Rejection of All that is Holy

[TreeSapNest]

What I am saying is that within Western culture there is no conceptual vacuum in which atheism is the default position; atheism will always be a positive act of rejection of spiritual experiences as divine.

For those like myself who believe that gods are not real, it is true that I believe people do not experience gods.

[FifthElement]

I doubt you'd find an atheist here who, when presented with a clear, unambiguous divinely inspired spiritual experience, for which no more likely explanation can be found, would actually reject it. Disagreement is not rejection, Chad; atheism simply disagrees with the claim that currently observed spiritual experiences are divine, mostly owing to their vague and subjective nature. But that disagreement withers and dies in the face of a divine experience that has all of those mitigating circumstances stripped away. The absolute best you could say, if you really wanted to push your case as strongly as you could, is that atheism is a rejection of all currently claimed spiritual experiences as divine, and even that's not entirely true as this "rejection" would also vanish if new evidence came to light that proved a past spiritual experience to be divine.

Totally agree here. Spiritual experience which is not divine, however, is considered by many religious people as blasphemy or at least as delusion.

How convenient ...

I regard spiritual "experiences" as delusional.

I always seen it more like "spiritual" experiences (quotation on the word spiritual), cuz I experimented with lots of drugs (when I was young) which can give you an experience often confused with "spiritual" (as most commonly understood) or even "religious" one.

[The Grand Nudger]

LSD- Tried that too, I melted- didn't experience any "divine". Peyote and a sweat lodge at pine ridge, also no "divine" (best.....sauna...ever...tho)

[Ryantology]

By way of analogy, my belief that horses not a food source (a uniquely American attitude) remains passive until I am presented with a plate of horse meat and I actively reject it in disgust. Something important is missing by failing to consider that simply holding a specific belief, like ‘horses are not a food source’ fosters a disposition in the person holding the belief.

And, what a complete disaster of an analogy.

1. I can be unwilling to eat horse meat and still acknowledge that it is a human food source. I would deny that it was a food source only if it was something humans could not consume for nutrition.
2. You're not actually presenting me with horse meat and asking me to consider whether or not it's food. You're presenting me with horse meat and insisting that there is no other food in existence.
3. Only, that's not right, either. You're not actually presenting me with horse meat at all. You're presenting me with an empty plate and telling me that there's horse meat there, and insisting that I see only an empty plate because I reject your claim that it contains horse meat.
4. The entire basis for this thread is maliciously dishonest. Those of us who don't identify as positive/strong atheists don't reject the concept of a god (at least, not technically). We reject all claims of god's existence because almost all of them contradict and none of them meet the standards of evidence we apply (or, should apply) to claims of any kind.

[The Valkyrie]

I reject what people claim to be "holy", and claims of spiritual/religious encounters, because I have no reason to believe them.

[Neo-Scholastic]

…you're still trying to categorize atheism as a rejection of a proposition (it isn't) that necessarily entails an additional rejection of supernatural beliefs (it doesn't.)

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.

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 doubt you'd find an atheist here who, when presented with a clear, unambiguous divinely inspired spiritual experience, for which no more likely explanation can be found, would actually reject it.

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

…Disagreement is not rejection…atheism simply disagrees with the claim that currently observed spiritual experiences are divine, mostly owing to their vague and subjective nature.

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.
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.

… Can it really be called a rejection at all, if the threshold for acceptance is "must be really divine"?

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.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

No, it isn't, point of fact, even our regular (nopt natural, but legal) "laws" were stolen..as a concept, from pagans.........particularly norse/germanic ones in the case of western society.

As regards a natural law, this concept is itself still not stolen from christianity, it's just a description of behavior that seems to have no exceptions.

There is no stolen concept, just to nip that ridiculous shit in the bud.

[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.

[Thumpalumpacus]

As it relates specifically to atheism, I believe that in Western culture it is impossible to disentangle the lack of belief in god(s) from the realization of that idea as the rejection of the spiritual experiences of the divine in oneself and others.

Your belief is incorrect. I do not need a deity to have spiritual experiences on my own. You can believe or disbelieve me, but you cannot speak with any authority about what happens inside of me.

Simply because you cannot conceive of the sublime outside of your own frame of reference, that does not mean that it doesn't exist there; it only means that you cannot conceive of the sublime that doesn't comport with your own outlook.

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atheism will always be a positive act of rejection of spiritual experiences as divine.

I regard spiritual "experiences" as delusional.

That depends on what they are, doesn't it?

I have what I regard as spiritual moments -- moments of connectedness colored with the awe of being aware of it in the moment -- when I look at the nighttime sky, and ponder the immense depths of time the light reaching my retinæ has crossed -- and what it implies about my place in the Universe (specifically, how fucking small I am against it). I have those moments when I consider that the very atoms of my body were manufactured in stars, equally as far away and yet now long dead; that we are literally the ashes of the stars. Or, as Dyson put it, we are the Universe, pondering itself.

It doesn't mean that I ascribe those phenomena to anything other than brute physical processes.

What is the delusion I'm buying into, then?

[Mister Agenda]

Realizing that my spiritual experiences were happening entirely inside of my head was a factor that contributed to me becoming an atheist, not vice versa.

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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 did not know that, and a little research shows that it isn't true. The idea of natural laws predates Christianity.

So there's an issue primary to the falsity of the contention, and that's is that even if it was true, I was unaware of it, so if Christianity had been behind the origin of the term, it would still be apropos of nothing in regards to creating an assumption of theism in me.

On the other hand, it's true that if you're an American, it's nearly impossible to be unaware of the most basic tenets of Christianity. I'm not at all sure that's true in parts of Europe where atheists form a large minority or even a majority, so I would hesitate to claim it for all of Western culture.