Is atheism an ideology?

Sarky

Characteristics like omnipotence and omnipresence aren't actually all that specific. the Christian god is surrounded in doublethink.

rozeboosje

oldrnwisr wrote: »

On the one hand, when you compare Christianity to deism or even theism then it is much more well defined. God has a wide range of definitive characteristics such as omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfection, eternal etc. not to mention being anthropomorphic in the first place.

Certainly. Until you start pointing out that many of these supposed characteristics are logically impossible and that if they insist that their "god" thing possesses those then we can simply conclude that said "god" thing cannot exist, and move on.

There are a number of ways a theist can respond to this. The biggest howler is the retort that, and this is stated in all seriousness "God is not subject to our puny human logic".

Of course the theist who retorts with that is missing a very crucial point. Nobody is subjecting "god" - whatever THAT is - to anything. What we are doing is subjecting STATEMENTS to logical scrutiny. Since these STATEMENTS are created by human beings, presented in a human language and following the grammatical and semantic rules of whatever human language they're presented in, it is just as valid to subject statements about some alleged "god" entity to logical scrutiny as it would be to subject any OTHER statement uttered by a human being to same. That retort can therefore be safely dismissed as idiotic and not worthy of a response.

But the only other alternative open to a would be apologist is to then revisit the actual semantics behind words such as "omnipotent" or "omniscient". It's all too common to see theists start arguing that, no, we don't understand, "omniscient" doesn't actually mean "all knowing", it JUST means .... and so the fuzzing up exercise proceeds. So is the Christian concept of "god" well defined? Not on yer Nelly. The only variations on the Christian "god" theme that ARE "well defined" are, sadly, precisely the ones that can be dismissed out of hand. That leaves only variations that are as vague and non-descript as any Deist "god" notion.

CiDeRmAn

I might suggest that an assumption of a supernatural entity that controls or influences the world around us is as old as language, certainly when early man was attempting to model the world around them and hoping to predict what was going to happen into the future they may have assumed things happemed either by their own hand or by the hand of an unseen operator.
I'm not suggesting for a minute they were right but, in the absence of a more sophisticated mental toolkit and without the rigor of scientific method and recorded results from events past, its easy to be drawn into a world view that erroneously includes a god.
To suggest that early man was inevitably an atheist as he had not developed a theistic POV is equivalent to considering frogs, trees, rocks and stars as being atheist in nature as they too have not expressed a belief in god, and is nonsense.

rozeboosje

Humans are born with several instincts that determine how they perceive the world. For example, we are hard-wired to think of the world in terms of "objects" and "actions", and we have a tendency to categorise objects: "these two things have a lot in common so I will invent a category and consider the two objects as two representatives of that category". Another natural thing to do is to consider the world in terms of "inanimate objects" that are passive and that lie around ready to be picked up and used, eaten or whatnot, and "agents" which are autonomous entities that have a "will" of their own and that act out of their own volition in order to pursue their desires.

Which works pretty well for the sort of stuff you're likely to encounter while you got your head down and you're foraging around the forest. If it just lies around doing nothing, it's likely to be a tool or food. If it tries to run away it's prey, and if it's staring at you it's a predator and it wants something - most likely to EAT YOU!

But once the head goes up it gets confusing. Up there, in the sky, things are moving without agents pushing them.... But because we're hard wired to LOOK for agents, we make them up. And it takes a conscious effort to snap out of that mindset.

Sure, nobody is born believing in "Yahweh". but I think CiDeRmAn makes a valid point: we are probably born with a "theistic instinct" and that is a natural tendency to make up "god"s when we are confronted with objects that appear to behave like agents, or when we observe a level of organisation in a naturally occurring phenomenon that we normally only observe when a human applies tools to objects in order to produce an artefact. When humans can achieve small scale phenomena and we observe large scale phenomena in the heavens above, naturally we imagine that an agent vastly superior to a mere human is responsible for those.

