Rejection of All that is Holy

[Esquilax]

I made a special effort to avoid that entailment by always including the term divine. You don’t have to be a theist to believe in ghosts or magic.

Okay, fair enough.

But that said, I do say it, atheism, is the rejection of a proposition, because the proposition is already embedded in Western culture in subtle and pervasive ways. For example, in the natural sciences, people talk about various laws, like the laws of physics. This use of the term ‘laws’ is based on a thoroughly Christian concept, i.e. that the regularities observed in nature, i.e. ‘laws’ are the result of a divine lawgiver.

I have reason to doubt that, but so what? Atheism isn't about dispensing with everything christian, or any other religion. It's about disbelief in a single claim, with a kind of added corollary for freethinking atheists to evaluate individual claims on their own merit. We can accept the good claims, reject the bad ones, and suspend judgment on the rest.

We are both trading in speculation here. I suspect that self-identifying oneself as an atheist affects how one judges what is or is not a genuinely mystical experience. Consider how easily many posters will say that mystical experiences are delusionaa

Possibly. But then, a large part of my own atheism- and this is true of many others here- is accepting the evidence as it stands, not as how we want it to stand. I can't tell you how many threads there are here where theists ask the question "don't you want to live forever?" or something like it, where the uniform response from the atheists has been "what I want or don't want is irrelevant to reality." We'd accept a mystical experience if only it'd conform to some simple, reasonable conditions. The problem is that the mystical experiences we've been presented with are either entirely subjective (personal relationships with god, feeling connected to the universe, stuff like that), not recorded or verified such that we can actually see for ourselves (nobody sees fit to record miracles, really), or more plausibly misattribution ("I was in hospital with cancer for years before god cured it!" as though the medicine had nothing to do with it.) The personal experiences of others aren't justification for belief myself, and I live in a world where I've never had such an experience; what else am I supposed to think, other than that there's another explanation?

Within the context of this discussion you are making a distinction without a difference. If someone disagrees with an opinion, even if their reason is that the statement is too subjective, that means that they do not receive it. Instead he or she turns it away, i.e. rejects it.

Except that there's three states; acceptance and rejection, and suspension of judgment. The last is still disagreement in that it maintains that so far sufficient evidence hasn't been given to justify acceptance right now, but it's not rejection in that it allows for additional evidence to be presented that would lead to acceptance. What that evidence might be will be different for each atheist involved, it's not like there's some standard we're all bound to appeal to, either. This isn't a situation where we're just being impossible to please.

Secondly you call spiritual experiences ‘vague’. By doing so aren’t you making a value judgment from within an atheistic framework. I doubt very much that GodsChild or Drich would call the reply to A/S/K vague. I am not asking to accept that their experiences are actually divine. I ask you to recognize that you are taking a stance that is opposed to accepting them as divine.

If GC and Drich got a reply to their A/S/K strategy, then fine for them. But their reply isn't sufficient justification for me to believe, and more than a few of us have had no results from the same method. I have serious problems with the methodology of A/S/K in that it seems formulated to resist falsification by consistently putting the blame for failure on the participant, but the main reason I find it and other spiritual experiences like it vague is because they're personal experiences that haven't happened to me. When Drich talks about A/S/K, it's rarely in language beyond "when I did it, I found the evidence I needed to believe in god," but he doesn't say what that is, and he can't show it to anyone else. If he's had that experience then fine, he's justified in believing in god. But the fact that he had it isn't a reason for me to believe, until I have such an experience myself.

It's just that all the suggested methods seem to fail when I do them, and when I say that out loud the theists proposing them fall over themselves in a rush to blame me for that, making judgments about my intent that they really have no way of knowing. After a while, it tends to make one suspicious.

The threshold is the problem that concerns me. To set a threshold, culturally and personally, is an act of establishing the boundaries of what is acceptable to think and how one must think about something. For example, the position that requires ruling out all natural causes before allowing for divine causes reflects a bias toward scientific modes of validation that are currently valued in Western societies. I suspect the same is true of the words ‘atheist’ and ‘atheism’, the terms set up conceptual boundaries within a larger cultural context.

It's just a probabilistic reality, really; the reason I'd try to rule out natural causes before accepting supernatural ones is that natural causes have explained every other phenomena I've ever encountered, and any potential supernatural phenomena would be the first one for me. It's just a fact that in my subjective experience of the world natural causes have a higher probability than supernatural ones, and thus should be the first port of call when attempting to find a cause.