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sissij

The Necessity of Atheism | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...the-necessity-of-atheism

brain science bias education

shared by sissij on 17 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Previously our ignorance kept us from unraveling nature’s secret process; when the process is understood knowledge replaces mysticism. He sums this up succinctly:
  • Education is essential because religion is effectively a struggle for power.
  • Since God is invented by man, it is through man that he is made known. Make people believe in your story and you can write whatever narrative you’d like. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This indifference confuses Shelley: a being that we endow with all the goodness in the world while turning a blind eye to endless atrocities.
  • Atheism is a necessity to the thinking mind, Shelley concludes.
  • The mind of Shelley has held up in the two centuries since his drowning. He discovered firsthand, however briefly before he succumbed, the extraordinary forces of nature.
  • sissij on 17 Mar 17
     
    I think Shelley's idea is really interesting. The questions he asked about religion is somehow similar to the questions we ask in our TOK class. As we discuss in TOK about religion, we talked about that God is invented by human so religion is essentially a human invention. The ignorance that Shelly talked about in this article also reminded me of Song of Solomon, where Pilate said "ignorance is the only thing that can kill him (Milkman)". I think atheism is a belief that human should not avoid questions that cannot be answered by creating an answer to it. --Sissi (3/16/2017)
Javier E

Ronald Dworkin's 'Religious Atheism' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ald-dworkins-religious-atheism

faith atheism deism value fact religious

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Dworkin, too, believes there is no contradiction in the term “religious atheism,” and offers no less towering examples than Shelley, Einstein and William James to show that it’s possible to adopt what he calls a “religious attitude,” a worldview which “accepts the full, independent reality of value,” as distinct from scientific fact, and which holds that both individuals and the natural world they inhabit have intrinsic, transcendental value, without believing in a personal God
  • Dworkin’s goal is to emphasize “the importance of what is shared” by subscribers of both “godly and godless religion.” That, in a word, he thinks, is faith. And while believers may think their faith in God differs substantially from the “faith” of an atheist, Dworkin’s rather startling conclusion is that the faith of theists is necessarily identical to that of religious atheists.
Javier E

Chief Rabbi: atheism has failed. Only religion can defeat the new barbarians ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...igion-can-fight-the-barbarians

atheism faith civilization religion morality relativism individualism

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • reading the new atheists.
  • Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order, the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom, and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?
  • religion has social, cultural and political consequences, and you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact. That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The history of Europe since the 18th century has been the story of successive attempts to find alternatives to God as an object of worship, among them the nation state, race and the Communist Manifesto. After this cost humanity two world wars, a Cold War and a hundred million lives, we have turned to more pacific forms of idolatry, among them the market, the liberal democratic state and the consumer society,
  • This is what a society built on materialism, individualism and moral relativism looks like. It maximises personal freedom but at a cost.
  • This freedom, energising and exciting as it is, is also profoundly disintegrative, making it very difficult for individuals to find any stable communal support, very difficult for any community to count on the responsible participation of its individual members. It opens solitary men and women to the impact of a lowest common denominator, commercial culture.’
  • In one respect the new atheists are right. The threat to western freedom in the 21st century is not from fascism or communism but from a religious fundamentalism combining hatred of the other, the pursuit of power and contempt for human rights.
  • But the idea that this can be defeated by individualism and relativism is naive almost beyond belief. Humanity has been here before.
  • The barbarians win. They always do.
  • The new barbarians are the fundamentalists who seek to impose a single truth on a plural world. Though many of them claim to be religious, they are actually devotees of the will to power. Defeating them will take the strongest possible defence of freedom, and strong societies are always moral societies
  • That does not mean that they need be religious. It is just that, in the words of historian Will Durant, ‘There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.’
  • I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other
  • A century after a civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also. That should concern all of us, believers and non-believers alike.
julia rhodes

