RE: Does it make any sense to ask what is the case for atheism?
May 31, 2013 at 10:22 am
(This post was last modified: May 31, 2013 at 10:35 am by Whateverist.)
(May 30, 2013 at 3:30 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Does it make sense to consider cultural factors? Regardless of the issue, if your opinion is at odds with the dominant culture, it seems reasonable to believe you have actual reasons for defying the common consensus. Only the dominant opinion can be taken for granted. Suppose you are the only conservative in a family of liberals. Liberalism is the default position. So if you are going to opine within hat context, prudence suggests you should be prepared to justify your stance.
On a forum devoted to atheism, atheism is the default position. Thus, no justification is needed. However in the larger USA community, where religious belief is the norm, the roles are reversed.
I don't mind considering cultural factors but I'm not quite sure how you are suggesting they apply here. I think of cultural factors as bubbling up through individuals, more so in some but less in others. Especially in a place as diverse as in the U.S., you have many competing cultures.
It almost sounds as though you are suggesting there is a kind of accountability to the dominant culture. Please say more about what you have in mind. I'm pretty sure I don't understand.
(May 31, 2013 at 10:13 am)apophenia Wrote:
You do provide reasons for rejecting positions people do hold. Sam Harris has said that atheism is just the noise people make in the presence of unrealistic theistic claims. I'm not sure I wholly agree with Sam, but in this case his analogy is sound; nobody felt any need to justify until theist claims to truth were introduced.
For those of us brought up in the Christian miasma, we each in some way or other had to confront the sense in which we were leaving the herd. I remember feeling that but I was so young and better able to accommodate change. So there may be a point in my movement toward atheism at which thinking through my reasons was something I was doing. That phase is over.
I suppose if a theist asked me to try to remember what reasons I'd found persuasive at that time, I could try to remember. But I seriously doubt I could recall in any detail and would just end of confabulating something that seems logical to me now.
