When you break it down: is atheism unappealing?

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Maybe the issue is that charismatic spiritual leaders are usually nuts.

As are their followers. To some inescapable degree we are all nuts. The environment selects for the degree of nuttiness.

 

[Jarhyn]

Is religion appealing? Is atheism unappealing? Seems to me that the answer depends almost entirely on who you ask, and when.

I'll say as much that I was disappointed that my learned concepts of god, ethics, morality, and afterlife were factually incorrect, and to learn this at the end of my teen years, detached as it were at the very entry into ostensible "adulthood".

It was made worse by the fact that while I had discovered I was wrong about it, that there were elements of what I had learned that would reprise in different forms in my matured worldview.

I didn't like where I had been, though. I was just there because I liked standing on that mess of confused religious bullshit even less, once I saw it as such.

As it is, I don't strictly know whether people hear my materialist understandings of commonly claimed "supernatural" phenomena and hear anything beyond the religious understandings they already had owing to confirmation bias. Or if they do, those who do are rare..

Worse, for others, often it is heard as a complete falsification rather than materialist mutation of spiritual terms.

and of course, materialism is boring and dry unless you put just the right spin on it: spiritualism has had millions of years to evolve as a presentation of nature and materialism has barely had a second in comparison to all that to get it's sales pitch nailed.

 

[Hermit]

The chief attraction of religion, at least its main stream Abrahamic varieties, is the prospect of life after death. Atheism precludes that possibility.

 

[rousseau]

My stock response is atheism is not monolithic in what atheists do believe.

Religion is not the only path to finding meaning.

Organized atheism provides community and meaning just like organized religion.

I think when it comes to evolution, sociology, and culture it can open a can of worms of political correctness.

No disagreement there. The argument wasn't so much that Atheism is never appealing, or valueless in of itself. It was that it's internal logic isn't appealing to many people, which is why we see so many people gravitate to religious answers.

If someone does find atheism appealing, that's fine.

Atheism is a lack of belief in god claims. It is statement of fact about our personal reality. It is not meant to be appealing or bring comfort or serve as a guide to life. Any more than gravity or the germ theory of disease or the water heater in your home is meant to do any of those things. It is inappropriate to attribute any meaning or characteristics to atheism other than a statement of skepticism regarding certain claims.

If you want to find meaning, go read a book, take a class on a subject you would like to learn more about, listen to music, make friends and have discussions with them. Because atheism is not a replacement for any of those things.

My stock response is atheism is not monolithic in what atheists do believe.

Religion is not the only path to finding meaning.

Organized atheism provides community and meaning just like organized religion.

I think when it comes to evolution, sociology, and culture it can open a can of worms of political correctness.

No disagreement there. The argument wasn't so much that Atheism is never appealing, or valueless in of itself. It was that it's internal logic isn't appealing to many people, which is why we see so many people gravitate to religious answers.

If someone does find atheism appealing, that's fine.

That is odd. It seems to assume that atheism is some sort of organized belief system like Christianity or Hinduism. Atheism is not a belief system. Atheism is just the lack of belief in gods. Like my lack of belief in the Loch Ness monster, the lack of belief does not guide my reasoning but is one result of reasoning.

Not an organized belief system, but it typically does come with a cascade of corollaries.

Really? What corollaries? I can think of none other than an absence of belief in claims of divine actions. It could be correctly said that not believing in miracles would lead one to different conclusions than someone who relied on miracles to explain reality... but that is very different than 'corollaries'.

From a religious perspective, you can't dissociate atheism from materialism and science, which also aren't an ontology in of themselves, but represent a very different way of viewing the world. I used the word 'atheism' in the thread title, but perhaps I should have used the word 'materialism'. To the religious, it's a package deal that many don't want to accept.

You can call these things neutral 'facts', but to many people they clearly have very real connotations and implications.

Religious peoples misconceptions of what atheism is, is a very different discussion than what atheists actually are.

So you don't think that atheism has a somewhat tight coupling with science and materialism? It's just a religious misconception?

 

[skepticalbip]

My stock response is atheism is not monolithic in what atheists do believe.

Religion is not the only path to finding meaning.

Organized atheism provides community and meaning just like organized religion.

I think when it comes to evolution, sociology, and culture it can open a can of worms of political correctness.

