Does the credibility of the god concept matter?

Your analysis leaves out what the motivation on the other side is for being an atheist.

Nor does it go very far. You're still comparing two very similar religious systems.

In particular, you're comparing two orthodoxic religions (post-Enlightenment Western Atheism being entirely orthodoxic and with zero concept of orthopraxy; different forms of Christianity differing in the degree but with Fundamentalism being nearly as entirely orthodoxic which is unsurprising given the shared post-Enlightenment roots).

Not all religions are anywhere near as orthodoxic. Of those that aren't some assume that doctrine precedes praxis and experience like orthodoxic views (perhaps a heritage from Plato's and Aristotle's heirarchies of reality that again is shared by both Christianity and post-Enlightenment Atheism).

For some religions lack orthodoxy to the point where doctrine is non-existent and irrelevant. Few give it anywhere near as much importance as post-Enlightenment Atheism and Fundamentalist Christianity (pretty much only certain trends within Islam and certain trends within Judaism, but certainly not every Muslim nor every Jew, just like not every Atheist or every Christian would).

Placing your point that faith is not necessarily the foundation of religion into a wider context it becomes more evidently true - faith may not actually be present at all.

On the other hand, Fundamentalists share the assumption of faith as the foundation (after all the "Fundamentals" that Fundamentalism takes its name from are articles of doctrine, not of ritual, lifestyle or any other matter) and so unlike most other religious people will often not believe in the Big Bang or evolutionary theories. The assumption of faith as the foundation of religion is actually one of the thing you have in common with Fundamentalist Christians, and it's precisely why creationism persists.

It's also a big part of why many Atheists persist in arguing against the religious as if we're Fundamentalist Christians and why Fundamentalist Christians persist in arguing against non-Fundamentalists non-Christians as if we're Atheists. Both sides find each other massively easier to understand.

Schuhart wrote: »

It does, and its interesting and useful to have another view of the argument. Bear in mind that I'm chiefly saying to atheists 'the reason you're getting frustrated is because the whole creation business occupies a different place in your outlook'.

Yep.

It's interesting to ask the same question about oneself though. If you lend any credence to current views of psychology you have to conclude (at a rational level at least, you may feel so at an instinctual one) that whatever the theological truths or untruths may be, there's a reason why you don't believe in any god, why most people in this country believe in one and I believe in many that is about us and not about the divine.

The question of why you are an Atheist is a different question than whether that makes you correct.

Schuhart wrote: »

I'm not sure how much of that I actually got. However, the kind of picture I'd have is that atheism at this stage is 'dox' averse, which I'd put down to the whole Marxism thing that we want to pretend never happened. We took God around the back of the barn with an axe, and reckoned once we'd that out of the way everything would start falling into place as humans freed from mindgames would inevitably build a perfect society.

Well, I'd divide modern Western Atheism into two related but not entirely connected trends, one is post-Enlightenment scientific thought and one is Marxism. The two fed off each other, often more than either would like to admit, but are still separate.

There are other completely different trends in Atheism (Zen Buddhism and people who just go "that's a loada ****e" and don't give it another thought being two relatively large ones), but the one that is most currently voiced by people who identify with their Atheism to the point where they would bother to post here would be the post-Enlightenment scientific variety.

Parking that thought for a moment, three large parts to having a religion (which for want of a better term I'll extend to include forms of Atheism and Agnosticism, and ask you to overlook it for now as merely convenience in language) are doctrine (what one believes or doesn't believe), and praxis (practice) further split between everyday praxis and ritualism. (I'm not going to assume I'm not leaving out another aspect of equivalent importance, but we'll just deal with those three rather than try to find more).

Not all three parts will exist in every religion. In Zen we largely have everyday praxis as primary with doctrine (there is no ultimate god, existence is suffering, existence can be escaped) coming after that and relatively little ritual. Catholicism has a large amount of all three, but with the praxis following from doctrine (the ritual and everyday behaviour of a "good" Catholic both follow from the credo and interpretations thereof). Most Protestant denominations reduce the degree of ritual considerably, some to the point of replacing church entirely with home prayer meetings (like many Anabaptist groups). Wiccans pretty much just have ritual orthopraxy which may influence practitioners beliefs but no doctrine beyond agreeing that performing those rituals has a value (they need not agree on what that value is, whether the gods are real or psychological or pretty much any doctrinal point). Other Pagan witches (of the sort that are called "Wiccan" in the US) abandoned that orthopraxy and the focus returned to believes again, though still much looser than any religion with a formal credo.

