RE: Is atheism a belief?
March 8, 2019 at 8:47 pm
(This post was last modified: March 8, 2019 at 8:52 pm by bennyboy.)
(March 8, 2019 at 7:58 pm)Shell B Wrote: It can be quite terrible. I've seen a young boy who would become immobile with one of his tics. He would just drop to the floor and be unable to move. Tics range from complex full-body tics like that to simple blinking.
No doubt. I was epileptic as a child. I was drugged for most of my childhood, and while I was in a pretty comfortable stupor at that time, looking back later on how my classmates treated me filled me with shame. I "grew out" of it, but I'm pretty sure that my brain still functions differently than that of other people. Things which seem sure to other people seem pretty unsure to me-- even down to sense of individual identity, confidence about physical reality and so on.
___
To shamelessly use this aside about brain function/dysfunction to swing back around to the OP, I could say that this may contribute to differences in my philosophical outlook. Some might say "Aha! You are probably brain damaged, and so you cannot understand what I'm saying." But to me, certain truths are self-evident in the experience of them: the existence of mind being one, and uncertainty about the nature of reality being another. From my perspective, it looks like most people were born with a blue pill in their mouths, and I'm Buridan's ass, looking back and forth between red and blue but never really being able to choose.
To some degree, I'd say that atheism might not be a belief, but it is very often (I'd venture to say usually) is accompanied by a belief in the observations of the senses, in the capacity of the mind to infer truth from those observations, and in science and only science to comprehend ultimate reality.
I wouldn't say that soft atheism can be said to be a belief, but I'd say that some particular atheists' world views are nearly as dogmatic, for the same reasons and much in the same way, as those of religious folk. Things like, "Well. . . we can't directly observe the human mind. . . yet. But we will!" is much more a statement of faith in Science, the god of Truth™, than it is an accurate assessment of the interaction between the scientific process and philosophical truth. And when people say goofy stuff like "There's no mind, because we can't observe mind!" then this is very much a secular expression of "I am a jealous God, and thou shalt take no other Gods before me!"
