Does your atheism come as a package?

[FrustratedFool]

My lack of being convinced God exists doesn't stand alone.  It comes packaged with various inter-related opinions.

My atheism comes as a bundle with:
Agnosticism
Skepticism
Anti-religious sentiment
Nihilism
Materialism/Physicalism
Evolution
A high view of science (scientism?)
Left/ Liberal/ Progressive Politics
Not believing in moral realism
Not believing in freewill
Etc.

Does your atheism tie into other things, or does it stand alone?

[arewethereyet]

It's part of me but I don't really make lists or think about what is linked to what. If I were to pick a label for myself - I'm an old hippie.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

My lack of being convinced God exists doesn't stand alone.  It comes packaged with various inter-related opinions.

My atheism comes as a bundle with:
Agnosticism
Skepticism
Anti-religious sentiment
Nihilism
Materialism/Physicalism
Evolution
A high view of science (scientism?)
Left/ Liberal/ Progressive Politics
Not believing in moral realism
Not believing in freewill
Etc.

Does your atheism tie into other things, or does it stand alone?

Not really. I reject agnosticism, I think many people take skepticism too far, and I think nihilism and scientism are jokes. I think I'd still be pro-science and leftist if I were religious. I decline to hate religious people for being religious.

I think the only thing that comes part and parcel with my atheism is that it frees up my Sunday mornings for other stuff.

Boru

[FrustratedFool]

To me, many follow on from each other: athiesm goes hand in hand with materialism, which leads to science and evolution, which leads to rejecting freewill and moral realism, which for me leads to left-liberal politics, which leads to being anti-religious etc.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

To me, many follow on from each other: athiesm goes hand in hand with materialism, which leads to science and evolution, which leads to rejecting freewill and moral realism, which for me leads to left-liberal politics, which leads to being anti-religious etc.

If that's what works for you, dandy. Personally, I can't justify having one aspect of my psyche be a roadmap for the rest.

Boru

[FrustratedFool]

To me it just follows on logically, and I like to be as consistent as I can. Hard to have science without evolution; hard to have materialism without atheism or nihilism; etc. It's just about thinking things through, for me.

[Belacqua]

My lack of being convinced God exists doesn't stand alone.  It comes packaged with various inter-related opinions.

My atheism comes as a bundle with:
Agnosticism
Skepticism
Anti-religious sentiment
Nihilism
Materialism/Physicalism
Evolution
A high view of science (scientism?)
Left/ Liberal/ Progressive Politics
Not believing in moral realism
Not believing in freewill
Etc.

Does your atheism tie into other things, or does it stand alone?

Every atheist everywhere gets their atheism as part of a package. It's impossible not to.

We aren't capable of looking out at the world in some kind of rootless, "view from nowhere" kind of way and then concluding that it doesn't look like there's a God. From the day we're born we're absorbing the values and social framework of the time and place we're in. More than ever before, this framework is compatible with atheism, so atheism seems like a rational conclusion to many of us. 

I think I'd reverse the order of causation, though: we don't settle on liberal bourgeois values because we are atheists. Rather, it becomes possible for us to be atheists because our culture is absolutely soaked through with liberal bourgeois values.

Of course both "liberal" and "bourgeois" are big terms with lots of internal variation. They don't necessarily lead to atheism. (Although I think that many of the problems with modern American Christianity come from the incompatibility of these values with old-fashioned Christianity, which makes it very difficult for modern people to espouse a consistent, historically-rooted religion.) 

The best book on this is A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. 

People who think their beliefs concerning God aren't part of a package, and that they have somehow independently come up with true conclusions, simply haven't examined their own ways of thinking very well. What we hold to be true about the world is entirely contingent on our time and place, and all the packages that come with that.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

My lack of being convinced God exists doesn't stand alone.  It comes packaged with various inter-related opinions.

My atheism comes as a bundle with:
Agnosticism
Skepticism
Anti-religious sentiment
Nihilism
Materialism/Physicalism
Evolution
A high view of science (scientism?)
Left/ Liberal/ Progressive Politics
Not believing in moral realism
Not believing in freewill
Etc.

Does your atheism tie into other things, or does it stand alone?

Every atheist everywhere gets their atheism as part of a package. It's impossible not to.

We aren't capable of looking out at the world in some kind of rootless, "view from nowhere" kind of way and then concluding that it doesn't look like there's a God. From the day we're born we're absorbing the values and social framework of the time and place we're in. More than ever before, this framework is compatible with atheism, so atheism seems like a rational conclusion to many of us. 

I think I'd reverse the order of causation, though: we don't settle on liberal bourgeois values because we are atheists. Rather, it becomes possible for us to be atheists because our culture is absolutely soaked through with liberal bourgeois values.

Of course both "liberal" and "bourgeois" are big terms with lots of internal variation. They don't necessarily lead to atheism. (Although I think that many of the problems with modern American Christianity come from the incompatibility of these values with old-fashioned Christianity, which makes it very difficult for modern people to espouse a consistent, historically-rooted religion.) 

The best book on this is A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. 

People who think their beliefs concerning God aren't part of a package, and that they have somehow independently come up with true conclusions, simply haven't examined their own ways of thinking very well. What we hold to be true about the world is entirely contingent on our time and place, and all the packages that come with that.

(Pointless response to someone who has me on ignore)

Of course atheism is part of a package, but what that package consists of varies widely from one atheist to another.

And 'liberal bourgeois values' is a nonsensical term. Historically, the bourgeoisie have been ultra conservative and concerned primarily with amassing and retaining wealth and keeping their economic dominance secure. Liberal values (in the modern sense) largely arise from the proletariat being fed up with bourgeoisie high-handedness.

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You don't expect the hard right to make a complex sentence (more than two words) now do you?

[The Grand Nudger]

Standalone. Drives folks like Bel nuts, but I was just born this way, lol.