Atheist vs. Atheist? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...atheist-vs-atheist-what

brain science bias knowledge psychology atheist

shared by julia rhodes on 20 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • After all, individuals who lack belief in a deity are, at least in their unbelief, essentially the same, right? But there’s a subtle—yet crucial—difference in degrees of incredulity that can meaningfully distinguish one’s person’s atheism from another’s. So if there’s an atheist in your life (or you’re one yourself), you might wish to consider just what sort of atheist they (or you) represent.
  • The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007). Its author, the prominent French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, makes the distinction between the “dogmatic atheist” and the “non-dogmatic atheist.”
  • For the assuredness of their atheism borders on an arrogance comparable to that of their fundamentalist-believing counterparts. In their outspoken conviction, they’re quite prepared to go on record declaring the non-existence of any supernatural being. Which is to say, their claim is not expressed as an opinion but as undeniable fact.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As compared to dogmatic atheists, non-dogmatic disbelievers go only one (modest) step beyond the undecided agnostic. It’s accurate to say that neither the non-dogmatic atheist nor the agnostic holds any faith in the existence of a god. But the more tolerant (or less “doctrinaire”) atheist—unlike the agnostic, who prefers to remain non-committal—is still ready to take a stand on the matter, asserting (though as an opinion): “I believe that no god (and certainly not God in the traditional sense)  exists.”
  • But even though they strive to keep an open mind on all things—for they’re oriented toward the world empirically and governed by facts rather than faith— non-dogmatic atheists simply can’t find any compelling evidence for a (monotheistic or biblical) god's existence.
  • To them, all that humans are able to know for sure exists in the realm of the relative. Anything beyond that points to the insoluble mysteries of the universe—which even today’s scientists recognize may be forever beyond their ever-more-precise instruments of knowing.
  • Coming full circle, if scientists in general—and physicists in particular—can’t ever be absolutely certain about Absolutes, how much more difficult must it be for metaphysicists to attain such certitude? To answer my own question: very difficult, indeed!
huffem4

During coronavirus, even trusting in science feels like a form of faith | Prospect Maga... - 2 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...hurch-religion-online-services

faith psychology COVID-19

shared by huffem4 on 18 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • We need badly to maintain our trust in the present strategy and coming cure, but terror loosens the senses, and sometimes it feels like we are fruitlessly blundering in the dark, with no end in sight.
  • Science—not religion—is what will end this crisis.
  • One of the biggest challenges people face in quarantine is the lack of structure
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This is one of the failings of aggressive atheism; in dismissing faith as ‘illogical’ or trivial, its adherents totally miss the point that everything that makes life living—friends and family, bad contemporary art, pastries, kissing—are all ultimately pointless and irrational but they sustain us, keep us charging forwards.
  • The grip of a crisis demands we surrender control—and quite rightly—to forces bigger than us: the long arm of a newly-paternalistic state, the unknowable complexities of science. Why not faith, too?
Javier E

