phenomenon. I guess it's possible that the universe just happened or that it's just a simulacrum and none of it is actually happening. Our understanding of God is contingent to an extent upon our understanding of the world and cosmos we inhabit. I don't think this generation has the final word on any of this......Some physicist said that the cosmos is not just stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. Ditto God. Ditto us.
William:
Atheism is a fairly new phenomenon.
Only if you discount the writings of ancient Greek, Roman and other atheists as far back as 570 BC.
"Where does religion come from?"
Easy: from the imagination (and ignorance and fears) of humankind, filling in the gaps in our knowledge and verifiable factual information about the world outside and inside us. In short, it is/was a hypothesis about existence and our place in it that is no longer serviceable.
(It is also an articulation of the behavioral traits evolved in us as pack animals--found also in many other animals, as it happens--that tend to enhance our chances of survival, also describing and proscribing behaviors that tend to be deleterious to our chances of survival. This aspect of religion is where we describe our code of behavior.)
As an atheist, I'm a YUGE fan of Western Civ. It's clearly the best at allowing or generating wealth and knowledge, and encouraging their spread.
Not to mention the clear superiority and variety of its art forms when compared to the best of the rest.
But all these advances and advantages arose relatively recently, when economic dynamism began to replace religious contention as the priority--and that only after the Christians of Europe had broken their teeth and heads against one another in sectarian wars and massacres over centuries.
Of course, there are those who hold that those wars and massacres weren't -really- about religion: those Christians were merely deluded to think they were. Every modern person, left, right, and center, believer or skeptic, knows they were really about money.
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