I find it odd that when filling out a form that asked me what my religion is one of the choices is Atheist.
What now? That is the that opposite of religion.
I find it odd that when filling out a form that asked me what my religion is one of the choices is Atheist.
What now? That is the that opposite of religion.
Atheist is not a statement about your religion at all. I’m also an atheist and my ‘religion’ is basically secular humanist. Yours could be none, Unitarian Universalist, Buddhist, secular humanist, or any others that are compatible.
I don’t intend this to be harsh or negative but I don’t know how to phrase this nicely;
Secular Humanism is a philosophy, not a religion. Religions are faith-based while philosophies are based in some logical argumentation. The muddling of religion with philosophy linguistically serves only to tarnish philosophy and lend undue credence to religion. That language is so flexible can be beneficial but it can equally be detrimental when used like this.
In Iceland the beurocratic term for religion is “life opinion association”. You can give your tax money to the secular humanist guys that do marriage ceremonies etc.
I don’t think there is anything “militant atheist” in the post you replied to.
I also consider myself a secular humanist, but would never describe myself as religious.
I think that normalising not having a religion would help to bring tolerance for people who have differing opinions, while calling secular humanist a religious view may reinforce a bias in some people that “you can’t be good without religion”.
Regarding the last point, I’m not at all religious, but I’ve accepted that even from a purely logical and scientific standpoint, you have to just accept some things on faith. Our capacity for knowing is limited, there are certain “unknowable” things that we just have to accept.
The easiest example of this is what’s going on in another person’s head. You have to take on faith that the things they’re saying to you is what’s actually going on. More broadly, a lot of the things about the physical universe and the fact that it exists at all are things that, at least with our current level of science, we just can’t know. We can make best guesses, but from there it’s a faith.
I’d say faith is only a bad thing when it’s used to make you so things you wouldn’t want to do otherwise. The more I examine the church specifically, the more I realize it’s not the faith based approach to understanding that I have issues with, it’s the leaders using that to manipulate. Faith is, and should be, a very personal thing not subject to some governing body with very real biases and objectives.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. We can determine to some degree what’s going on in the mind of other people without having faith in their self-report, it’s just impractical to do to everyone or frequently; FMRI can show us their brain activity and we already have a reasonable sense of what the different bits of brain do. Would we be able to get fine specifics of their thoughts from it? No, not yet but given that out ability to detect and measure has a general tendency to improve with time I believe that it is a ‘yet’ and not an ‘if’ barring Extinction Level Events.
Could you elaborate on the second point? I don’t see cause to have faith regarding that subject. We don’t have all the knowledge about the subject but neither would we know, for example, the exact ordering of a deck of cards immediately after a thorough shuffle. We know enough that we’re not going to see an Ace of Fives if we shuffled a standard deck and we’ll be able to determine the order they are in if we pay attention.
Most of the faithful that I know personally aren’t involved with a governing body of their faith. They still use it to be bigots. When pressing them on the issue I’ve yet to get a response as to why they’re bigots other than their faith. They have, or at least are aware of, secular reasons to be good and kind but not when being bigoted in some ways (they have secular reasons for the kinds of bigotry their faith opposes).
I see faith and religion confused a lot. I’m pretty anti-religious, but I find myself fairly spiritual. There exist known, and knowable, things such as the number of cards and their values in a standard deck. We can know there is no fifth ace in the deck, and so we can know you will never pull a fifth ace.
Unknowables, however, also exist. I already listed the example of the specifics of what goes on in another person’s head, which - fair, you can make inferences and guesses, but we’re still not able to know for certain what someone else is thinking. A more esoteric example for anther things in this category would be something like how a 4th spatial dimension would look. We, with our current biology, can’t actually KNOW this. We can approximate it, and even develop an intuition, but we’re simply not equipped with hardware to allow us to interpret that information. Or, that the sun will rise tomorrow. It’s always happened so far, but I have nothing guaranteeing that it will happen. In fact, we know as a point of certainty that it will, one day, not rise. We have pinned down a timeframe we think this death will occur in, but we can’t KNOW.
