Or maybe not. Why does it matter?
I disagree, but good luck for either of us proving that.
I think this highlights an excellent point. Undoubtedly, the majority of theists would tell you without God, they would have no purpose, but what’s to say that this is true? From their perspective, it might seem that they would feel purposeless if their form of God doesn’t exist, but that also cannot be proven. I doubt it is a belief in God that gives people a purpose, but I don’t doubt it seems that way to them.
I agree with this because one only needs to look around to see you’re right: that’s why so many still believe in a deity. But supposing that at some point in mankind’s history, it became common knowledge there is no God judging our every action, then most average Joe’s would already know and accept this and be fine with it.
When it comes down to it, believers won’t stop being believers, even if there was some way to prove a negative. Dogmatic belief systems cannot be defeated, no matter what evidence is brought against it. Just look at those who refuse to believe evolution.
I don’t view this as a strike at all. Atheism has no accountability with a deity, but that’s not to say there is no accountability at all. We still have laws, governments, consequences, etc. Atheism wouldn’t lead to sudden anarchy, people running out and killing one another, etc. At least not more so that happens now in the name of god.
What if ritual isn’t a side effect of religion, what if it’s the other way around? Perhaps religion is a side effect of our need for social ritual. In that sense it probably wouldn’t matter too much what your ritual was so long as you had one. Elsewhere here someone linked an interesting Times aricle on the evolutionary basis for right and wrong. An interesting case is made that natural selection has programmed a moral grammar into us social animals, and it makes sense. I don’t think we get our morality from religion; religion mirrors our own basic innate sense of right and wrong. My guess is that religions began as parables that codified the things we already knew.
If that is true, then we really don’t need religion to base our society on. Given our social nature we’ll always invent institutions to help organize ourselves. My hope is that the institutions we create will keep the wisdom and shed the baggage.
So why not make the leap a bit easier? It is possible. Atheism is a blank slate, there’s nothing that rules out purpose. Heck, you can even believe in design without believing in Intelligent Design.
And I will tell you why. Even if Christianity and theism were true, even if every word in the bible denoted an actual event, it wouldn’t matter. Because the it doesn’t matter whether religious beliefs are confirmed by evidence or not, it matters whether they are believed by the majority and whether they are socially beneficial. What I’m trying to say is, the reason people would continue to believe what is obviously false is that acting as though it were true will still yield benefits.
It’s like this. The question on the test is 2+2. Now, if you evaluate 56-60+7-1, you will still the right answer. That’s the way it is with religion. The existence of god as a justification is just fluff, filler, for a set of commandments, which is why it can and should be easily replaced with an equivalent yet less constricting set of atheist filler.
I think we’re on the same page, but you don’t seem to understand the importance of making this clear to theists.
fucking finally!
I have been saying what that article about evolutionary morals is saying for months, and I wholeheartedly agree. Thanks for posting it, it’s nice to know I’m not the only crazy one who thinks so…
Dorkydood, you missed this section:
Which agrees with my hypothesis that we need to replace the existing ritual with a new one, and that in order to do this we will have to go through the steps of evaluating what we are replacing, formulating an adequate replacement, and propagating it.
And I say that there is a lot of wisdom, and we need to separate the wisdom from the baggage, and in effect, evaluate the benefits of theism.
That’s the thing- we don’t really have to formulate or propagate it. It’s essentially within us and will come out on it’s own. Of course, nowadays ideas travel rapidly anyway, so it wouldn’t be a major impediment if we did have to.
I’d love to hear that thought rationalized, first lets look at the definition of Design and then see if you feel it can be done without intelligence.
de·sign (d¹-zºn“) v. de·signed, de·sign·ing, de·signs. ]–tr. 1.a. To conceive or fashion in the mind; invent. b. To formulate a plan for; devise. 2. To plan out in systematic, usually graphic form. 3. To create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect. 4. To have as a goal or purpose; intend. 5. To create or execute in an artistic or highly skilled manner. --intr. 1. To make or execute plans. 2. To have a goal or purpose in mind. 3. To create designs. --de·sign n. 1.a. A drawing or sketch. b. A graphic representation, especially a detailed plan for construction or manufacture. 2. The purposeful or inventive arrangement of parts or details. 3. The art or practice of designing or making designs. 4. Something designed, especially a decorative or an artistic work. 5. An ornamental pattern. 6. A basic scheme or pattern that affects and controls function or development. 7. A plan; a project. 8.a. A reasoned purpose; an intent. b. Deliberate intention. 9. Often designs. A secretive plot or scheme. --de·sign“a·ble adj.
