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So when the interviewer asked me if children need spirituality, I said sure, but offered a more helpful definition—one that doesn’t exclude 91 percent of the people who have ever lived. Spirituality is about being awake. It’s the attempt to transcend the mundane, sleepwalking experience of life we all fall into, to tap into the wonder of being a conscious and grateful thing in the midst of an astonishing universe. It doesn’t require religion. In fact, religion can and often does blunt our awareness by substituting false and frankly inferior wonders for real ones. It’s a fine joke on ourselves that most of what we call spirituality is actually about putting ourselves to sleep.
atheists in North America are are disliked because they are distrusted, and that untrustworthy people are often assumed to be atheists.
Why the distrust? Well, it's partly because they are an unknown quantity - many Americans never come across an open atheists - but also partly because people who think they are being watched at least claim to be trustworthy. Probably they think that other people will be trustworthy too, if they think they are being watched by a supernatural agent.
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All more good evidence that one important factor that draws people to belief in God is fear and anxiety, and that stable social systems that are common in wealthy countries are contributing to the increasing numbers of non-believers.
many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality. A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong. After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?” And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?
the reason atheists are disliked is specifically because they are distrusted.
They also found that the degree of this distrust is governed by the strength of belief that supernatural monitoring helps to enforce good behaviour. Those who believe this are most likely to distrust atheists.
disputants in the religion debate are talking past each other because they do not have a sufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand against.
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it cannot be the case that the views of someone who is most immersed in or knows most about a religion always trump those of a relatively uninformed outsider. People who live and breathe a faith know more about it than those who do not – but this quantitative advantage does not guarantee better qualitative judgements. If it did, by the same logic, we should take the word of the earnest astrologer of 40 years' standing over the clear evidence that it's all baloney. Indeed, being deeply immersed may be a positive disadvantage, in that it might make it impossible to take a clear-sighted, impartial view. So Dawkins and his ilk are correct when they say that they are not obliged to become experts in theology in order to make criticisms of religion.
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Of course, there is a level of ignorance that makes reasonable criticism impossible. But where that is the case, it should always be possible to point out what elementary mistake the critic has made. It is never reasonable to fob someone off on the basis that they do not understand: it is always necessary to explain what they do not understand. But also – and here's the rub – it's also essential to make it understandable. Rule one of intellectual engagement is that all parties must sincerely attempt both to understand others and to make themselves understood.
psychologists Kurt Gray (University of Maryland), Anne Knickman and Daniel Wegner (Harvard University) have shown that people regard brain-dead individuals as less mentally aware than individuals who are completely, stone-cold dead.
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People tend to accept that the dead are likely to be mentally impaired. They're less likely to be aware of their environment, have emotions, a personality, to remember events from their life, be able to influence current events, know right from wrong.
Bizarrely enough, however, the dead score higher on all of these than the brain dead. In the words of Gray et al, the brain-dead are more dead than dead! -
For the religious, it didn't matter whether whether they just said David was dead, or went into details about the corpse. Religious folks thought that David's mind survived regardless - except course, if he was brain dead. Dead people have a mind, brain-dead people don't.
For the non-religious, the corpse mattered. If there was a corpse, then David's mind was dead - just as dead as if he was brain dead. That's good - that;s what the non-religious are supposed to say. Dead people don't think.
But if they didn't mention the corpse, well then even the non-religious were tempted to say that David's disembodied mind persisted somehow. They weren't as confident as the religious, but there seems to be a nagging suspicion that David's mind lingered on after death. - 1 more annotation(s)...
Opponents of religion – anti-clericals, humanists, rationalists or whatever we want to call ourselves – ought to recognise that religion is a complicated box of tricks, containing much wisdom as well as folly, along with diversity, dynamism and disagreement. And we need to realise that many modern believers have moved a long way from the positions of their predecessors: as Mill once said, they may believe they are loyal to an old-time religion when in reality they have subjected it to “modifications amounting to an essential change of its character”. In particular, they may not accept the idea of God as an actually existing entity, so arguments for atheism will not disturb them; and they will be aware that there has always been more to religion than belief in God. The dividing lines between religiosity and secularism, or between belief and disenchantment, are not getting any clearer as time goes by, and if there has been a lot of traffic travelling from the camp of religion to the camp of disbelief in the past couple of centuries, it has followed many different paths, and is bound for many different destinations.