Can Political Theology Save Secularism? | Religion & Politics - 0 views

religionandpolitics.org/...tical-theology-save-secularism

religion capitalism liberalism god secularism politics theology

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy
  • As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.
  • At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Botton’s central obsession is the insane ways bourgeois postmoderns try to live, namely in a perpetual upward swing of ambition and achievement, where failure indicates character deficiency despite an almost total lack of social infrastructure to help us navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and death. But he seems uninterested in how those structures were destroyed or what it might take to rebuild them
  • Botton wants to keep bourgeois secularism and add a few new quasi-religious social routines. Quasi-religious social routines may indeed be a part of the solution, as we shall see, but they cannot be simply flung atop a regime as indifferent to human values as liberal capitalism.
  • Citizens see the structure behind the façade and lose faith in the myth of the state as a dispassionate, egalitarian arbiter of conflict. Once theological passions can no longer be sublimated in material affluence and the fiction of representative democracy, it is little surprise to see them break out in movements that are, on both the left and the right, explicitly hostile to the liberal state.
  • Western politics have an auto-immune disorder: they are structured to pretend that their notions of reason, right, and sovereignty are detached from a deeply theological heritage. When pressed by war and economic dysfunction, liberal ideas prove as compatible with zealotry and domination as any others.
  • Secularism is not strictly speaking a religion, but it represents an orientation toward religion that serves the theological purpose of establishing a hierarchy of legitimate social values. Religion must be “privatized” in liberal societies to keep it out of the way of economic functioning. In this view, legitimate politics is about making the trains run on time and reducing the federal deficit; everything else is radicalism. A surprising number of American intellectuals are able to persuade themselves that this vision of politics is sufficient, even though the train tracks are crumbling, the deficit continues to gain on the GDP, and millions of citizens are sinking into the dark mire of debt and permanent unemployment.
  • Critchley has made a career forging a philosophical account of human ethical responsibility and political motivation. His question is: after the rational hopes of the Enlightenment corroded into nihilism, how do humans write a believable story about what their existence means in the world? After the death of God, how do we account for our feelings of moral responsibility, and how might that account motivate us to resist the deadening political system we face?
  • The question is what to do in the face of the unmistakable religious and political nihilism currently besetting Western democracies.
  • both Botton and Critchley believe the solution involves what Derrida called a “religion without religion”—for Critchley a “faith of the faithless,” for Botton a “religion for atheists.”
  • a new political becoming will require a complete break with the status quo, a new political sphere that we understand as our own deliberate creation, uncoupled from the theological fictions of natural law or God-given rights
  • Critchley proposes as the foundation of politics “the poetic construction of a supreme fiction … a fiction that we know to be a fiction and yet in which we believe nonetheless.” Following the French philosopher Alain Badiou and the Apostle Paul, Critchley conceives political “truth” as something like fidelity: a radical loyalty to the historical moment where true politics came to life.
  • But unlike an evangelist, Critchley understands that attempting to fill the void with traditional religion is to slip back into a slumber that reinforces institutions desperate to maintain the political and economic status quo. Only in our condition of brokenness and finitude, uncomforted by promises of divine salvation, can we be open to a connection with others that might mark the birth of political resistance
  • This is the crux of the difference between Critchley’s radical faithless faith and Botton’s bourgeois secularism. Botton has imagined religion as little more than a coping mechanism for the “terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability,” seemingly unaware that the pain and vulnerability may intensify many times over. It won’t be enough to simply to sublimate our terror in confessional restaurants and atheist temples. The recognition of finitude, the weight of our nothingness, can hollow us into a different kind of self: one without illusions or reputations or private property, one with nothing but radical openness to others. Only then can there be the possibility of meaning, of politics, of hope.
Javier E

Study Finds That the Number of Protestant Americans Is Declining - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nt-americans-is-declining.html

religion US survey God agnosticism atheism trends

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • For the first time since researchers began tracking the religious identity of Americans, fewer than half said they were Protestants, a steep decline from 40 years ago when Protestant churches claimed the loyalty of more than two-thirds of the population.
  • it was not just liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists or Episcopalians, who abandoned their faith, but also more conservative evangelical and “born again” Protestants. The losses were among white Protestants
  • When they leave, instead of switching churches, they join the growing ranks who do not identify with any religion. Nearly one in five Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”
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  • The largest single faith group is Catholics, who make up about 22 percent of the population. Their numbers have held steady, mostly because an influx of immigrants
  • The “Nones,” as they are called, now make up the nation’s second-largest religious grouping
  • more than one-third of those ages 18 to 22 are religiously unaffiliated.
  • “The significant majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to be left-leaning, tend to support the Democratic Party, support gay marriage and environmental causes,”
  • it is not clear that Americans are necessarily moving toward the European model. The Pew report found that even among Americans who claimed no religion, few qualified as purely secular. Two-thirds say they still believe in God, and one-fifth say they pray every day. Only 12 percent of the religiously unaffiliated group said they were atheists and 17 percent agnostic.
Sean Kirkpatrick