Note #3, hell any of the definitions taken in context automatically denotes intelligence of some kind, how can you plan anything without intelligence? What would a plan without intelligence look like, would it complete a desired task?
No, on this I must disagree, purpose denotes design and design denotes intelligence, no way around this and no other alternatives that I can see. And once again, if you truly are atheist you do not believe in purpose or absolute, if you do then you need to rethink your position and what you really believe in.
Atheism is an empty vessel, it offer’s nothing to no one and will never have a majority in any society of intelligent beings.
Prove it.
I’ve already shown the logical connections. Atheist do not believe in any form of deity or creator or source to life, yes or no?
Purpose must have a creator as purpose is a design goal and design must be intelligent to achieve the goal. Purpose cannot be accidental, if you think it can then knock yourself out trying to provide any logical evidence to this, I’ll listen.
Now show me how you can have purpose without a creator or absolute of some kind. See I don’t have to prove anything, the idea of atheism is severely flawed in the idea of no absolute which is basically no source to life. Truthfully (IMO) a real atheist is just someone who is afraid of the possibilities of a creator and the consequences of acknowledging this, they basically want to serve themselves or “do what I wantâ€. Or they just haven’t spent much time thinking very deep about sources, and seem to ignore the obvious evidence of nature and its laws, which point to purpose.
The creator of purpose is me. The intelligently designed goal is my own. Purpose is not accidental, I create it. That fits your guidelines like a glove.
So are you saying we don’t “come with” some kind of “operating instructions”, so to speak, complete with “suggested use”?
grins You might want to check who first posted that NYT article. Of course we can create non-religious rituals, but in doing so haven’t we just re-created religion? Where is the line to be drawn? See: Fingarette’s Secular as Sacred for a shining example of what I am talking about.
As for saying that atheism is purposeless, Buddhism and Confucianism manage to have a great deal of purpose in living without a creator/divinity as well as accountability systems. Heck, several societies have been based off of them with no problems. So, that seems to go against your thesis that atheism=purposelessness.
Any religion based on empiricism and the scientific method would ensnare me.
It does not fit my guidelines at all, not even close.
How does your assertion explain the obvious purpose in nature’s laws that exist without you or me?
So you are in affect God by you statement, did you create Love as well? How does this answer the questions of source to all life, are we also the creator of all life and the laws of nature, did we formulate these laws of survival and cause and affect?
I think you need to go back to the drawing board, you ideas are skin deep with no foundation and beg more questions then they answer, they are also quite narcissistic and arrogant.
Good luck, I’ve been deep down this road with many others and none can logically explain purpose without a far more intelligent source then humans. Also good luck proving that humans have ever created anything from nothing, if you can do that then you win hands down and you get to be God.
Do these isms even deal with ultimate sources to life?
If they don’t then they are incomplete and irrelevant to my assertions. If they do, I would like to hear what these isms say about the source to all known life and the universe.
Well, Confucianism doesn’t directly deal with it, but given the activeness that is applied to the Confucian concept of qi (the stuff that everything is made of), life tends to arise naturally. Life, in this context, is more of a given than something that had to come about because of a creator or random chance.
As for Buddhism, I’m honestly not sure what the classical opinion is, nor what the current thinking is of most sects – however, the Dalai Lama, the most respected Buddhist leader, says that when religion and science conflict, it is the information gained from science that ought be viewed as correct. That means Big Bang and Evolution.
This is an interesting thread. I’m going to toss a few ideas into the mix, in no particular order, because I think they have a bearing on this.
- In some societies, religion does serve as social glue. In particular, this used to be true in societies under what I like to call the “Classical Civilized Paradigm” – an agriculture-based economy, cities, hereditary classes, slavery or serfdom as society’s bottom rung, warrior-aristocrats at the top, and a monarchical government. This was the norm from when the first cities were founded until the Industrial Revolution, when it began to change.
Another part of the C.C.P. is the existence of a formal religion allied with the state: a formal priesthood, state-supported temples, and religious rituals buttressing the authority of the state itself. A mutually-enhancing relationship between government and religion.
