Books regarding atheism

[GrandizerII]

Admitting that atheism is simply a lack of belief would destroy a lot of his other arguments.

Atheism is a lack of belief among stones and lizards.

If you are a grown-up human being who has heard and rejected religious claims, it is something more than a lack.

While I agree with the overall point you're making (so you're not in your own here), I think the application of the term atheism/theism to stones and lizards and other such things might be problematic. It's like applying the "with hair"/bald dichotomy to God and then saying God is bald because he has no hair.

[The Grand Nudger]

Depends on the god. You just know aphrodite had a brazilian.

[Belacqua]

Atheism is a lack of belief among stones and lizards.

If you are a grown-up human being who has heard and rejected religious claims, it is something more than a lack.

While I agree with the overall point you're making (so you're not in your own here), I think the application of the term atheism/theism to stones and lizards and other such things might be problematic. It's like applying the "with hair"/bald dichotomy to God and then saying God is bald because he has no hair.

You're right; but in the past I've had people so adamant about "no belief" being the only criterion that they did assert that stones are atheist. I'm just using it as an example of something which is incapable of belief.

It's very strange to me that what I say isn't obvious.

Let me try a dialogue:

Fundamentalist: I say that God created the world in six days.
Brain-dead atheist: I don't accept that claim. 
Fundamentalist: Why do you reject that claim? 
Brain-dead atheist: I don't need a reason to reject that claim. I reject or accept claims based on no reason. I'm just an atheist and I always have been.

I don't want to assume that anyone capable of posting here would resemble the brain-dead atheist.

Here is what I claim actually goes on:

Fundamentalist: I say that God created the world in six days.
Reasonable thinking atheist: I don't accept that claim. 
Fundamentalist: Why do you reject that claim? 
Reasonable thinking atheist: Because everything science tells me about the existence and development of the world, from the Big Bang to the development of my own solar system tells me that it all took a lot longer than six days. In general I find scientific explanations to be more well-founded and more believable than creation myths in old books, therefore I reject your claim. 

The point is that in even very simple religious claims, we reject them because there is something else we rely on more. In the above case, the whole of scientific cosmology. We have standards to which we hold (e.g. that science is more reliable than revelation) and we use those standards to evaluate claims. 

This means we have rejected religious claims, and continued to be atheists, based on standards of judgment. We are no longer like new-born infants, who lack belief in God simply because they don't know anything about it.

[The Grand Nudger]

I strongly doubt that a brain-dead person is having a conversation with anyone, but go ahead, tell us how you feel, lol.

Here again we see the insistence on a false dichotomy that swirls around avoiding some negative consequence. People either agree with your trivially false position,and are vry smrt prsns..or they don't, and they're dumb. If you think it;s smarter, somehow, to be an atheist because you've categorically assessed all god claims which you can possess knowledge of, then and only then, with enough knowledge of the workings of your own mind to exclude other possibilities.... deciding upon that rational basis that there are no gods or you don't believe those claims, then fine.

Good luck finding one of those atheists, though.

Me, I just hear the stories and don't believe them. Never have. I heard the stories and knew about the stories long before I knew anything about the scientific method or the big bang model or geology. I never needed to compare the two to know what I did or didn't believe, and it would be a neat trick if I didn't believe them based on some commitment to things I didn't know about...wouldn't you agree? The switch is simply in the off position, lol. That, and only that, is what accounts for my being an atheist...because that's all the term refers to in the first place.

I do, ofc, have positions on and commitments to a wide range of things - for example truth and accuracy, and it's from that wide range of positions and commitments that I can opine on how much of a bad faith suggestion you made in response to a request for books on atheism. The authors book, and your position, has absolutely nothing to do with atheism, but..rather...all those positions and people which the two of you detest and would write a polemic about.

[EgoDeath]

Admitting that atheism is simply a lack of belief would destroy a lot of his other arguments.

Atheism is a lack of belief among stones and lizards.

If you are a grown-up human being who has heard and rejected religious claims, it is something more than a lack.

You can scream and shout this from the rooftops for a long as you like, but does that make it true?

How do you figure that atheism is a belief?

From Wikipedia:

"Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of deities."

Now, within this broad range of individuals, there may be some specific people who choose to say "I know there is no such thing as god." At that point, you could argue that they hold a positive belief. But if you say "theres a god" and I say, "until i see evidence, i see no reason to agree with you," that is you having failed to convince me. the burden of proof rests on he or she who made the claim.

Maybe I still consider that you could be right, but i dont know one way or the other.

After all, arent you the perpetual fence-sitter, forever saying its okay to admit "i dont know?"

[Belacqua]

Now, within this broad range of individuals, there may be some specific people who choose to say "I know there is no such thing as god." At that point, you could argue that they hold a positive belief.  But if you say "theres a god" and I say, "until i see evidence, i see no reason to agree with you," that is you having failed to convince me. the burden of proof rests on he or she who made the claim.