Conflicts between science and religion - 0 views

www.iep.utm.edu/s-rel

science knowledge

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12
     
    I found another article that highlighted the clear conflict between science and religion as the author reflects on the work of all the scientists we studied, including Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, three of the most famous scientists in history. The author highlights the struggle between church and the findings of these scientists. For example, in the Steven Hawkings movie, the narrator talked about how Newton's discovery of gravity and his laws of motion went against what the church believed. In the article, the author highlights this conflict when he says, "Interestingly, this led to two diametrically opposed inferences. On the one hand, many people saw the success of Newton (and many people see the continued success of physics to the present day) as an argument for atheism. If God is not needed to explain the behavior of the world, and if the cosmos, like a giant clock, operates on mechanical principles alone, then one has no reason to suppose that God even exists. There are no explanatory gaps left for God to fill. Newton himself would have rejected this. He considered God to have a vital role in setting up the initial conditions for the universe."
Javier E

Why Our Children Don't Think There Are Moral Facts - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...nt-think-there-are-moral-facts

morality fact truth relativism ethics

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts.
  • the overwhelming majority of college freshman in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.
  • where is the view coming from?
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.”
  • So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view that there are objective moral facts?
  • For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives)
  • Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.
  • worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both
  • How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality
  • Kids are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion.
  • Here’s a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions? — Copying homework assignments is wrong. — Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior. — All men are created equal. — It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism. — It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol. — Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat. — Drug dealers belong in prison.
  • The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.
  • In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.
  • It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on.
  • If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?
  • the curriculum sets our children up for doublethink. They are told that there are no moral facts in one breath even as the next tells them how they ought to behave.
  • Our children deserve a consistent intellectual foundation. Facts are things that are true. Opinions are things we believe. Some of our beliefs are true. Others are not. Some of our beliefs are backed by evidence. Others are not.
  • Value claims are like any other claims: either true or false, evidenced or not.
  • The hard work lies not in recognizing that at least some moral claims are true but in carefully thinking through our evidence for which of the many competing moral claims is correct.
  • Moral truths are not the same as scientific truths or mathematical truths. Yet they may still be used a guiding principle for our individual lives as well as our laws.But there is equal danger of giving moral judgments the designation of truth as there is in not doing so. Many people believe that abortion is murder on the same level as shooting someone with a gun. But many others do not. So is it true that abortion is murder?Moral principles can become generally accepted and then form the basis for our laws. But many long accepted moral principles were later rejected as being faulty. "Separate but equal" is an example. Judging homosexual relationships as immoral is another example.
  • Whoa! That Einstein derived an equation is a fact. But the equation represents a theory that may have to be tweaked at some point in the future. It may be a fact that the equation foretold the violence of atomic explosions, but there are aspects of nature that elude the equation. Remember "the theory of everything?"
  • Here is a moral fact, this is a sermon masquerading as a philosophical debate on facts, opinions and truth. This professor of religion is asserting that the government via common core is teaching atheism via the opinion vs fact.He is arguing, in a dishonest form, that public schools should be teaching moral facts. Of course moral facts is code for the Ten Commandments.
  • As a fourth grade teacher, I try to teach students to read critically, including distinguishing between facts and opinions as they read (and have been doing this long before the Common Core arrived, by the way). It's not always easy for children to grasp the difference. I can only imagine the confusion that would ensue if I introduced a third category -- moral "facts" that can't be proven but are true nonetheless!
  • horrible acts occur not because of moral uncertainty, but because people are too sure that their views on morality are 100% true, and anyone who fails to recognize and submit themselves are heathens who deserve death.I can't think of any case where a society has suffered because people are too thoughtful and open-minded to different perspectives on moral truth.In any case, it's not an elementary school's job to teach "moral truths."
