RE: atheism motivated by hatred for gods
July 21, 2013 at 6:41 pm
(This post was last modified: July 21, 2013 at 6:42 pm by Angrboda.)
(July 21, 2013 at 6:30 pm)Ryantology Wrote: I could hate characters that deserved hating if they were real, and committing real atrocities. Otherwise, my feelings for any character don't usually extend beyond consideration of the works in which they are featured. I certainly do find the Christian God repulsive, but I would only hate him if he really existed and exhibited the behaviors he displays in the Bible. All it makes me do in the real world is suspect the sanity and moral compasses of people who can read it and come away convinced that the character is a good guy.
There are aspects which can be realized by reflecting back on how we form a mental identity of an actual person. We don't see a person's mind, we infer it, using the same bottom-level cognitive machinery that posits the existence of an invisible thing (a mind or self) in a body, despite never encountering such in the flesh. We attribute traits to people such as patience, intelligence, wit, and so forth that are abstractions which are incrementally built into the "identity" by correlating behaviors with (inferred) mental substances (a mind that can solve problems well, one that is possessed by strong emotions, or not, as in "a cold fish"). In a sense, other than the contextual markers up top, there is very little that differentiates how we infer the "mental" existence of the mind of an actual person existing in a body, and inferring a fictional mind inside a fictional character. Note that the traits like intelligence, patience, wit, and so on, don't come in fictional and non-fictional varieties; Sherlock Holmes is still the same clever, whether he is real or not.
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