Fundamentalist Atheism
January 15, 2008 · By Aaron Unruh
Along with Kabbalah and Global Warming, it’s the cool religion of the season!:
When I’m with fundamentalist atheists, I quickly begin to have the experience that, for them, something is wrong with me unless I’m like them. For example, I was invited to speak recently at a gathering of atheists. My topic was comparing and contrasting healthy and unhealthy religion. Not a few minutes in, I found myself spinning in an eddy of atheistic proselytizing, such as, “Do you believe in invisible pink elephants, too?”
I was being converted. I’ve been on the receiving end of proselytizers before, of various ilk, and I recognize the experience when it’s happening. They lead you through a series of scripted rhetorical questions designed to make you say: “Oh my God! I want to be one of you!” Or, in the case of atheism, “Oh my No-God!”
And now for the new “faith”… gravity! Yes you too can manipulate words so much to completely remove their origional meaning.
Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism: religion.
Environmentalism is a cause: like civil rights, socialism or free trade
Atheism is a fact statement: There is no God. (that is all there is)
Must be handy to have your own personal dictionary. Does it do other tricks?
Hey Sammy, whats a 7 digit prime number?
All atheists are saying is that it makes absolutely no sense to believe in something for which there is no evidence; in exactly the same way that I don’t believe in pink unicorns or sasquatches, I don’t believe in an invisible omnipotent being in the sky. Now, if you were to present some EVIDENCE for the existence of an omnipotent invisible being in the sky (and no, “I prayed and what I prayed for came true” doesn’t count as evidence), then you might have some sort of an argument. Until then, all religions are based on nothing more than wishful thinking, exactly the same as “horoscopes”, “fortune telling”, and “past lives” are.
Hmmm. I guess Atheists don’t believe in love then.
TTFN
It is also true that all of life and the living of it cannot be experienced in terms of measureable facts and “evidence”.
“healthy and unhealthy religion”
And they couldn’t see the difference?
Atheism by definition is the absence of a belief in God. So how on earth could that be portrayed as fundamentalist? There are no fundamentals to atheism. It’s very simple. Atheists are about as threatening as daisies. By definition, atheists do not attempt to inflict their beliefs on anyone, because by definition they do not have beliefs. How scary. Run for your lives.
By the way, there are lots of atheist conservatives. Just like there are lots of gay conservatives, and lots of black conservatives. It’s true.
“Hmmm. I guess Atheists don’t believe in love then.”
If you love someone, and that person loves you, then you’re “in love”; if you’re in love with the IDEA that you were once Joan of Arc, or that there is an invisible magic man in the sky, does that mean that you were ACTUALLY once Joan of Arc, or that there is ACTUALLY an invisible magic man in the sky? No, of course not; all it means is that you have an over-active imagination.
Hmmm. I guess Atheists don’t believe in love then.
Hmmm. If you’re having some difficulty observing real-world manifestations of the phenomenon called “love” (which would be things like statements expressing love and behaviour that suggests love) in the world around you, then I gather you don’t believe love really exists in the real world; you just have to have “faith” that it it exists.
Weird.
This is why atheists have problems with people like you. You de-humanise them with statements as bizarre as that. Hardly very Godly, I must say.
oh! the irony!
KEvron
oh! the lol!
oh! the hee hee hee!
AAron
“This is why atheists have problems with people like you. You de-humanise them with statements as bizarre as that. Hardly very Godly, I must say.”
The reason that atheists have problems with people like me is that they don’t read what I say carefully enough and then respond to the premises of my question. There are many philosophical presuppositions that a rationalist could use. The question was an extremely serious one as it has been ever since Plato’s Symposium - a dialogue referenced in Pope Benedict XVI’s Introduction to Christianity in its 2nd edition from Ignatius Press, btw.
How, for example, do you know that what you perceive to be love is not being generated by a sophisticated Turing Machine? Such questions come up frequently in the Philosophy of Mind.
You mean some people use words without knowing what the heck they are saying? On the subject of love, yes I believe the emotion exists. It is chemicals in a persons brain and actions between two people. It isn’t an all powerful energy that pervades the universe and allows Jedi knights to use light sabers. That is the force (not real, but cool). This may sound less magical, but that is who the world is. Deal with it.
PS Not all atheists are rationalists. They don’t have to deal with this BS.
“Such questions come up frequently in the Philosophy of Mind.”
Anyone who claims to be familiar with philosophy should also be aware that we are not yet sure that the question is itself meaningful or coherent: it may itself conceal a misunderstanding of what’s actually going on.
But then, such acknowledgments require a philosophical humility that is generally beyond theologians.