  • The characterization of moral anti-realism as some sort of fringe view in philosophy is misleading. Claims that can be true or false are, it seems, 'made true' by features of the world. It's not clear to many in philosophy (like me) just what features of the world could make our moral claims true. We are more likely to see people's value claims as making claims about, and enforcing conformity to, our own (contingent) social norms. This is not to hold, as Mr. McBrayer seems to think follows, that there are no reasons to endorse or criticize these social norms.
  • This is nonsense. Giving kids the tools to distinguish between fact and opinion is hard enough in an age when Republicans actively deny reality on Fox News every night. The last thing we need is to muddy their thinking with the concept of "moral facts."A fact is a belief that everyone _should_ agree upon because it is observable and testable. Morals are not agreed upon by all. Consider the hot button issue of abortion.
  • Truthfully, I'm not terribly concerned that third graders will end up taking these lessons in the definition of fact versus opinion to the extremes considered here, or take them as a license to cheat. That will come much later, when they figure out, as people always have, what they can get a way with. But Prof. McBrayer, with his blithe expectation that all the grownups know that there moral "facts"? He scares the heck out of me.
  • I've long chafed at the language of "fact" v. "opinion", which is grounded in a very particular, limited view of human cognition. In my own ethics courses, I work actively to undermine the distinction, focusing instead on considered judgment . . . or even more narrowly, on consideration itself. (See http://wp.me/p5Ag0i-6M )
  • The real waffle here is the very concept of "moral facts." Our statements of values, even very important ones are, obviously, not facts. Trying to dress them up as if they are facts, to me, argues for a pretty serious moral weakness on the part of those advancing the idea.
  • Our core values are not important because they are facts. They are important because we collectively hold them and cherish them. To lean on the false crutch of "moral facts" to admit the weakness of your own moral convictions.
  • I would like to believe that there is a core of moral facts/values upon which all humanity can agree, but it would be tough to identify exactly what those are.
  • For the the ancient philosophers, reality comprised the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (what we might now call ethics, science and art), seeing these as complementary and inseparable, though distinct, realms. With the ascendency of science in our culture as the only valid measure of reality to the detriment of ethics and art (that is, if it is not observable and provable, it is not real), we have turned the good and the beautiful into mere "social constructs" that have no validity on their own. While I am sympathetic in many ways with Dr. McBrayer's objections, I think he falls into the trap of discounting the Good and The Beautiful as valid in and of themselves, and tries, instead, to find ways to give them validity through the True. I think his argument would have been stronger had he used the language of validity rather than the language of truth. Goodness, Truth and Beauty each have their own validity, though interdependent and inseparable. When we artificially extract one of these and give it primacy, we distort reality and alienate ourselves from it.
  • Professor McBrayer seems to miss the major point of the Common Core concern: can students distinguish between premises based on (reasonably construed) fact and premises based on emotion when evaluating conclusions? I would prefer that students learn to reason rather than be taught moral 'truth' that follows Professor McBrayer's logic.
  • Moral issues cannot scientifically be treated on the level that Prof. McBrayer is attempting to use in this column: true or false, fact or opinion or both. Instead, they should be treated as important characteristics of the systematic working of a society or of a group of people in general. One can compare the working of two groups of people: one in which e.g. cheating and lying is acceptable, and one in which they are not. One can use historical or model examples to show the consequences and the working of specific systems of morals. I think that this method - suitably adjusted - can be used even in second grade.
  • Relativism has nothing to do with liberalism. The second point is that I'm not sure it does all that much harm, because I have yet to encounter a student who thought that he or she had to withhold judgment on those who hold opposing political views!
Javier E

"Everybody Worships" - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...everybody-worships.html

grace idolatry religion

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 12 - Cached
  • DFW's work itself points to an understanding of human nature brimming with religious insight.
  • Our addictions - to fame, power, beauty, wealth - he understood these as petty idols, replacing transcendent, ultimate concerns with the penultimate, taking good things and making them everything.
  • In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
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  • if you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it.
  • The term for what he's describing, in Christian theology, is grace.
Annie Procacini

Christopher Hitchens explains why "Religion Poisons Everything" - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

science religion atheism

shared by Annie Procacini on 15 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Annie Procacini on 15 Sep 12
     
