RE: Is atheism a belief?
March 12, 2019 at 3:16 pm
(This post was last modified: March 12, 2019 at 3:21 pm by bennyboy.)
(March 12, 2019 at 9:16 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: -and, for the other side of that coin, believing in a conscious universe (as your hypothetical example) isn't capable of making you a theist, or of somehow contradicting the status of your belief in gods as an atheist of any kind. I can also think of dozens of things, true things...not hypothetical, that explain why people believed in gods and what they were describing with the employment of the concept. This acknowledgement doesn't express a belief in gods or a change in the status of my belief, only that believers were misinformed about the object of their worship. In the same vein, if it turned out that the universe were conscious, then I would believe in...the universe, which is conscious. Perhaps some of the faithful were trying to describe that, I'd tend to argue otherwise..but even if both of these things were the case I would remain an atheist beause the contention has nothing to do with -gods- and the god believers were still wrong.
That's fair enough. I didn't say that a conscious Universe would be evidence for or proof of God. I said that I'd be well-disposed toward someone who would call a panpsychic Universe God; to me, that's a non-trivial difference. I suppose I might think of the Universe as a mega-entity then, and that I also would think God was a good term for that. What I wouldn't do is start believing that Jesus was resurrected, or that praying would kill Aunt Ethel's kidney stones.
All this revolves around a slightly silly question: "Do you believe in anything that you'd call God?" And the answer is yes / no / maybe / needs resolution: which I resolve down to "I don't know." It doesn't mean that I'd suddenly be open to the mythological narratives of ancient sand-dwellers as an expression of universal truth.
(March 12, 2019 at 12:06 pm)Shell B Wrote: I've only ever had one accident. It happened when I was at an unfamiliar intersection and a snowbank literally blocked the light, so I didn't even know there was one, let alone that it was red.
I had several accidents in my teens and twenties. It's because I was rally-driving, often in the Canadian winter roads, and was much more interested in excitement than in my own survival-- and the safety of others rarely entered into my calculus at all. Now that I pretty much consider anything exciting a nasty jolt to be avoided, I'd say I'm an excellent driver-- I can predict what people will do, I have a good awareness of the vehicles around me, I rarely get upset, and so on.