It's worth adding that doctrine covers not just what is believed, but some things that are not believed. Neither Buddhism nor Catholicism contains a belief in polytheistic deities, but syncretist beliefs that combine Buddhism with polytheism remain Buddhist (e.g. those forms which contain a belief in devas or which have absorbed Shinto spirits) while those that combine Catholicism with polytheism are normally considered outside of Catholicism (e.g. the syncretic religions such as Voodoo and Candomblé). Buddhism does not contain a belief in polytheism, but it doesn't contain a disbelief in it either, Catholicism contains a disbelief in polytheism.

Similarly, post-Enlightenment Atheism contains a disbelief in both monotheism and polytheism, it can't tolerate the addition of polytheism in the same way that Buddhist Atheism can.

As well as differing degrees of doctrine or praxis, there's the matter of which precedes which. Judaism would have a much stronger sense of orthopraxy than most forms of Christianity, but shares with it that the praxis follows from the beliefs (consider the questions asked during a Passover Seder and how they give a reason from scripture for the practices of the night). Tribal religions may contain shared beliefs, but they start with people doing "what our people do", rather than with doing something because of the beliefs (though they may be intellectualised as originating with the beliefs later).

Post-Enlightenment Atheism shares this matter of doctrine preceding praxis (I personally believe this may have originated with Platonic and Aristotlean metaphysics as I stated above). This doesn't have much effect on such Atheists as such (since you pretty much don't have any praxis) but it does affect how Post-Enlightenment Atheists tend to think about religion more generally.

This is related to part of our shared intellectual heritage as Westerners (hence my theory about Plato and Aristotle); consider that we tend to think of scientific discovery preceding technological innovation, despite the fact that very often the technological innovation comes first and then the theory as to why the innovation is so effective comes later (happens in programming and computer science on occasion, a more impressive example is engineers building steam engines when scientists still said they were impossible). As such even a Westerner like myself who practices a religion where the emphasis is on praxis and belief non-existent (though present in my personal religious views) will often talk as if belief is the foundation of religion despite that not being how I actually experience it.

Which brings us back to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment happened amongst a largely Christian (Protestants especially), largely privileged group of scientifically minded intellectuals. From that position a big part of how to think about religious matters, mystical and mythological ways of looking at religious stories, was devalued. From that position there arose a belief that the Christian Bible was either literally true or worthless. That binary question, if accepted, offers two positions; post-Enlightenment Atheism (the Christian Bible is worthless*), or Fundamentalist Christianity (the Christian Bible is literally true).

Schuhart wrote: »

Since that vanished up its own hole, I think atheists (again, take this place as a snapshot) are slow to say anything beyond the whole god concept being fantasy. "And then what?" "Whatever, I'm only saying the whole god thing is silly." "So whats it all about?" "I haven't a clue. Maybe nothing. Its just the whole god thing is silly." And so forth.

Well, of course those Atheists who expected otherwise were being irrational in expecting anything else. Valuing rational thought doesn't make Atheists purely rational animals, and believing otherwise is as irrational as one can get - Atheists are still human.

I think Atheists tend to be dox-adverse, as you put it, at an intellectual level, but not at an instinctual one. I've seen Atheists cite as heroes of Atheism Einstein (a Theist in the Spinoza model), Newton (a deeply devout, if heretical, Christian) and once even Arthur Conan-Doyle (who was credulous to the extent that he more closely matched the strawman stereotype of a foolish believer than any sort of Atheist rationalist). I offer that this is a form of superstition. There is no reason why Atheists should be any more unhappy that these people were religious than any other people, but because they are in different ways important to the value that rational thinking now has to the post-Enlightenment era they are important to Atheism despite their own religious views, and there is a tendency to canonise them.

This actually flies in the face of the sort of rational thinking that Atheists laud, which is why I describe it as a superstition rather than a belief - it's a belief outside of accepted doctrine.

Those are deliberately extreme examples, and rather unfair as such, but they are not uncommon. More generally, Atheists will tend to make irrational leaps the same as everyone else simply because the brain works that way. We know the brain works that way, saying otherwise is no different than saying dinosaurs where something god did for a laugh on the 8th day.

Schuhart wrote: »

Are Christians and atheists essentially on the same wavelength?

From my point of view you are very similar indeed (particularly with Fundamentalist Christianity, less so with more mystical forms).

Schuhart wrote: »

Possibly, although I was more thinking that they chiefly talk about two different things which is why the dialogue is endless.

