RE: What Kind of Atheist are You?
April 25, 2015 at 6:54 am
(This post was last modified: April 25, 2015 at 6:59 am by Red Economist.)
(April 25, 2015 at 4:20 am)robvalue Wrote: What do you mean by a spiritual realm? If it's unknowable, how do you know it exists?
Apologies if it's not you making this claim but you're referring to someone else. Politics is hard for simpletons like me.
No, it's cool. I'm not making that cliam, as its more a cliam I'm making of others particuarly people who are religious.
the dualistic seperation of the body and the mind becomes the dualistic seperation of matter and consciousness/spirit into different realms of existence. In seeking to find explanation for how the world works, if you argue that pheneomena is caused by the mind or consciousness, you then end up needing a "first cause" to start everything in existence, i.e. God. Materialism is based on the assumption that consciousness is a property of matter/the brain as part of the body, and that matter is primary; therefore the existence of supernatural pheneomena is an illusion. it is monistic in that all things are material as opposed to dualistic. In Marxist philosophy, consciousness itself is not material, but is a product of matter (e.g. the nuerological connections in the brain).
The reason this is important is that dualism leads to strong agnosticism; if there is a world "beyond", "behind" or "above" the material one, it is therefore beyond sense-perception, and therefore scientific evidence/knowledge. Marxism is a 19th century philosophy which relies on treating science as an ideology ('scientism: that natural science is the best method for establishing truth/knowledge) and so rejecting dualism and therefore strong agnosticism means there is no inherent limit to human knowledge and nothing is unknowable, merely unknown.
This view (scientism) fell out of favour in the 20th century because of the implications of scientific cliams of understandings of history in both communism and national socialism; the former said history is characterised by class struggle and the latter racial struggle. What they share in common, is that treating natural science as a method for understanding society has radical implications on ethics and as "knowledge is power" the old adegde "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" into play. If society is understood scientifically it gives the people (or more worryingly the state) the power to control society and with such knowledge society can be improved and made into a utopia. this is central to communist ideology and to a lesser extent national socialism in terms of eugenics.
The flip side of this is that it also gives a different standard for "objective" ethics. this is dangerous because without a belief in a universal or enteral law of ethics (common to Christianity and Liberalism) the state can measure a persons value based on what they contribute to society and in the name of efficiency "eliminate" those who it thinks do not help their cause. the tricky question is whether this is an inherent qualitity of communism, or something that can be overcome by futher development.
(edit: The idea that there is a spiritual realm is implied as a way of explaining how the world works, but with the advance of science and the human ability to replicate natural pheneomena for our own purposes, we no longer need religious explanations. Science therefore shows that religion is an illusion; but overcoming religion completely means being in conscious control not only of nature, but also by having scientific knowledge of and applying it to the planned development of society. )