No disagreement there. The argument wasn't so much that Atheism is never appealing, or valueless in of itself. It was that it's internal logic isn't appealing to many people, which is why we see so many people gravitate to religious answers.

If someone does find atheism appealing, that's fine.

That is odd. It seems to assume that atheism is some sort of organized belief system like Christianity or Hinduism. Atheism is not a belief system. Atheism is just the lack of belief in gods. Like my lack of belief in the Loch Ness monster, the lack of belief does not guide my reasoning but is one result of reasoning.

Not an organized belief system, but it typically does come with a cascade of corollaries.

Really? What corollaries? I can think of none other than an absence of belief in claims of divine actions. It could be correctly said that not believing in miracles would lead one to different conclusions than someone who relied on miracles to explain reality... but that is very different than 'corollaries'.

From a religious perspective, you can't dissociate atheism from materialism and science, which also aren't an ontology in of themselves, but represent a very different way of viewing the world. I used the word 'atheism' in the thread title, but perhaps I should have used the word 'materialism'. To the religious, it's a package deal that many don't want to accept.

You can call these things neutral 'facts', but to many people they clearly have very real connotations and implications.

Religious peoples misconceptions of what atheism is, is a very different discussion than what atheists actually are.

So you don't think that atheism has a somewhat tight coupling with science and materialism? It's just a religious misconception?

There are atheists with all sort of ways of thinking about reality. So sure there are some that are into science, some into materialism, some into yoga, etc. (just as there are some religious people that are into these things). There are even atheists who are into mysticism or atheists that don't really try to understand the nature of reality and just accept that that it is. Not believing there are gods has nothing to do with someone's view of reality other than that a god doesn't control it.

Your assumption that atheists are materialists is similar to assuming that all religious people accept the Dahlia Lama as their religious leader... Certainly there are some that do but that assumption would show a serious misunderstanding of what religious people, in general, believe.

About the only thing that can be said about atheists in general is that they don't believe in gods. After that, an assertion about their mindset would have to be about a specific atheist.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Atheism promises nothing, other than one less reason to lose sleep on the weekend. That'll always hold it back some.

 

[atrib]

The chief attraction of religion, at least its main stream Abrahamic varieties, is the prospect of life after death. Atheism precludes that possibility.

Not necessarily. One can still believe in some form of an afterlife that is not related to any gods.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The chief attraction of religion, at least its main stream Abrahamic varieties, is the prospect of life after death. Atheism precludes that possibility.

Not necessarily. One can still believe in some form of an afterlife that is not related to any gods.

This is quite true. Frankly I am smitten by the fact that every bit of me is eternal, you might as well say immortal. I may go to pieces but I'll never go away.

 

[abaddon]

The argument went something like this:

Acceptance of evolutionary theory
[*]The world and your life is intrinsically meaningless other than what you assign to it

Ironically when I read books to find meaning is exactly when I feel the most meaningless. When I stop abstracting about it like that, then I find intrinsic meaning is "just there" when I put the books aside and engage the world with focus. It's a feeling not a formula, so it's not something you "assign" to anything as if "it" is something you can make happen or share in words with others.

To me, a "sense of meaningfulness in life" is simply the experience of not lacking it. It's there, unbidden, in attentive experience so it's "intrinsic", not contrived.

[*]Anything negative that happens to you is primarily random and indifferent

That's a vast improvement over "it's your fault that your leg got cut off in the accident. That happened because God thinks you're an asshole".

[*]Your well-being is entirely up to you, and if you fail it's because you failed / aren't skilled enough

Hm. That sounds more like a political ideology than a consequence of evolutionary thought.

It completely leaves out the inter-relational nature of human cultures and life on earth. Evolution as a "dog eat dog" worldview is antiquated stuff. That it shows we're kindred with the rest of life is a more apt description of what it means for humanity.

[*]When you die you will cease to exist. When your friends die they will cease to exist

If one identifies less with the "me" and more with the ecological cycle, death's less an 'affront' against their person and more a feature of the biospheric process.

Thomas Clark at naturalism.org wrote a deeply insightful essay. It's an elaboration of Epicurus's "where I am death is not, where death is I am not". The gist is you cannot experience death, so the fear of personal death (as "non-existence") is based on imagining a view of your own death from outside of yourself.

