An interesting read concerning atheism in america.

[brewer]

[no one]

Because free thinking is an abomination.

[brewer]

[Fireball]

[vulcanlogician]

That was an interesting read, brewer. Thanks for sharing.

I learned of Ernestine Rose for the first time. Can't believe I hadn't heard of her before. She's fuckin' awesome.

I also found this bit interesting:

This kind of apophatic theology has a lot in common with godless mysticism, Gray argues, because saying that God does not exist is not so different from saying that we cannot comprehend God’s existence. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic. “A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think,” Gray writes.

One of these days I'm going to make a thread about what I call "realistic mysticism"... like that of Thoreau... that holds the natural world as its divine object rather than a god. Not that I practice that sort of mysticism or anything. But I find it interesting, and think it's defensible.

[brewer]

[vulcanlogician]

[The Grand Nudger]

Out of free articles. I will say, though, that with respect to secular humanism being a standin for other religions - yeah..and there's even an actual religion of secular humanism. Part of the reason, in my experience, that a christian person (and by extension a christian country) is uncomfortable with atheism is that religious views are ethical and political views, and people tend to be wary when a person rejects their ethical and political views. What will they do? The rejection of christianity is taken to be a rejection of more than just the idea of a god.

[Mister Agenda]

Humanism used to be usually religious, though it seems to have been coopted by Unitarian Universalism in the US, secular humanism distinguishes itself from the former default of religious humanism, though now secular humanism IS the default humanism.

[The Grand Nudger]

The list of which superstitions we do or don't use to assert normative principles changes more often than the normative principles do. They're truth statements in search of validation.

Insomuch as people assume that a given validation being invalidated harms the normative assertion, they lose their shit. Tons of threads on this board by the faithful to that effect.

"How can you X without gods?" is just another way of saying "How can this important thing be true if this other unimportant thing isn't?" Secular humanism (and humanism of any kind) succeeds in that it offers the answer to those questions, even in the hypothetical case where the superstition is true, but irrelevant to that answer. Ala, if there are no gods, how can there be right or wrong? Well, here's how..but even if there are...that's still how, and how some god belief is, plainly put..not only factually inaccurate and contextually irrelevant, but morally vacuous or even unacceptable. When or if a person asserts or believes that the proper focus or organization of human society or law is human interest and authority the justification for that holds even if there are gods and even if those gods are powerfully aligned against those interests and even if those gods punish the disobedients and reward the sycophants.

More than anything, the anxiously faithful are uncomfortable with the unbelieving because their justifications and even their very existence preempts their arguments and reduces their gods to obsolescence. This thing that means so much to them that their own identity is bound to it becomes a thinly veiled farce. No one handles that well.