    ***Credit to Sophie Mester who showed me this
Javier E

Did Zeus Exist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...did-zeus-exist

deism Greece gods agnosticism atheism ancient

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • This set me thinking about why we are so certain that Zeus never existed. Of course, we are in no position to say that he did.  But are we really in a position to say that he didn’t?
  • as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned. 
  • Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? 
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • what the Greeks saw as experiences of divine actions in their lives. ”The greatest evidence for the existence of gods is that piety works . . . the converse is that impiety leads to disaster,
  • There were also rituals, associated with the many cults of specific gods, that for some worshippers “created a sense of contact with the divine. One knows that the gods exist because one feels their presence during the drama of the mysteries or the elation of the choral dance.
  • there were “epiphanies” that could “indicate not merely a visible or audible epiphany (whether in the light of day or through a dream . . .) but also any clear expression of a god’s favor such as weather conditions hampering an enemy, a miraculous escape, or a cure;
  • how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do?  What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life?
  • shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?
  • We may well think that our world contains little or no evidence of the supernatural.  But that is no reason to think the same was true of the Greek world.
  • I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded.  There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks.  We have no reason to make this assumption.
Javier E

Jon Meacham on Why We Question God | TIME Ideas | TIME.com - 2 views

ideas.time.com/...why-we-question-god

Christianity God agnosticism atheism faith doubt redemption

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Hamilton was no militant atheist. He was not contemptuous of faith or of the faithful—far from it; he was a longtime churchgoer—and he was therefore, I think, all the more a threat to unreflective Christianity. At heart, he was questioning whether the Christian tradition of encouraging a temporal moral life required belief in a divine order.
  • The questions with which he grappled were eternal, essential, and are with us still: how does a culture that tends to be religious continue to hold to a belief in an all-powerful, all-loving divinity beyond time and space given the evidence of science and of experience?
  • faith has become not a possession but a hope.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • My own view of these things is that we simply do not know enough to judge the ultimate truth of the claims of theology. (I’m with Hamlet, who remarked to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) Perhaps we will one day; perhaps not. Meanwhile, given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.
  • In his view that faith was “not a possession but a hope,” Hamilton was tapping into an ancient tradition. As the author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews wrote, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”—in this sense, religious faith is way of interpreting experience that allows for the possibility of the redemptive. Faith in this sense assumes that scripture and tradition are the works of human hands and hearts, efforts undertaken to explain the seemingly inexplicable. Faith in this sense is inextricably tied to doubt; it is an attempt, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to squint and struggle to “see through a glass darkly,” as Paul wrote in Corinthians. Faith without such doubt has never been part of the Christian tradition; it is telling, I think, that one of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence—he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers.
catbclark

In Age of Science, Is Religion 'Harmful Superstition'? - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...ling-atheism-people-ngbooktalk

science religion superstition bias

shared by catbclark on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • God is not only dead, author avers. He never lived. Not to mention the deaths of kids treated with faith instead of science-based medicine.
  • Another is free will: the idea that at any point in time all alternatives are open to us. This is the dualistic free will maintained by religions when they say you can choose to accept Jesus as your savior, or being homosexual is a choice. Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make, which is the output of our materialistic brains.
  • They’re incompatible first of all, because they both compete to find truths about the universe. There are some fundamental truths about the universe that believers have to accept in order to be religious.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A purposeless, purely physical universe, in which human life is accidental and human consciousness is what you call “a neuronal illusion,” is a bleak vision, isn’t it?
carolinewren

