RE: What Kind of Atheist are You?
April 22, 2015 at 11:35 pm
(This post was last modified: April 22, 2015 at 11:37 pm by Pyrrho.)
(April 22, 2015 at 8:33 pm)AFTT47 Wrote:(April 22, 2015 at 6:30 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: What is the question of this thread? What sorts of categories do you have in mind?
Well many of us (myself included) are fond of pointing out that atheism only tells someone what you don't believe. It says nothing about what you do believe. I'm curious what my fellow atheists here do believe. I realize it may not fit into an established category. Anyone familiar with my posts knows I'm not big on labels. The 'Secular Humanist' one does match my own beliefs pretty closely so I use that one but others may not fit into such a pigeonhole.
Okay. Aside from what I stated earlier at post 50:
http://atheistforums.org/thread-32894-po...#pid926727
I believe there is no god, nothing that I would be willing to call a god, nothing that is normally called a god, other than things that are called a god in a loose way (as in "Brad Pitt is a god!"). I believe that there are no supernatural beings of any kind.
For my positive views, it is convenient to simply say (as I already stated in the previous post) that I basically agree with almost everything David Hume wrote, though I have some disagreements with some of the interpretations I have read about the is/ought issue that would be better discussed in another thread. Of course, if someone has no familiarity with David Hume, this is pretty useless for telling someone anything about me, but it works pretty well for those who have studied his philosophical works.
A few things: Human motivation is emotional. Reason can help one discover facts, but if one does not care about the facts, then they do not have any motivational power. That caring about some fact or other is emotion. So reason is useful for providing means to one's ends, but it is irrelevant for ultimate goals one might have, which are a matter of emotion.
Belief in miracles is silly and irrational.
One should proportion one's beliefs to the evidence. That is, one should be more sure about things that are better supported by evidence than things that are less well supported by evidence. And if there is no evidence for something, one should not believe it.
Some of those ideas are discussed in William Kingdon Clifford's essay "The Ethics of Belief," which can be found at:
http://ajburger.homestead.com/files/book.htm
I basically agree with everything Clifford says in that essay.
And I agree with Epicurus on death, and on his basic view of how one should live one's life (though not everything he wrote). Here is a good site for more on that:
http://www.epicurus.net
I hope to pass through life as pleasantly as reasonably possible, while harming other sentient beings as little as reasonably possible. So far, I am doing fairly well at that, and have no particular reason to expect things to not continue this way for many years, though obviously things could change at any moment.
I have no wish to live forever, and have no fear of death (see Epicurus). I would rather live a good life that is short than a long mediocre life. I would rather be dead than live a bad life, as death is nothing to fear and is not a bad thing. It is like what you experienced in 1800, or, in other words, nothing.
I rather like Seneca's letters 70 & 77:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_lett.../Letter_70
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_lett.../Letter_77
For something more thorough on the subject, though less poetic, see Hume's essay "Of Suicide":
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/704#lf0059_label_889
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.