Comment by jdmichal
2 days ago
> To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize.
I consider myself agnostic. And I'll provide my definition of what that means to me, since there's several in existence. I take as an axiom that the truth-value of the statement, "Is there a God," is unknowable / unverifiable to humans. I then define faith as the choice to (not) believe despite not knowing its truth-value. Contrasting with knowledge as having some basis for knowing the truth-value.
I like these definitions, because they allow for agnostic theism and agnostic atheism. But, here's the catch and where the tie to your statement comes. In this world view, atheism is just as much a faith-based position as theism is. Why? Because it's the choice to not believe, despite not having knowledge.
I define myself as an atheist, though by your definition I may be closer to an agnostic.
My position is closer to “whether God exists or not, it does not matter much to me.” I sometimes think free will exists, and I sometimes imagine that perhaps someone created all of this, though I do accept evolution. In that sense, I think my view is close to yours.
Personally, I also think religion has real benefits. Many local social service organizations are rooted in religious communities, and socially isolated people often rely on religion. In some cases, religion may be the last community that helps people preserve their humanity.
I also think atheism has benefits. Many atheists tend to believe strongly in free will, and that can make them think more carefully about responsibility for their own choices.
In any case, this is the kind of question where it is difficult to produce a final answer. But one thing does seem certain: the probability that we can talk to each other like this, even through the internet, is miraculously low.
And I am genuinely glad that I could exchange comments with someone like you, someone intelligent enough to label things so precisely.
Have a good day.
As an over-educated person who still struggles to think for himself through everything from scratch, the above nevertheless sounds like Descartes'
dubito, ergo sum
From this, I can go in practical (ie, separable from free will & other ontological considerations) directions, like:
insofar as organised religion does not equate existence with faith, maybe its most important use is to overcome the fear of death.
That's cool enough for me, but maybe there are other less "brainwashy", "respectful to the free will[0]" ways to overcome fear of meaninglessness/death/lack of validation from the world, plus all the anguish that these preceding emotional distractions entail?
[0] we do not have to admit the existence of free will in order to respect it? Thus can we substitute God with Free Will everywhere but retain the practical benefits of respecting free will without the ontological difficulties with the precise nature of God?
I, on the contrary, am not very learned, and I am not as intelligent as someone like you. And in my view, your difficulty is not that you find it hard to think from the beginning. Rather, I think the things that are supposed to be obvious are difficult for you. The things that are obvious to me are not obvious to you, and that is why you think from the beginning.
In my case, I simply think of death as a state. Everything is a process moving toward death, and whether it is fear or happiness, I feel that these are temporary states. Even the point at which we think “we ought to be happy” seems to me to be a matter of belief. It is shaped by media and other forces, and most of the forms we imagine are, in a sense, built on imitation. But even so, I do not think that a single moment of intense emotion is a bad thing.
However, I think the very premise that something must be overcome is itself constructed. For example, I work in a profession that sells mental models. After thinking about what the profession of programming really is, this is the answer I have: OOP, FP, DOP, and procedural programming are all ways of constraining things within a particular abstract frame, and then executing automation within that bounded space.
Just as astrophysics is not the study of telescopes, and computer science is not merely the study of computers, our profession is about placing mental models for understanding the world within the constraints of the tool called the computer. Just as, to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, to me everything looks like the act of placing a complex world into limited cognition. Programming, too, appears to me to be that kind of work.
From that perspective, the meaning of human life and the fear of death also seem to be processes of placing a cognitive model inside a particular frame. I may be one of the cheapest developers on Upwork, but that defines my current state, not my entire identity.
So, to me, the fear of death and my price on Upwork are the same kind of thing. Both are states, not identities. And both have meaning only inside a particular mental model. Outside the model, they are just piles of facts: I am alive; I assign meaning to the fact that I love this profession I have; I will soon die; I am traded in the market; and in the meantime, I create abstractions.
I am not claiming that my way is better than the way religion deals with this. But it is at least one piece of evidence that a person can live without religion. A person who works with abstraction as a profession can also apply abstraction to himself. That is the method I have found.
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Consciousness and God both seem to have this property in common: they're real but not what we think they are.
Only when we have a decent theory of consciousness will we know what counts as evidence for whether a particular entity is conscious or not.
You can't disprove the space teapot, therefore you're religious for not believe in it.