RE: Books regarding atheism
November 19, 2019 at 12:49 pm
(This post was last modified: November 19, 2019 at 1:00 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Why would an argument against an ad hoc proposition argue against the actual, if any, justification for your non belief?
We're talking about a "bad reason to lack belief" situation...but will that change the status of your belief, or just lead you to abandon that particular conceit? I'm not convinced that these sorts of beliefs ultimately reduce to anything we'd could accurately call justification one way or another, personally. It may simply be that some are susceptible and some are not, or that we all fall on a range of susceptibility. Our coming to terms with where we fall on that spectrum - whenever we become self aware of it- leads to elaborate linguistic ruses, and particularly in context of a culture dominated for thousands of years by religious thought, and recently by rational thought, setting up the assumed internal dilemma of justification and it's baseline.
Ultimately we're talking around the issue of the operation of the human brain..and I want to stress again that none of us have an even remotely accurate internal model of that. It's being so integral to who we are, however, we're deeply invested in imagining that we know what it's doing..what we're doing..and we resent suggestions to the contrary as though they're derogatory remarks. Comments on our intelligence, for example.
We're talking about a "bad reason to lack belief" situation...but will that change the status of your belief, or just lead you to abandon that particular conceit? I'm not convinced that these sorts of beliefs ultimately reduce to anything we'd could accurately call justification one way or another, personally. It may simply be that some are susceptible and some are not, or that we all fall on a range of susceptibility. Our coming to terms with where we fall on that spectrum - whenever we become self aware of it- leads to elaborate linguistic ruses, and particularly in context of a culture dominated for thousands of years by religious thought, and recently by rational thought, setting up the assumed internal dilemma of justification and it's baseline.
Ultimately we're talking around the issue of the operation of the human brain..and I want to stress again that none of us have an even remotely accurate internal model of that. It's being so integral to who we are, however, we're deeply invested in imagining that we know what it's doing..what we're doing..and we resent suggestions to the contrary as though they're derogatory remarks. Comments on our intelligence, for example.
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