Led by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,” atheism has taken on a new life in popular religious debate. Dawkins’s brand of atheism is scientific in that it views the “God hypothesis” as obviously inadequate to the known facts. In particular, he employs the facts of evolution to challenge the need to postulate God as the designer of the universe. For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.
Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.
In the last few years there has emerged another style of atheism that takes such experiences seriously. One of its best exponents is Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia. (For a good introduction to his views, see Kitcher’s essay in “The Joy of Secularism,” perceptively discussed last month by James Wood in The New Yorker.)
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Instead of focusing on the scientific inadequacy of theistic arguments, Kitcher critically examines the spiritual experiences underlying religious belief, particularly noting that they depend on specific and contingent social and cultural conditions. Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning. This “cultural relativism” argument is an old one, but Kitcher shows that it is still a serious challenge. (He is also refreshingly aware that he needs to show why a similar argument does not apply to his own position, since atheistic beliefs are themselves often a result of the community in which one lives.)
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Kitcher takes seriously the question of whether atheism can replace the sense of meaning and purpose that believers find in religion. Pushed to the intellectual limit, many will prefer a religion of hope if faith is not possible.
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Perry defines atheism: “An atheist is someone who not only doesn't believe in God, but believes, with some confidence, that there isn’t a God.” Oh no, it ain’t! That certainly describes some atheists, but not others. I, for instance, tend to stick to the etymology of the term, a-theism, meaning without a positive belief in god(s), so I consider myself an a-theist in pretty much the same manner in which most people are a-unicornists: they don’t believe in unicorns, not because they know that there aren’t any, but simply because they see neither evidence nor reason to hold that particular belief. As Hume put it, “A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence,” and when the evidence approaches zero...
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“When you’re converted to atheism, the world goes from meaningful to meaningless, from caring to uncaring, from hopeful to hopeless.” Bullshit on stilts. Meaning doesn’t come from without, it is constructed by us through our reflections on the world and our interactions with fellow human beings. That, of course, is true also for religious people, except they don’t seem to realize it. As for caring, well, if we are talking about the Christian god, particularly the Old Testament nut job, I’d much rather not be cared for, lest I be forced to slaughter innocents and rape women just to please His Nuttiness and pander to His cosmic narcissism. And hopeless? Says who? I have always been, and continue to be, very hopeful, both in terms of my personal life (the next exciting thing is likely just around the corner, if I keep looking!) and about humanity in general. While it is demonstrably true that we have a penchant for fucking things up royally, there is also no question in my mind that we have done, ahem, miracles in terms of human flourishing since the time of the Tower of Babel — and certainly with no thanks due to imaginary deities.
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It might be that if they think that atheists are common, they conclude that some of the people they've met around the place must be atheists after all - and they were OK. Alternatively, they might think that, if there are a lot of atheists, then a lot of people must think that atheists are OK. There are various other ways in which simply being more numerous can make a group of 'others' seem less weird.
Personally, however, I think there is a special feature of atheism that separates it from many other kinds of predjudice - and that's the fact that atheism is a choice. When there are only very few atheists, then the only people who are going to 'come out' as atheists are likely to be those who are a little maverick.
If lots of people choose to be atheists, then it's clearly something that 'normal' people do. In other words, distrust of atheists when they are a tiny minority might well be a perfectly rational rule of thumb!
Atheists recognise that we need evidence in order to come to reliable conclusions about reality and that, so far, those who claim there is a god have signally failed to provide it. And atheists care about reality: not what it might be comforting to believe, or what has traditionally been believed, or what we have been instructed to believe. And this focus on reality, far from diminishing our experience of life, as so many religious people imagine, actually makes our lives all the richer: once you have faced up to the reality that there is no evidence to suggest there is another life after this one, it becomes all the more important to live this finite life to the full, learning and growing, and caring for others, because this is their only life, too, and there is no reason to believe there will be heavenly compensation for their earthly sufferings.