Under those circumstances, religion certainly does serve as social glue, but does it really do so in America today? We have a deliberate separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution. We have not one official religions, but a plethora of them. Granted, the majority of Americans are Christian, but that is disunity disguised as unity. Christians in different denominations vehemently disagree with each other. Southern Baptists are closer in their beliefs to Muslims than they are to Unitarians or even Catholics. Does religion serve as social glue, or is it more a social atomizer?
The problem is that we are a society in transition away from the C.C.P. and towards – what? We don’t really know. But it requires a revision of religious beliefs, and that is seldom a peaceful process. Eventually, perhaps we will evolve a new religious paradigm, more sophisticated than the old ones, more accommodating both of scientific progress and of social evolution. But it hasn’t happened yet, and until it does, it seems to me that religion’s utility as social glue is gone.
- Where does religion come from? The answer is obvious to me, but that’s because I’m a mystic – a person who experiences directly the Reality underlying the metaphors religions used to (inadequately) express it.
If you look at the origins of specific religions, rather than of religion in general, you find that in almost every case, the founder was a mystic, or more than one. We don’t have any reliable knowledge of Moses, but Jesus’ sayings definitely show mystical understanding, it’s obviously true of the Buddha, and while Mohammed was arguably not a very deep mystic, he did experience visions and present teachings derived from those visions. And so on.
But because mystical understanding isn’t conveyable directly in language, all such religion founders have had to express themselves in metaphor. And the metaphors were in turn taken up, and misinterpreted, by others after the founder died. In every case. Some did so honestly, out of ignorance, but others did so in service to their own (or their patrons’) political ambitions. As in the case of Christianity, which in its modern form emerged not from the teachings of Jesus or the Apostles, but from the ecumenical councils convened by the Christian Roman Emperors starting with Constantinus, in service to the needs of the Roman state for a state religion to replace the old pagan one that no longer served as social glue.
Where am I going with this? Well, what I’m saying here is that the Reality experienced by mystics is a genuine experience that cannot be successfully nothing-butted or dismissed. If you try, YOU will be dismissed and ignored, because you are essentially telling someone that color doesn’t exist, when they can damned well see for themselves that it does – even if you can’t.
And while most people, including most religious people, are not full-fledged mystics, religious people do experience something along those lines, and the experience is compelling. So religion is held to, not because the beliefs themselves serve any particular purpose, but because of the religious experiences that the beliefs serve as an intellectual framework for.
It’s like the old children’s hymn: “Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so.” Now – that’s nonsense; the reason a Christian knows that Jesus loves them is because they feel his presence and his love in prayer; the Bible actually has nothing to do with it. But because the Bible serves as the intellectual framework explaining what they experience, it becomes strongly associated with the experience of divine love, and so abandoning Biblical beliefs in all their irrationally becomes tantamount, in their minds, to abandoning divine love. And that, they will not do.
And so this is the real reason why it is true that something needs to replace current religion before it can be abandoned. One can only be a humanistic atheist if one has either no mystical sense, or a very weak mystical sense that can be overriden by a commitment to atheism. Most people aren’t like that. (One can be some other sort of atheist, such as a Buddhist atheist, without abandoning mysticism or religious experience; a personalized deity is only one metaphorical framework for the mystical experience and not mandatory by any means, even though it is a very common framework.)
Religion, in the sense of some kind of non-trivializing intellectual framework for mystical experience, will always be with us. But that doesn’t mean current religions will be. There are severe discordances between all so-called “great” religions and modern reality, and the necessary changes are severe, yet all of these religions are fairly dogmatic and resist changes.
For the world’s religions, we are in a difficult time. But to expect them to simply die and not be replaced, except by universal atheism, is quite unrealistic.
Navigator, you’re views on religion are more-or-less consistant with Durkheim, but I cannot agree with your solution to anomie.
You seem to want to create more individuals, and a more individualistic system. Since that is what causes anomie and the host of social dysfunctions that comes with it, how is this a useful option?
What we need, IMHO, is religion but not mysticism, rituals but not supersition.
Unfortunately, modern religions have the former, but bring much of the latter in tow; while modern secularism merely rejects the latter.
I also think we ought focus on the aspect of community over individuality. That’s something that many religious movements get wrong and far too many secularist movements get wrong.
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I’m curious how you derived that from what I wrote.
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I’m also curioius how you believe that individualism creates social dysfunctions.
That isn’t a choice, though. Mysticism is an inherent factor in human psychology. It isn’t going anywhere, and besides, without mysticism there can be no religion.