[Serious] Atheist Dogma

[Belacqua]

The problem starts with the incorrect definition of "theism" - belief in gods. Atheists unwittingly dispute this definition when they argue that theists have to be indoctrinated to believe in gods. But then they falsify their correction by claiming that a child is born an atheist and has to be indoctrinated, or that atheists have no doctrine or dogma. 

This is one of those topics we run through every few months. But maybe it's time for another try.

In my view, all babies are taught how the world works. They figure out some things on their own (like, maybe, things tend to fall down rather than up) but any sort of conceptual explanation comes from their parents and other teachers. These concepts are woven into their understanding of the world from their earliest understandings. 

For most people in human history, kids learn about gods or other concepts which we categorize as "religious" merely as part of conceptualizing the world. We can call it "indoctrination" if we disapprove of it, but everybody learns something or other. 

People who are raised around atheists will learn different ways to explain the world. We don't call this "indoctrination" because we approve of it.

The part of the discussion where people flip out is when we talk about grown-ups. Adults who hear the claims made by religious people may or may not accept those claims as true. Unlike infants, we have standards of judgment by which we evaluate claims. These can be very simple -- to the point where we don't even know we have them. So if someone claims to an adult that he dropped a bowling ball and it fell up, that adult would reasonably reject the claim. And he could do so based purely on experience even if he had never studied gravity or any kind of physics. Likewise, if you hear as an adult that St. Peter could cure sick people with his shadow, it would be reasonable to reject that claim based on everything we've experienced before. 

Therefore, adults who hear and reject claims made by religious people are atheists for reasons. They are not atheists in the way that babies are atheists. And adult atheists have very good reasons to be atheists. They hear claims and evaluate them, and are therefore thinking adult atheists. If they heard the claims and accepted them, they would not be atheists any more.  

I don't think it's proper, in most cases, to call the set of standards by which atheists evaluate claims "dogma." Dogma involves something that isn't questioned, and we hope, anyway, that atheist standards of evaluation are derived from better sources.

Strangely, I have had atheists deny the above claim. They are positive that their minds are exactly like the minds of infants. 

A child is born secular - not atheist.

I can't agree with this. As I wrote before, I don't think we should use the word "secular" simply to mean "without religion," in the way that a baby is without religion. 

Secularity is a policy or position we take in relation to religion. So for a long time schools were mixed up with the dominant religion of the city, and after a long time people found reasons to make them independent of religious thinking. This is when secularity became a thing. Likewise hospitals, governments, etc. 

Before there was religion, there was no secularity. Because it doesn't sense to talk about, say, secular ferns that existed in the Devonian period, before humans evolved. Nor does it make sense to talk about secular ferns now, simply because there are no religious ferns. 

A similar word would be "libertarian," I think. Libertarianism is a policy or position in relation to government control of the economy. There was no libertarianism before there were governments or economies -- again, ferns in the Devonian weren't libertarian because they existed without government control -- they were merely without government, which is different. 

I think that using "secular" identically to "non-religious" is a bad idea because it takes away its special meaning and impoverishes our vocabulary. But I realize I'm probably fighting a losing battle.