Also there's the fantasy of "being dead"; we imagine a "long sleep" or a "black void" that lasts forever. Again, this is people pretending there's a POV outside themselves that stays true for them even after they're dead!

Actually "ceasing to exist" is no more able to be experienced than "coming into existence" was. The beginning of one's time and the end of it aren't there in the firstperson POV, which leaves only the middle -- the state of being alive. To think otherwise is, again, to imagine that other people's POV ("by golly he's dead!") matter more than your own in this.

There are 2 points to this long post. 1) That^^^ is the sort of stuff I'm thinking of whenever I say the word "spirituality". I'm not looking for ways to make words like 'spirit' or 'gods' go on being meaningful to materialists and naturalists. Nor is it about self-deluding to shelter against a "cruel world". I'm thinking science focuses on description, religion on dogma, philosophy on ivory tower conjectures... but my interest is transforming experience so it both reflects reality AND has a self-improvement effect at the same time.

2) The other point is, the argument that evolutionary thought makes it a bleak world is false. Or, rather, is true only if you want it to be.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

And materialism is not boring. Maybe what's boring are those who say that materialism is boring. Naturalism is a seriously awesome trip through reality.

 

[abaddon]

And materialism is not boring. Maybe what's boring are those who say that materialism is boring. Naturalism is a seriously awesome trip through reality.

Yes I agree. Unfortunately it SEEMS boring to many people though.

I'm intrigued that many humans seem to need things to be more fantastical than our earthly reality. I've imagined a landscape with elves and trolls and other fantastic beasts in it, and it's fun. The fairy tales about such worlds are fun. It'd be a deeply enchanting world. But... more-so than the trees and birds and foxes and other fantastic beasts that are actual?

Why would a world with spirits be a more enchanted world rather than just a differently enchanted world? It's like there's a 'reducing valve' in people's heads.

 

[rousseau]

And materialism is not boring. Maybe what's boring are those who say that materialism is boring. Naturalism is a seriously awesome trip through reality.

Yes I agree. Unfortunately it SEEMS boring to many people though.

I'm intrigued that many humans seem to need things to be more fantastical than our earthly reality. I've imagined a landscape with elves and trolls and other fantastic beasts in it, and it's fun. The fairy tales about such worlds are fun. It'd be a deeply enchanting world. But... more-so than the trees and birds and foxes and other fantastic beasts that are actual?

Why would a world with spirits be a more enchanted world rather than just a differently enchanted world? It's like there's a 'reducing valve' in people's heads.

It's an interesting question. I wonder if many people are religious in ontology, but expert materialists in practice. When it comes to everyday life we intuitively accept the physical world and basic cause/effect, but adding an additional layer (religion) makes the whole experience more interesting.

In practice, because we spend so much time in the real, actual world, doing actual things, it becomes mundane and we never develop any type of curiosity about it. It just doesn't seem that important. And in reality - when the goal of a human life is to build relationships and have fun - maybe there is a kind of logic in a lack of curiosity, and propensity to focus on friends/partners/experiences.

I've noticed that many who end up finding philosophies like Zen and Advaita are typically actualized, experienced, and looking for something more than everyday concerns. Maybe it's that the awe-inspiring nature of the real world isn't really attainable or relevant to us, until the practical world of relationships stops being interesting. Until then, that world is enough for most people, and there is no incentive to look more deeply.

 

[rousseau]

My stock response is atheism is not monolithic in what atheists do believe.

Religion is not the only path to finding meaning.

Organized atheism provides community and meaning just like organized religion.

I think when it comes to evolution, sociology, and culture it can open a can of worms of political correctness.

No disagreement there. The argument wasn't so much that Atheism is never appealing, or valueless in of itself. It was that it's internal logic isn't appealing to many people, which is why we see so many people gravitate to religious answers.

If someone does find atheism appealing, that's fine.

That is odd. It seems to assume that atheism is some sort of organized belief system like Christianity or Hinduism. Atheism is not a belief system. Atheism is just the lack of belief in gods. Like my lack of belief in the Loch Ness monster, the lack of belief does not guide my reasoning but is one result of reasoning.

Not an organized belief system, but it typically does come with a cascade of corollaries.