I'm not talking about the difference between a positive belief in no God and a simple lack of belief. What I say applies in both cases.

[The Grand Nudger]

What you have to say on the matter doesn't just stretch atheism beyond the remit the term covers and into the territory of other positions, it also flies in the face of much of what we know about human decision-making and belief in general. We're not rational creatures, for example, so much as rationalizers, and our memory is not a reliable timestamp for events so much as it's a system of making associations that reinforce our internal narratives.

Particular to this issue, post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this. People remember having read some contradiction, for example, and they remember being or becoming or realizing that they were atheists. The latter may not actually have follow the former, but in conjunction with a desire to be "reasonable thinking atheists" there is cognitive pressure to associate them and remember them in that order, to assert a causal relationship.

In contrast with how we perceive ourselves, and events in relationship to ourselves and the causal relationship between them - we find that by the time we've created the narrative of a "decision" - the fix is already in. We were not privy to the details, the actual functional details of this "decision" - because they aren't useful to us. This is the gap that our memory fills. This is the thing we communicate to others in words, which add an extra layer of implicit and explicit bias.

There are cracks, though, in the narratives. What we might call minority reports. People commonly recall a period of doubt preceding any exploration of their faith. In fact, that period of doubt is often, as they recall, the impetus for that exploration in the first place. Was the doubt created by some thing they would later discover? No more than anything I learned long after I learned a hell of alot about a hell of alot of gods. Not unless we have a time machine, that is. If they hadn't discovered that particular thing, later, would they have continued along the path of doubt until they did find something which confirmed what was almost certainly already there, in their subconscious? Again, as people so often recall it, yes. They keep looking, until they find what they're looking for. No matter how inconsequential it may be to the larger question of a gods existence..and, in fact, even if it isn't any justification for atheism at all, they satisfy themselves with it. A contradiction in a magic book has absolutely nothing to tell us on the issue of whether gods exist. Nothing.

The TLDR version is that these things aren't usually any commitment to an external measuring stick, it isn't on account of any commitment -to them- that a person does or doesn't believe, but on account of a commitment to that self narrative and a need for it to be cohesive and positively reinforcing that we imagine ourselves to be in some sort of rational control over what we believe or feel. We are not. To use an even simpler analogy, we put on a coat after it gets cold, not before. This is all very inconvenient for any rational discussion of a state of belief, and not for a single party or side in those discussions, either. It bothers us to think of ourselves in this way, it contradicts the narrative we have fastidiously curated, but it also denies nutters the avenue of attack they require..positively insist on, even.

-and so here we are.

You need for what you have to say to apply, and no amount of "reasonable thinking"..atheist or otherwise, will dissuade you from it, because these other things you have to say, about other positions and about atheists and atheism in general, are clearly an important portion of your own self narrative. So important that in response to a request about books on atheism, you actually offered up a book on exactly those opinions...rather than atheism. I'd be willing to bet that, like our hypothetical deconvert recounting his story, you came to these opinions before you sought out anything even remotely approaching a rational basis for them, and that you've satisfied yourself with it's contents in precisely the same way. All that's left is to see how diligently you'll work to lie to yourself, or to me, in order to curate them, and insist that this simply cannot be so, just like I can't possibly exist, even as I sit here and have a very frank discussion with you about atheism.

[EgoDeath]

Now, within this broad range of individuals, there may be some specific people who choose to say "I know there is no such thing as god." At that point, you could argue that they hold a positive belief.  But if you say "theres a god" and I say, "until i see evidence, i see no reason to agree with you," that is you having failed to convince me. the burden of proof rests on he or she who made the claim.

I'm not talking about the difference between a positive belief in no God and a simple lack of belief. What I say applies in both cases.

https://youtu.be/sNDZb0KtJDk

Seems like you should give this video a quick look.

[Mister Agenda]

This conversation reminds me of a novel by Peter Watts that's free online called Blindsight. The term refers to the ability of some blind people to avoid obstacles they can't consciously see; their eyes are intact enough for vision, but the neural apparatus for processing what their eyes perceive that they aren't aware of what they 'see'.

In the novel it turns out that although intelligent life is fairly abundant, consciousness is an anomaly. The concept is so confusing to the aliens that they interpret human broadcasts as an attempt to drain their communications bandwidth because what we're communicating (art, identity, and the like) makes no sense at all. The book moves from a First Contact novel to cosmic horror as the narrator realizes that unconscious intelligence is biologically more successful than the human kind.

Gae Bolga's comments made me think of this fictional example of intelligent species that are rational but don't rationalize.

[Tom Fearnley]

God The Failed Hypothesis by Victor J Stenger is a classic. Also try the blog Common Sense Atheism.