An atheist life, well lived, leads to the only kind of afterlife there is any evidence for whatsoever: the immortality of living on in the fond memories of those who loved us.
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In practice faith is always a pick-and-mix affair: believers emphasise those bits that sit comfortably with them, whilst mostly ignoring those bits that do not, or concocting elaborate interpretations to allow them to pretend they do not mean what they actually say.
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subjective experience cannot tell us anything about God. Knowing what kind of god someone believes in tells us a great deal about that person – but nothing whatsoever about the truth or otherwise of the existence of any god at all.
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Atheism and agnosticism. If you ask some people, atheism is just a sexed up version of agnosticism. After all, atheism is about what you believe (or don’t believe), and agnosticism is about what you know (or don’t) — so when we say that we’re atheists, we’re just putting accent on the fact that God is really really really super unlikely. But others will say that atheism and agnosticism are perfect companions. They’ll tell you that agnosticism is just a closeted form of atheism. After all (they’ll say), since agnostics dislike being called ‘theists’, they must be atheists — the one position collapses into the other.
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For Russell, following Hume, deduction and induction involve different degrees of warranted certainty. The idea here is that we ought not have as much confidence in inductive proof as we do with deductive proof. Logic and mathematics occupy a kind of heaven, an epistemic ideal; inductive proof, like most of our commonsense knowledge, will always be in perdition. As a result, while it’s tempting to believe that “Rain is wet”, I am really only warranted in believing that “rain is probably wet”. Likewise, you’re only warranted to believe that God is really really really not likely, though you might brand yourself as an atheist.
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Grayling believes that Russell is wrong to think that you are warranted in being any less certain about induction than deduction. In other words, Grayling thinks that it is just as provable that rain is wet as it is to say that 2+2 = 4. Instead of putting deduction in heaven, and induction in hell, the two modes of reasoning stand side-by-side. They just seem to be adhering to different standards.
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The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has "done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts", reworking them into a "great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world". He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.
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He is very cross, for example, with the question in the current census that asks: "What is your religion?" The British Humanist Society has just conducted a poll that asked those surveyed if they were religious – to which 65% said no. But when asked, "What is your religion?" 61% of the very same people answered Christian. "You see, they say, 'Oh well, nominally I suppose I'm Christian.' But two-thirds of the population don't regard themselves as religious! So we have to try to persuade society as a whole to recognise that religious groups are self-constituted interest groups; they exist to promote their point of view. Now, in a liberal democracy they have every right to do so. But they have no greater right than anybody else, any political party or Women's Institute or trade union. But for historical reasons they have massively overinflated influence – faith-based schools, religious broadcasting, bishops in the House of Lords, the presence of religion at every public event. We've got to push it back to its right size."
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Atheists, according to Grayling, divide into three broad categories. There are those for whom this secular objection to the privileged status of religion in public life is the driving force of their concern. Then there are those, "like my chum Richard Dawkins", who are principally concerned with the metaphysical question of God's existence. "And I would certainly say there is an intrinsic problem about belief in falsehood." In other words, even if a person's faith did no harm to anybody, Grayling still wouldn't like it. "But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that really concerns me the most."
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Unless you as an atheist are willing to disparage all religious people, describe them all as imbeciles and creeps, mock every text and thinker they have ever produced, then you must be some sort of deluded, self-hating, sellout, subverting the rise of the Mighty Atheist Political Juggernaut (about which more anon).
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When I read Professor Ruse’s recent Brainstorm post equating the Tea Party with the New Atheists I was overcome by feelings of anger, surprise, and resentment.
That’s because he beat me to the punch.
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American atheists—a thoughtful, diverse, and long-suffering cohort—have seen this all before. Atheism has never been a force in American politics or cultural life and a lot of it has to do with poor choices and leadership.