CiDeRmAn

Theism is probably an aspect of human thought that has been artificially propped up over the centuries by things other than a heartfelt belief in a god.
The need to define a people, the need to control those people both require a suitable stick and carrot and religion seems to fulfill these requirements.
It's no wonder then that states have gotten so involved in promoting a faith as integral to their nature over such a long time.
Secular states seem to still contain elements that venerate their religious past, acknowledging a faiths function as a glue that kept the integrity of a nation together in the face of an enemy, sometimes a secular nation can fall back on this way of thinking once again, so powerful a device is religion to define "us" and "them", witness the actions and language of the Bush Jr administration, referencing crusades and so on.
So religion is a tool, but i none of this presupposes any of it is actually real.
It's an ideology that the people take on as a mantle of identity, a label for themselves.
Socialism, Fascism, Libertarianism, Liberalism, Right/Left, these too are ideologies that we use, like an Emo with guy-liner, to feel collectively comfortable and secure while defining "them" or "other than us".
By it's nature it's a defensive posture then, to have an ideology, it's an act of opposition to something that is not that ideology.
So Atheism must exist in a world with Theism, perhaps someday just the memory of Theism.
Theism must have been borne only when faced with opposition with a faith that was incomprehensible to us as a legitimate, and so we defined them as "savage".
It's easy to see how, mixed with the worst and, most unfortunately, typical human behaviour it has led to misery and exploitation throughout history.

rozeboosje

Well that's the difference between a "belief" and a "religion", isn't it?

There are a number of fairly basic human instincts at work here.

The things I was talking about would lead people to think that there are "super agents" who are in control of all the things that appear to behave like they are moving with some kind of "purpose" but that clearly aren't the result of the actions of human beings. We are hard-wired to look for agency in anything that "moves", and if agency isn't immediately obvious to us we make things up.

Given that we're naturally inclined to create narratives around agency even when we don't have sufficient data to come to a properly informed conclusion, we end up inventing these "super agents" - "god"s - all over the place. And THEN another human instinct kicks in: the instinct to arrive at heuristic conclusions. When B follows A we have a natural tendency to assume that A implies B, or that B is the natural result of A. I scratched my arse in a particular way and the torrential rain stopped. Blimey, I must have a magic way of scratching my arse!

And I must be communicating with the Gods! And so a THIRD instinct kicks in: the instinct to want to strive to be the Top Dawg. Faced with natural phenomena that we have no control over whatsoever, but convinced by our heuristic mindset that the performance of bizarre rituals has an effect on how these phenomena play out, we convince ourselves and others that we possess some kind of mystic powers and we have a direct line to God. And so we assume a position of authority and control over other people.

I think religion is a perfect storm of at least these three instincts going off the rails and feeding into each other.

pauldla

Thanks for all the replies, folks. I had a lot of fun reading that: some very thoughtful responses.

FWIW, I still hold the same opinion as I did at the beginning of all this. Such is life.

Red Nissan

pauldla wrote: »

My own opinion on the matter is 'no', as it is a POV on a single issue, and ideologies tend to be much more complex (a collection of positions, if you will). But I'm sure others hold contrary views, and I'd like to get a range of opinion.

Atheism becomes and ideology as other ideologies just won't stay out of its way. An atheist generally feels superior to believers and it's very often the case that they are more educated as well thus enhancing the notion of superiority and confidence.

Absoluvely

Red Nissan wrote: »

An atheist generally feels superior to believers and it's very often the case that they are more educated as well thus enhancing the notion of superiority and confidence.

I'm not so sure what that opinion has to do with atheism being an ideology. There could be all sorts of statistical prevalences of certain traits among atheists but it wouldn't make atheism any more or less of an ideology.

pauldla wrote: »

Thanks for all the replies, folks. I had a lot of fun reading that: some very thoughtful responses.

FWIW, I still hold the same opinion as I did at the beginning of all this. Such is life.

What's with the poll? I haven't seen this type before.

Who gets to see the hidden results?

pauldla

Absoluvely wrote: »

What's with the poll? I haven't seen this type before.

Who gets to see the hidden results?