Really? What corollaries? I can think of none other than an absence of belief in claims of divine actions. It could be correctly said that not believing in miracles would lead one to different conclusions than someone who relied on miracles to explain reality... but that is very different than 'corollaries'.

From a religious perspective, you can't dissociate atheism from materialism and science, which also aren't an ontology in of themselves, but represent a very different way of viewing the world. I used the word 'atheism' in the thread title, but perhaps I should have used the word 'materialism'. To the religious, it's a package deal that many don't want to accept.

You can call these things neutral 'facts', but to many people they clearly have very real connotations and implications.

Religious peoples misconceptions of what atheism is, is a very different discussion than what atheists actually are.

So you don't think that atheism has a somewhat tight coupling with science and materialism? It's just a religious misconception?

There are atheists with all sort of ways of thinking about reality. So sure there are some that are into science, some into materialism, some into yoga, etc. (just as there are some religious people that are into these things). There are even atheists who are into mysticism or atheists that don't really try to understand the nature of reality and just accept that that it is. Not believing there are gods has nothing to do with someone's view of reality other than that a god doesn't control it.

Your assumption that atheists are materialists is similar to assuming that all religious people accept the Dahlia Lama as their religious leader... Certainly there are some that do but that assumption would show a serious misunderstanding of what religious people, in general, believe.

About the only thing that can be said about atheists in general is that they don't believe in gods. After that, an assertion about their mindset would have to be about a specific atheist.

Fair enough. I guess I always just thought of atheism/materialism as two sides of the same coin, each implies the other.

 

[rousseau]

The other point is, the argument that evolutionary thought makes it a bleak world is false. Or, rather, is true only if you want it to be.

I don't have the time to respond to your whole post, but I agree with this. I don't think the implications of evolution necessarily make it a bleak world, in my own view I wouldn't have it any other way.

But I think to the religious mind it's a much harder sell compared to the fantastic answers derived from religion.

 

[Coleman Smith]

Many actual facts are unappealing.

The cancer rate is an example.

It is still a fact appealing or not.

 

[steve_bank]

It's an interesting question. I wonder if many people are religious in ontology, but expert materialists in practice. When it comes to everyday life we intuitively accept the physical world and basic cause/effect, but adding an additional layer (religion) makes the whole experience more interesting.

I think that is it.

 

[prideandfall]

The chief attraction of religion, at least its main stream Abrahamic varieties, is the prospect of life after death.

is it though? like, for real?

i have known a lot of atheists and a lot of deeply religious people in my life, and without exception every atheist i've ever met faces the death of a loved one with the range of emotions you'd expect - grief, sorrow, resigned indignation, missing them, mourning them, etc etc.
this reaction tracks with the view that the person you knew is gone, simply gone, and you will miss them in your life.

every religious person i have known when confronted with the death of a loved one embarks on this wild dramatic wailing and gnashing of teeth and incoherent sobbing, and blubbering on and on about "oh lawd why you gotta take dem away from me" and this absolute inability to accept that death as a natural part of life.

i think this is the secret portal into religious thinking... they don't actually believe in life after death, their behavior gives them away.
if one believed in life after death, the physical death of someone would be meaningless - it just means they're going on vacation for a bit and you won't see them for a couple years.
the way religious people absolutely lose their shit over someone dying shows that they *don't* believe there's a life after death, and that the whole thing is a lie they know they're trying to sell themselves but can't manage to pull off.

Atheism precludes that possibility.

how so?
atheism precludes the claims that life after death has a specific set of characteristics as espoused by any given religion, but it doesn't preclude something else existing.

 

[prideandfall]

Although a little more nuanced, that was it in a nutshell. Between the two worldviews it's obvious which one would appeal to more people.

but why?

maybe someone religious can answer this because i've asked dozens of people in my life and nobody can explain it to me:
why does the idea that your life is a marionette show appeal to you?
why is the thought that if something bad happens to you, it's punishment for something you did, sound good?
why is all of this being a skin flick for some sky fairy sound more appealing than "it happens because it gets to happen"?

i get the argument in terms of grammar, i just don't understand it philosophically or rationally.
why is that line of thought appealing to people?