We still engage with each day as if the sun WILL come up. And there may be overwhelming evidence that it will, but it may not. Similarly, the old thought experiment of us being in a simulation. Practically, we can’t really know whether or not that’s the case, but all but the most adamant about simulation theory are going to act as if it’s not.
To wrap it all back around, about militant atheism and the like - my view is that we all act on some degree of faith, and some people really glom onto a worldview that helps to explain our origins and meanings of our lives. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The issues only start to arise when one person or groups faith starts to impress itself upon others. I don’t care, in the slightest, what someone believes, it’s only when they start asserting that their faith is fact, and when they start using said faith to justify mistreating anyone else.
Edit: to address the thing about bigotry, I really don’t think having some notion of Faith has much to do at all with one being a bigot. Bigotry tends to come from exclusion, because of fear and not understanding. This is why I have a problem with most RELIGIONS. Religions take your faith (i really like the term spirituality more here), something I think should be inherently personal, and dogmatize it, use it to form an in group and an out group, and use it as justification for the subjugation of the out group. Nothing to do with the faith/spirituality of the individual, a LOT to do with the biases of whatever leadership your in group has.
Fair enough, I have been using them interchangeably. I suppose given your position that’s inaccurate. Our positions differ quite a bit, I’m an antitheist and materialist/physicalist.
My point here is just the opposite. It isn’t inferences or guesses, we can tell from brain activity that what’s going on falls within a certain range. We have yet to refine this ability to tell detailed specifics but we’re not guessing A * B = G, we can use our modern tools and understanding to determine that G is within the range of D through J. Prior to the development of the current tools and methods we had a wider range and prior to the development of any such tools we were guessing and making inferences.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle would be an example I’d agree to of something unknownable: the set of both the precise location and momentum of a particle. However as of yet I am unaware of any reason or mechanism by which this unknowable is impactful to any sapient entity… except those specifically studying it.
As-is I find the unknowables that I am aware of, the Uncertainty Principle, whether or not we’re in a simulation, and so on so be inconsequential on the scale we operate on. We have a perceived reality that behaves according to rules that are determinable and practical utility can be derived from determining them.
I don’t think I can contest this. At least not at the moment after having had a long day. In any case I think this point is where we likely differ quite a lot; I strive to take nothing on faith. To whichever extent that I do I want it to be less or at least driven past the point of functional irrelevance to the operation of my life.
I suppose the authors of their scripture would count even though they have limited relation to living leaders of their religion.
The uncertainty principle is a fantastic example! I don’t necessarily disagree that these unknowables are largely irrelevant to every day life. They’re the minutiae that help an individual understand their ‘place’ in the vastness of the universe, but they don’t really tell us anything about the things that… Well, matter.
The biggest thing I think my world view has helped me with is, if I can accept some things are just inherently outside of my grasp as an individual, I don’t have to try to justify or explain why we’re here. We just are. Whatever the reason, let’s make it the best time we can. It lets me focus on things that matter to me. And, for you, the thing that matters is resolving all of those things as logically as possible.
And, as far as scripture goes, there are myriad interpretations for the meanings of the actual words written in the scriptures, at least Christian ones. They’ve gone through so many translations, rewrites, omissions, and blatant changes. It’s… Well, unknowable what the original intentions of the authors were, but what we see now, the scriptures used to preach hate, are absolutely the result of millennia of people in places of power pushing agendas. Blind faith in something like a church is exactly what I meant when I said that about faith making you do something you wouldn’t otherwise. Fuck that, form your own opinions on the things that matter, don’t just take the ones from someone who swears they want the best for you.
Believing things based on the best evidence you have available (someone told you what they’re thinking) and believing things with no credible evidence (religion) are completely different things and one being a good idea does not mean the other one is.
Wow, I just read about secular humanism, and it seems to be pretty much exactly how I feel about things. The human race could, through science, understanding, and cooperation, solve most of the problems that we are faced with. I like that.
I never thought of that; that’s interesting.