National Geographic Asks 'Is Religion Harmful Superstition?' - 0 views

newsbusters.org/...-religion-harmful-superstition

religion superstition bias

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In a recent piece for National Geographic, Book Talk curator Simon Worrall entitled his headline, “In Age of Science, Is Religion 'Harmful Superstition'?” For the answer, he gave platform to Jerry Coyne, author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.
  • Coyne, an atheist and University of Chicago professor of Ecology and Evolution, answered, among other questions, why “are religion and science incompatible.”
  • “[T]here are a number of things about evolution and science that undermine religion,” Coyne responded, including “the fact that the Genesis story is wrong.” “There’s no evidence that there’s any qualitatively different feature about humans from other species, except maybe for language” – language that “could have evolved via culture.”
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  • “We’re not special products of God’s creation,” he concluded
  • As far as the “dualistic free will maintained by religions when they say you can choose to accept Jesus as your savior, or being homosexual is a choice,” Coyne decided, “Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make.”
  • “We are creatures of physics, made of molecules,” he persisted. “Therefore, our thoughts and behaviors are also the results of molecular motions.”
  • “[T]hey both compete to find truths about the universe,”
  • “Religion doesn’t have a methodology to weed out what’s false.” (And maybe that’s why it’s called faith.) “[I]t’s a way of fooling yourself,” he said, through “methods” of “authority, revelation, dogma, and indoctrination.”
  • religion is, as Coyne claims, “the most widespread and harmful form of superstition.”
  • “Since I see all religious belief as unfounded and irrational,” Coyne responded, “I consider religion to be superstition.”
  • “People get killed because they don’t share your beliefs.”
  • “The less a religion has to do with a tangible God, the less it hands out moral dictates and the better it is,” he pushed
  • (On a more legitimate note, Coyne then addressed the devastating story of Ashley King, who died after her parents decided to treat her bone cancer with prayer instead of medical treatment.)
  • “It doesn’t have anything to do with God,” he insisted. “It has to do with a commonality of feeling prompted by nature and the arts.
  • National Geographic has produced God-related stories before, including ones that boast “intolerant attitudes” in the Bible.
carolinewren

If Evolution Has Implications for Religion, Can We Justify Teaching It in Public School... - 0 views

www.evolutionnews.org/...if_evolution_ha096541.html

evolution religion teaching

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Evolutionary biology is a science, so it can be legally taught in public schools when it's treated as a science and isn't promoted as a support for atheism or materialism.
  • few would deny that Darwinian evolution has larger implications that aren't friendly to theism
  • the Court held in Lynch v. Donnelly that "not every law that confers an indirect, remote, or incidental benefit upon [religion] is, for that reason alone, constitutionally invalid"
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Do the larger religious (or anti-religious) implications of a scientific theory make it inadmissible for instruction in public schools? They shouldn't.
  • just because we're declaring the teaching of evolution to be constitutional doesn't mean we that it has no connections to religion
  • while it may sound odd to hear that we can (sometimes) declare something constitutional to teach in public schools even though it touches upon religion, there's good legal precedent for such a finding.
  • a government policy establishes religion if its "principal or primary effect" is one that "advances or inhibits" religion.
  • the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion
  • a government policy is unconstitutional if it has a "primary" or "principal" effect that advances (or inhibits) religion. However, in light of this second part, the Supreme Court has also developed a legal doctrine called the "incidental effects" or "secondary effects" doctrine which says that government law or policy may have "secondary" or "incidental" effects that touch upon religion and not violate the Establishment Clause.
  • Secondary effects that touch upon religion are not constitutionally fatal.
  • the conversation focuses strictly on the science, the implications are still there.
  • one can legally justify teaching evolution while being sensitive to the fact that it has larger implications that touch upon the religious beliefs of many Americans.
  • evolutionary biology is based upon science, when we teach it as a science, the primary effect is to advance scientific knowledge.
  • a scientific theory like evolution does speak to ultimate questions about origins, which are also addressed by religion
  • it certainly touches upon religious questions. But when we discuss Darwinian evolution strictly on a scientific level, any effects upon religion are "secondary" or "incidental" compared to their primary effect of advancing scientific knowledge.
  • if creation science were a scientific theory, it could have been taught because any its touching upon religion would have been a secondary effect
  • approach was also followed in Crowley v. Smithsonian Institution, where a federal judge rejected arguments that Smithsonian exhibits on evolution established "secular humanism" because the "impact [on religion] is at most incidental to the primary effect of presenting a body of scientific knowledge"
  • Because evolution is based upon science, any effects upon religion would not bar its teaching.
  • [I]f a theory has scientific value and evidence to support it, its primary effect would be to advance knowledge of the natural world, not to advance religion
  • ultimate goal of schools is to educate students. Where a theory has scientific value and supporting evidence, it provides a basis for knowledge. Whether it coincidentally advances religion should not matter.
  • if government aid "is allocated on the basis of neutral, secular criteria that neither favor nor disfavor religion, and is made available to both religious and secular beneficiaries on a nondiscriminatory basis," then any effects upon religion are merely incidental.
  • best of both worlds. It allows science to be taught in the science classroom while respecting the beliefs of people who have religious objections to evolution.
Javier E

