The books been pretty thoroughly panned. Apparently, it plays out like an episode of Batshit AF Apologists Greatest hits, lol.

(November 19, 2019 at 8:58 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(November 19, 2019 at 8:51 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: I don't see how, since it's qualified with the word 'some'.

Boru

Really? "purist view without a viewpoint" and "lack of belief rests on no assumptions and requires no justifications" I guess it's easy talking about some of those atheists.

I have met a few atheists with precisely that outlook.

Boru

(November 19, 2019 at 4:37 am)Belacqua Wrote: Some atheists today apparently want to deny that their thinking is inevitably embedded in their own time and place and culture, and therefore contains various contingencies. Some people seem to have the fantasy that to be an atheist today is a sort of purist view without a viewpoint, and that therefore their lack of belief rests on no assumptions and requires no justifications. It would be hard to sustain this fantasy after reading Gray's book. 

I've never been any kind of religious. When I was younger I said "I'm not religious enough to call myself an atheist." People might as well ask me what kind of unicorn I am.

The interesting thing, is that you probably aren't. Even the religious are becoming, increasingly, not any kind of religious. As a concept, religion is losing it's privileged place, and with that the ability to maintain itself or even produce a situation where a person has to have some ad hoc explanation for why they don't believe as and in a social artifact.

The pushback from the culture of religion, which is not at all exclusive to the religious, is to imagine that any and everything is "your religion". Further, in some cases, and in the case of this book..to then go on to claim that your "religion" is indebted, somehow, to the religions of the social artifact. With a good smattering of "hurr durr, atheists are shitty too" for good measure.



Like I said, Batshit AF Apologists Greatest Hits. Course, as Lavar put it, don't take my word for it, lol.

(November 19, 2019 at 8:58 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(November 19, 2019 at 8:51 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: I don't see how, since it's qualified with the word 'some'.

Boru

Really? "purist view without a viewpoint" and "lack of belief rests on no assumptions and requires no justifications" I guess it's easy talking about some of those atheists.

The point is that it's pretty rare to find such atheists, especially on forums like these.

I don't think that it is. Either way, this is just a variant of the "angry at/disappointed with god" song and dance.

I'd be interested to see how many people can, with rigorous introspection, offer a justification for why they don't believe. I wouldn't be surprised to find tons of stories about how and when people realized that they didn't..but why or how? That information isn't actually made available to our conscious selves. It isn't necessary. No more so than the whys and hows of our favorite tastes and textures in food are made available.

George Smith's 'The Case against God' is thorough and available as a free PDF.

There ought to be a book 'The 4,200 Types of Theist'. I suppose it would be 4,300 by the time you finished writing it, though.

(November 19, 2019 at 10:59 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: I don't think that it is.  Either way, this is just a variant of the "angry at/disappointed with god" song and dance.

I'd be interested to see how many people can, with rigorous introspection, offer a justification for why they don't believe.  I wouldn't be surprised to find tons of stories about how and when people realized that they didn't..but why or how?  That information isn't actually made available to our conscious selves.  It isn't necessary.  No more so than the whys and hows of our favorite tastes and textures in food are made available.

Most, if not all, atheists here can. No one here is lacking in intelligence to not be able to provide justification for their lack of belief. Often times, the factor is motivation/interest. Some atheists here don't really care to justify, and that's fine.

Most mental ideas/thoughts don't surface into the consciousness anyway until we are driven into bringing them up.

I think you misunderstand the question, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether people are intelligent (or not). OFC most, if not all atheists have something to say..and partly because, as social artifact, it's seen to be a requirement of some sort or another.

-is the thing they have to say, in reality, the explanation or justification for the fact that they don't believe - or a convenient ad hoc proposition filling a gap that their cognitive apparatus saw no need to address, or..perhaps..lacked the fundamental ability to address?

Let's take the case of ex believers, as the most fertile field for people who might have or need some justification. In the moment that you realized "fuck, I don't believe this shit anymore" had some sentence in the magic book changed? Was a flying horse or a risen demi-god more or less rational or believable the moment before than it was the moment after? OFC not, the change was internal.


-but what was it? Do you know, how could you know? How expansive and accurate a picture of your subconscious do you possess?

Isn't it at least possible...and couldn't I mine the converts corner..for stories where a person first ceased to believe..and then began to look for justifications to buttress that new state of being?

(fwiw, I fully expect to find that some people did methodically deconstuct their beliefs...but I also expect that group to be smaller than the one that didn't, or never had any need to)

The tipping point was pretty obvious in my case, took a course on religion from a believer who thought he could prove God while taking a course on logical fallacies. I noticed all of his arguments contained at least one. The road was paved by my having read the Bible cover-to-cover twice, so I was definitely already no longer a Pentecostal.