I think you've hit on part of it. I also think the remaining mystical element, the element of communal experience, the received moral code and other elements of Christianity that just don't have a parallel in your world view do lead to impasses.

I think those of us who don't fit in either group (including not just non-Christian religious† people, but Atheists who allow for some sort of spiritual or paranormal reality and Christians with a more mystical and experiential and less doctrine-based view) tend to skew the whole thing quite a bit too. Since we are very much outside of the core debates between those two groups, but those two groups are largely focusing on each other, we provide more heat than light to the debates themselves.

Atheists don't have a very good answer to the question of why people will continue to behave in a reasonably moral manner without a belief in god to offer to people who practice a received morality. You simply don't. You've got plenty of evidence to suggest that they will (e.g. everyone who is Atheist or of a religion that also doesn't have a received morality, or is from a religion that dictates some rules for how to deal with co-religious and not beyond that - as a rule they all behave perfectly well), but that's not really an answer that fits their framework.

You are ironically requiring a leap of faith from such people before they can accept your view on this.

You're also ironically very bad at beauty and spiritual response. I say ironically, because there are some Atheists who are very good at this (Richard Feynman has written some passages that I personally rate amongst the best ever on the spiritual response to the beauty of the natural world, John Lennon is one of my favourite song-writers including when he is prosyletising an Atheist view), but so far Atheist apologists have done a poor job at this. It's also ironic because Fundamentalist Christianity is even worse at this, at least as far as what it will acknowledge in explicit statement.

There's no need for this, if we consider "spirituality" as the applying of value to something there's nothing to stop Atheists from experiencing this. Again I refer to Feynman, "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there." is 100% Atheist in sentiment, but to my mind also a spiritual statement. My view of the mechanics of birth, sex, procreation and death is no different to yours (I may add a few gods and goddesses on at another level, but still...), it's the value I place on it that makes me a practitioner of a fertility religion, not how I think it works.

I have sometimes heard people who uneasily identify as Atheists talk in some terms, and sometimes heard people who identify as Atheism talk uneasily in such terms. While many Atheists will discard all notion of spirituality wholesale (and that's fair enough) many others seem more embarrassed by it than opposed to it. It's a difficulty in Atheist apologia that I think also leads to an impasse, though this time more with other religious people than with Fundamentalism. When I see an Atheist like Dawkins first cast scorn upon the beauty of poetry and then in the same book quote John Lennon because his poetry can express a point better than he can I consider him doubly a fool, but more for his scorn of poetry than his hypocritical use of it. Ultimately, if all my experiences of the Craft are mere delusion, I'm happier to experience beauty in ignorance than be both correct and ugly. But an Agnostic like Feynman, I can see much beauty in his expression, and wonder why that is so rarely expressed. Are Atheists afraid of being accused of being mystics?

Schuhart wrote: »

I think its a point worth developing, and I think it probably involves each of us asking 'Never mind the other guy for a minute, to what extent am I full of it'.

Well I'd have to agree with that, my religion encourages self-examination

Schuhart wrote: »

Maybe the natural outcome of that is everyone will suddenly see that some form of self-manufactured paganism is the natural gravitational point for all right thinking folk.

LOL. I actually find that thought rather scary.

Schuhart wrote: »

Or maybe not. I don't know. I just think the whole god(s) thing is silly. But that's probably not the point. Not for the first time, you have supplied an answer that I find coherent and reasonable.

Thank you.

Ultimately, I just find the whole thing - Atheists, Christians, Druids, Jews, Druze, Shamans, the whole lot of it far too interesting not to keep prodding at the different ideas they each have. Which is perhaps another matter. My reasons for bothering with any religious discussion are mainly that I find the whole thing interesting. I also have absolutely zero interest in converting you to my religious views (I may attempt to persuade you if we were to differ on how best secularism should be expressed, since that's a political matter rather than an Atheist or religious one and I have every interest in living in a more secular society). Christians and Atheists seem rarely to have that much interest in each other, and always great interest in converting each other. That's stating the obvious, but it does also mean you put each other on the defensive before you begin to discuss anything. Of course you're going to keep missing each others' points; you want to miss their points.

* Barring a small minority who developed an interest in Hinduism, Buddhism or Classical Paganism who were pretty marginal, but of interest to me as they probably had an intellectual influence in setting the scene for the Pagan revivals of the 19th and 20th Century.

† "Religious" as an adjective for a person is a rather loaded word in different ways. I describe myself as religious but mean by that merely that my religion is personally important to me. People may view that as a good, bad or indifferent thing, but that's not really the point.