So as Atheists, we're all obviously invested in the lack of God because it appeals to us

i mean, the idea of a lack of god doesn't appeal to me per se, but i guess i'm not technically an atheist so maybe that's why.
but, none of the atheists i know are invested in a lack of god either.

however, both myself and every atheist i've ever known are most certainly invested in the lack of *religion* - but religion and god are absolutely not the same thing.

but when you break the problem down to it's basic elements we're trying to sell the religious a bit of a shithole. Their religion shields them from what is a cruel and indifferent world, they do not want to accept materialism because it isn't much of a cakewalk.

hard disagree on both points and i don't understand how that argument can even be made.
the human experience of life is what it is either way, in one version things happen because they get to happen. in the other version, things happen because some unknowable inscrutable screenplay has been written for all of existence and you're locked into a path you have no way of diverting from or even being aware of.

i don't think religion is a shield against that, and i think the behavior of religious people completely defy any attempt to classify it as such.
like so many things dealing with religious/conservative thinking, there is nothing about saving or bettering themselves that is the part that appeals to them... it's about punishment and degradation for other people that appeals to them.

they don't buy into religion with the hope to go to heaven, they buy into it for the promise that other people are going to hell.

 

[zorq]

I am having a little trouble following the example beliefs in this thread. Specifically the ones related to fatalism/free will and blame/consequence. While I think I understand how each poster is sorting these beliefs into the Theist or Materialist box it isn't entirely obvious to me because I think these concepts aren't monopolized by either camp, and I think we should remember that.

Not every theist is a Calvinist who believes in a strict plan for the universe. Some materialists have a fatalistic belief in the vein of Hari Seldon's  psychohistory that the universe is a stack of dominoes falling exactly how they must fall. But others see it from a different angle and take note of just how much a determined individual can bend the world to his own fickle will.

To point out another sort of outlier in the assumptions being made in this thread, I must confess that I sometimes feel like an Atheist in ontology and a spiritualist in practice. Ask me on any day of the week if I believe in God or supernatural phenomena of any sort and I will give you a firm "No." But when I think about a choice that is in front of me, I often consider "karma" as if it were a real factor to help me make the choice. I don't actually believe in cosmic justice or universal balance, but the ideas are appealing and useful in my every day life. It just sort of feels right. ... So I use it... without believing in it.. (IKR?)

Oh, and I like some simple superstitions too. I indulge in silly superstitions that I know have no affect on the world around me beyond just making me feel good. I'm often laughing at myself while I perform the ritual, but it brings me comfort.

Anyways, all I'm trying to say here is what other people are saying. Atheism doesn't really come bundled with any other specific beliefs, and neither does theism.

 

[steve_bank]

The chief attraction of religion, at least its main stream Abrahamic varieties, is the prospect of life after death.

is it though? like, for real?

i have known a lot of atheists and a lot of deeply religious people in my life, and without exception every atheist i've ever met faces the death of a loved one with the range of emotions you'd expect - grief, sorrow, resigned indignation, missing them, mourning them, etc etc.
this reaction tracks with the view that the person you knew is gone, simply gone, and you will miss them in your life.

every religious person i have known when confronted with the death of a loved one embarks on this wild dramatic wailing and gnashing of teeth and incoherent sobbing, and blubbering on and on about "oh lawd why you gotta take dem away from me" and this absolute inability to accept that death as a natural part of life.

i think this is the secret portal into religious thinking... they don't actually believe in life after death, their behavior gives them away.
if one believed in life after death, the physical death of someone would be meaningless - it just means they're going on vacation for a bit and you won't see them for a couple years.
the way religious people absolutely lose their shit over someone dying shows that they *don't* believe there's a life after death, and that the whole thing is a lie they know they're trying to sell themselves but can't manage to pull off.

Atheism precludes that possibility.

how so?
atheism precludes the claims that life after death has a specific set of characteristics as espoused by any given religion, but it doesn't preclude something else existing.

Well Prideandfall, I guess not everyone has a Vulcan's ability to suppress feelings.

I do not begrudge anyone's using religion to cope with problems. I am 70 and went through a long hospital stay plus a nursing home and assisted living before getting back out in the world.

I knew and know people with serious medical probables who's faith gives them comfort. Terminal cancer. Death of family and friends. Four people I knew in my senior housing have died. One guy who lived across from me coped using heavy alcohol and pot. I called 911 for him a few time, he had a trach and could not talk. The last time he was dobuled over in pain in his wheelchair.

People cope in different ways when facing death.