RE: sectarianism in atheism
July 12, 2020 at 4:35 am
(This post was last modified: July 12, 2020 at 4:37 am by Belacqua.)
(April 5, 2019 at 3:18 pm)yogamaster Wrote: Are there different sects within atheism and do some people believe their version of atheism to be "true" while another version of atheism is "false"?
The definition of "atheist" that people on this forum use is "anyone who lacks a belief in God." So that's fine with me.
And it seems reasonable, as is often pointed out, that beyond that simple definition there is a great deal of variation in what atheists hold to be true.
So while "sects" doesn't seem like the right word to me, I do think there are people who are atheist for very different reasons. Their ways of understanding the world might be so in variance with other atheists that they would disagree about just about everything of importance.
Sometimes I've seen atheists speak of religion as a kind of illusory or distracting add-on to life, and once this unnecessary layer is removed then it's obvious what is true and what is good. For the most part, among the sort of person who participates on forums like this one, the true is what science tells us. And the good is some variation of standard liberal values, along the lines of "do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt other people." These beliefs seem so self-evident to many atheists that they may not even seem like something we could sanely question. In some cases the fact that science and liberal values are local, historical, contingent views seems to get lost. People may speak as if the alternatives are 1) religion, or 2) science and liberal values.
Again, I wouldn't call this a "sect," but it is only one way of seeing the world, and people who are atheist because this is what they consider to be the truth of the world are not the only kind of atheist there is. People who say "I'm an atheist because I don't see any evidence for God" are for the most part unwittingly judging by these criteria.
As an example of an alternative kind of atheist, the most famous example would probably be Nietzsche. When he wrote of God, or declared that God is dead, he wasn't referring only to the literalists' angry sky-daddy. Nietzsche knew that for educated people, God is the Logos -- the guarantee of reason and the organizing principles of the universe. If that guarantee is gone, then so is our confidence in science and in liberal values.
For Nietzsche, the deepest level of the real world has no order. It is chaos. Any order we perceive is a useful illusion, manufactured by the mind, so that we can get through the day and not go crazy. The order we project onto the world
seems to us true and intrinsically embedded in the non-human world, but to him that is a hold-over from religion. If God is dead, we have no reason to have faith in any kind of order. And we live in such a tiny space and time out of the entirety of the universe, that it is just arrogance for us to assume that the order we project is in any way universal or permanent.
So I think that people who become atheists because they find Nietzsche persuasive would be very different from the typical atheist on this forum. A Nietzschean atheist would find science to be mere convenience and liberal values to be insincere power-plays. Anyone who argued that the lack of God leaves us with science and liberalism would be a different kind of atheist.
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