What is Atheism?

[Brian37]

On another thread I wrote about my experience with the ineffable. I said it was just my private experience and not meant to convince anyone. The reply came back that it was just my private experience and wouldn't convince anyone. Brian, clearly didn't read my post because I said the exact opposite of what he claimed I said. Par for the course. Some people, which may or may not include Brian, seem intent to dispute everything a theist says simply because they are a theist.

That's really the problem with personal experiences, they don't really mean anything.  That's why people ask questions of theists who claim to have had some kind of spiritual experience and inevitably, those explanations just don't pan out rationally.  Theists arbitrarily assign a cause to their supposed experience because it makes them feel good to think that cause was actually responsible, but they do not, at least not in my experience, have any way of demonstrating that the cause actually exists or actually had anything to do with the experience.

That's why these experiences are so pointless.

There is a real psychological explanation that is rooted in evolution as to why humans gap fill and come up with these claims based on false perceptions.

Humans don't understand that evolution produces fight or flight and in that process that individual life form, even in other species does not always have time to slow down and assess a situation. Life evolved to make quick responses. An antelope on the African plains doesn't have time, for example to stop and think if that swaying grass is mere wind or the motion caused by a lion stalking it. That gap filling is a bi-product that while can produce survival and even cooperation in groups leads to false perceptions. It is especially easy in humans say with kids whom are not adult enough when they get sold a falsehood before they can formulate critical thinking skills. 

There are natural psychological reasons humans make false claims of "personal experience". When I was a kid I had three "experiences" of seeing relatives. 1 was my dead father. One was my dead Grandmother, and at the time 1 was my live mother. I "saw" them at night time standing next to my bed. It felt real, and did scare the shit out of me. I now know it was merely my brain projecting a lucid dream mixing it with my open eyes. It was NOT real. Now that my mother is dead, if I were to "see" her, I have the knowledge to know most dreams we dont remember and the bad dreams are caused by stress and or mental defect. I was a bullied kid too so I had lots of dreams triggered by that stress.


The same lack of understanding what is really going on is what allows someone to think magic is real. Most people now know that "magician" isn't really sawing the woman in half and it is just an illusion, a trick. Our brains evolved to gap fill and we do that constantly every day every minute without realizing it. Our brains are very powerful in fooling ourselves.