Religion Without God - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...religion-without-god.html

religion atheism ritual church language attitude psychology

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 14 - No Cached
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  • Atheist services have sprung up around the country, even in the Bible Belt.Many of them are connected to Sunday Assembly, which was founded in Britain by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans. They are avowed atheists
  • they have created a movement that draws thousands of people to events with music, sermons, readings, reflections and (to judge by photos) even the waving of upraised hands. There are nearly 200 Sunday Assembly gatherings worldwide.
  • “Singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people — and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. Which part of that is not to like?”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • rituals change the way we pay attention as much as — perhaps more than — they express belief.
  • Religion is fundamentally a practice that helps people to look at the world as it is and yet to experience it — to some extent, in some way — as it should be
  • rituals work, if by “work” we mean that they change people’s sense of their lives. It turns out that saying that you are grateful makes you feel grateful. Saying that you are thankful makes you feel thankful. To a world so familiar with the general unreliability of language, that may seem strange. But it is true.
  • In a study in which undergraduates were assigned to write weekly either about things they were grateful or thankful for; hassles; or “events or circumstances that affected you in the past week,” those who wrote about gratitude felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the coming week. There have now been many such studies.
  • ritual isn’t about expressing religious commitment at all, but about doing something in a way that marks the moment as different from the everyday and forces you to see it as important. Their point is that performing a ritual focuses your attention on some moment and deems it worthy of respect
  • Much of what people actually do in church — finding fellowship, celebrating birth and marriage, remembering those we have lost, affirming the values we cherish — can be accomplished with a sense of God as metaphor, as story, or even without any mention of God at all.
Emilio Ergueta

Does God Exist? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now - 1 views

philosophynow.org/...Does_God_Exist

god philosophy

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • On April 8, 1966, Time magazine carried a lead story for which the cover was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright, red letters against the dark background: “IS GOD DEAD?” The story described the so-called ‘Death of God’ movement then current in American theology. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it seemed that the news of God’s demise was “greatly exaggerated.” For at the same time that theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of young philosophers was re-discovering His vitality.
  • Back in the 1940s and ’50s it was widely believed among philosophers that any talk about God is meaningless, since it is not verifiable by the five senses.
  • Its downfall meant a resurgence of metaphysics, along with other traditional problems of philosophy which Verificationism had suppressed. Accompanying this resurgence came something altogether unanticipated: a renaissance of Christian philosophy.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The turning point probably came in 1967 with the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds, which applied the tools of analytic philosophy to questions in the philosophy of religion with an unprecedented rigor and creativity
  • The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology – that branch of theology which seeks to prove God’s existence without appeal to the resources of authoritative divine revelation – for instance, through philosophical argument.
  • the New Atheism is, in fact, a pop-cultural phenomenon lacking in intellectual muscle and blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It tends to reflect the scientism of a bygone generation, rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.
Javier E

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on Faith, Religion, Tolerance, Moderates, Bible, God, Is... - 0 views

www.beliefnet.com/...-Religion-Built-Upon-Lies.aspx

faith reason religion evidence rationality fundamentalism God

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.
  • Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?
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