In fact, atheism is still trying to dig out from the self-inflicted damage caused by its mid-century embrace of American communism. That was followed by Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s carnivalesque and tragic reign of error. New Atheism is just the latest bad idea to grab the steering wheel
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a book recommended by a friend of mine, Brad Warner’s Sex, Sin and Zen,
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Atheism, as rational and sensible as it is, will never be an adequate substitute for religion. It's like trying to substitute actual eating with a superbly argued essay on food.The quote comes from a context in which Warner was discussing an article by Elisabeth Cornwell entitled “Why women are bound to religion: an evolutionary perspective,” which makes the commonsense argument that “in order for women to abandon religion and its securities, there needs to be something tangible to replace the support it offers.” Warner then goes on to explain that Buddha realized that “religion and spirituality were pretty much fucked up. But he also understood the very important role they play in human society. As Cornwell points out in her article on the evolution of religion, religion serves a need much, much deeper than anything the intellect can ever hope to reach.” And it is this passage that is followed by the quote I posted on Facebook.
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The difference between the secular left and the secular right is that the secular left asks the same question about why God allows some children to be born into hopeless poverty and violence--say, in Sudan--and some into families and nations rich with opportunity. The secular right's basic answer is that children born into poverty are simply the culmination of generations of breeding by the genetically unfit.
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I took a look at Secular Right to see how its regular contributors reacted to the new-found fame of the blog in the Times. Not surprisingly, bloggers who weren't quoted were miffed at the bloggers who were. Blogger Dan Riehl called the Times article "hogwash" because it it focused on belief in God. "Saying one has to be a social conservative to be conservative is not the same as saying one must believe in God," he noted. "Social conservatism is an appreciation of what will happen to society in the face of a collapse of traditional institutions and values. Invariably, the society declines. We see it in single mothers, otherwise broken families, crime, and individual unwilling to take responsibility for themselves and elsewhere [sic]." I rather admire the bloggers at Secular Right for being willing to voice their views under their own names and take responsibility for what they say (and for their bad grammar). And Riehl has a point: there is no particular reason, except in an America that assumes all religion is invariably good and there can be no morality without faith in God, why atheism should lead to social liberalism rather than social conservatism.
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In the United States, though, the vast majority of people who describe themselves as secularists or atheists are politically liberal. But this generalization does not apply to other countries, and it is not true historically. While political conservatives have upheld state religions as a reinforcer of social order, they have not always upheld religious faith in general--much less religious liberty for all. The Roman Stoic philosophers, who certainly did not believe in a personal God in anything like the modern evangelical sense, upheld state polytheistic religion simply because they considered it part of civil order. Objections to Jews and Christians in the late Roman empire were based not on the Jews' and Christians' belief in their own deity but on their refusal to pay the proper respect due to Roman deities in public. In similar fashion, the horror of English conservatives like Edmund Burke at the French Revolution's attack on the Roman Catholic church was based not on any love for Catholicism but on the breakdown of social order represented by assault on a state religion.
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The posters, which encourage people to tick the 'no religion' box if they do not believe in God, were judged too likely to offend
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The posters, bearing the slogan "If you're not religious, for God's sake say so", have been refused by the companies that own the advertising space, which say they are likely to cause offence.
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The British Humanist Association (BHA), which published the posters, said it was astonished that such an everyday phrase should be deemed too contentious for public display. "It is a little tongue-in-cheek," said the BHA chief executive, Andrew Copson, "but in the same way that saying 'bless you' has no religious implication for many, 'for God's sake' is used to express urgency and not to invoke a deity.
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Atheists, agnostics, Buddhists and Jews were the most literate. Protestants and Catholics are the least.
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research by Darren Sherkat showed that fundamentalist beliefs are closely linked to poor verbal skills.
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"Theological apologists and perhaps nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists have all uncritically assumed that monotheism is somehow a "higher" form of belief than "polytheism." It seems to me that philosophers have paid little attention to polytheism until very recently. Is it so obvious that monotheism is philosophically or metaphysically "superior" to polytheism? In what way is it superior? If there is a natural evolution from polytheism to monotheism, then is there not a natural development from monotheism to atheism? Is monotheism doomed to be superseded by a higher form of belief, that is, atheism—via agnosticism, perhaps? I
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People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith”.
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Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -‐ evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.
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