I thought it might be better to make the poll anonymous. Apparently, only mods and the thread starter gets to see who voted for what.

nagirrac

pauldla wrote: »

I thought it might be better to make the poll anonymous.

Why, out of curiosity?

Its anonymous anyway, I'm sure most would be interested in the poll results.

Turtwig

nagirrac wrote: »

Why, out of curiosity?

Its anonymous anyway, I'm sure most would be interested in the poll results.

Because.



I can see the resul-ts. I can see the resul-ts!
Toodles

pauldla

nagirrac wrote: »

Why, out of curiosity?

Its anonymous anyway, I'm sure most would be interested in the poll results.

I thought it would be fairer to have an anonymous poll, that's all.

rozeboosje

Anonymous, certainly, but now we can't see any results. Not even the total percentages. At least, I can't here in my FireF***s.

pauldla

rozeboosje wrote: »

Anonymous, certainly, but now we can't see any results. Not even the total percentages. At least, I can't here in my FireF***s.

You can't see the percentages? Sorry about that, I thought the results could be viewed by all, but the voting would be hidden.

Yes 6.31%
No 84.68%
Maybe 6.31%
I don't know 2.70%

Obliq

Ah ha! Worth the wait.

pauldla

Rats, as said above I thought the results could be seen by all! My apologies, laizengeminen. Mods, would it be possible to make the results of the poll public?

robindch

pauldla wrote: »

Mods, would it be possible to make the results of the poll public?

I've made it as public as possible -- can everybody see?

Absoluvely

robindch wrote: »

I've made it as public as possible -- can everybody see?

Yeah, we can see the percentages now but not the voters.
Which is what you were going for, I assume

Banbh

There was an interesting discussion on Newstalk this morning on the subject of religion. Guests included Colette Colfer, an expert on world religions.

Anyway, she described herself: "I wouldn't say I'm a believer or an atheist but somewhere in the middle."

Doctor DooM

Banbh wrote: »

There was an interesting discussion on Newstalk this morning on the subject of religion. Guests included Colette Colfer, an expert on world religions.

Anyway, she described herself: "I wouldn't say I'm a believer or an atheist but somewhere in the middle."

I heard that. Was a rather painful discussion.

endacl

Banbh wrote: »

Anyway, she described herself: "I wouldn't say I'm a believer or an atheist but somewhere in the middle."

"I don't want to think about the question in case I have to face the reality of the answer."

Banbh

...a rather painful discussion.

Indeed it was. It was a measure of how irrelevant the Catholic Church has become. The interviewers were clearly gob-smacked by the crazy pro-lifer.

rozeboosje

Thanks!

pauldla

robindch wrote: »

I've made it as public as possible -- can everybody see?

Thank you! Should I poll again, I will make sure the results can be viewed by all.

smacl

pauldla wrote: »

Thank you! Should I poll again, I will make sure the results can be viewed by all.

Good to see the results. It would be interesting to run the poll on the Christianity forum to compare the results, to see whether atheism is viewed differently from the outside. Purely a hunch, but I reckon you'd see something closer to a 50/50 split.

Brian Shanahan

I'm going to make a guess here and say all 7 of the "yesses" were religious believers.

I'd say I was going out on a limb, but it is a common tactic of religious detractors of the idea of atheism to paint it as a fellow religion. Somehow they think that it makes their arguments stronger to denigrate something they believe to be another religion.

Sarky

"You're just as bad as us, which makes you worse!"

Zillah

Sarky wrote: »

"You're just as bad as us, which makes you worse!"

When presented with a superior foe, if you can do something to reduce them to your level, doing that is a sound tactical move.

I find it fascinating that religious people are subconsciously brilliant at game-theory.

FamousSeamus

True atheism is not an ideology as its based on the reasoning of what is more likely to be correct as opposed to an ideology which is based on what we believe to be more correct. If an atheist says I don't believe in anything then they don't mean believe like a faith they mean they want facts and scientific research and from this they can draw their conclusions as to what is more likely to be correct.


Well that's my two cents on the question, didn't read the full thread so my apologies if this has been previously said:)