RE: Church of the atheists and prayer and supplication
September 19, 2022 at 9:55 am
(This post was last modified: September 19, 2022 at 10:00 am by Belacqua.)
(September 19, 2022 at 8:28 am)Eclectic Wrote: [...]
So anyone who becomes atheist should be a member of philosophical religions, such as Confuciusism or humanism or ... as worldview and ideology.
Either create a personal or public eclectic religion that combines religious and philosophical religions with its personal beliefs.
[...]
I'd say there's one big difference between a religion and a non-religious philosophy:
In a religion, ethics and metaphysics are fundamentally united. "Is" and "ought" have an essential relationship, and the one necessitates the other.
In general, atheistic systems don't have this connection. We may hold to a system of ethics or argue in favor of certain basic principles, but these are not made necessary by the laws by which the universe is made and operates.
In practice, then, when ethical principles are no longer held to be fundamentally a part of the world, what people are left with are contingent historical mores. And these, in our time, are almost always the values drummed into us by constant corporate propaganda. The ubiquity of this stuff, and the masterful way in which it instills its values into people, is amazing. It's still possible to encounter competing views -- in great literature, for example -- but the percentage of people who take this seriously is tiny in comparison to consumers of pop culture and its barely concealed propaganda.
I wish we could set up a non-corporate ethics which could work as a counter to the values of our time. But in practice I don't see how this could work. Your dream of a universal (but atheist) religion has an appeal. I guess I just lack the idealism to think it could get up and running in a major way.
