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.
Well, one of my hopes in taking a slightly more critical-rather-than-skeptical materialist view of these discussions is to see if there are materialist terms that say the same things as religious terms, but allow the materialist to tease out the
conflations and the
supernatural claims and to treat the real mechanisms and processes being recognized like mature, rational, and oftentimes
cleverly engineering, adults.
As much as I talk about what would be allowed, likely, or unimportant in the simulation case I very much do my best to also see material mechanisms behind the "supernatural" because
I find the simulation case implausible in the absence of solid evidence.
Even so, we can recognize that we will be survived of our memories by others. In their stories and minds, we will be in some heaven or hell, their empathetic version of us.
This will in turn influence how our stories are told (or are forgotten) by those who survive us, and whether empathy towards our lives creates in others an empathetic reproduction of some part of ourselves in them, but either as a villain to oppose, or as some thing to emulate unto replication, or with any other useful intent.
It pays in fact to see replication and reproduction as more than a simple act of biological division: the described process can happen across widely disparate people. I do not expect that this act of empathetic replication must even terminate across boundaries of species or even boundaries of whole life processes. Rather, I expect empathetic reproduction is entirely possible by Silicon based minds of carbon chemistries, and visa versa.
To lack empathy is then to shut oneself off from this process with relation to those one lacks empathy for. It is to deny not just community but immortality of thought forms through empathetic reproduction.
Even so, some of that empathy places the learned thought-form in a very confined place where it gets no agency. Regardless of what you want to call it, the thought of it is rather hell-like.
So, there's also that.
So there are definitely reasons, if only for empathy towards the memory of you in others, and the effects those memories have and the elements of your personality they will retain, that you live a decent life: so that people will want to be like you, rather than use you as an example of who
not to be like or of behavior they only learned the model of which as
an idea to defeat.
This is, to me, a suitable reason to not be a bastard even if my immediate experience merely ends at my death.
Even so, it also stands out as a reason to tell a story, write a book, and perhaps allow some of my thought forms to be reborn not as a villain but as a person to emulate.
But moreover, regardless of how you judge the above, it is apparent to me that this is not exactly how the religious understand the concepts of afterlife. I would rather expect some dim or perhaps clear but later or even
immediately corrupted understanding of that to have metamorphosed into the "supernatural" religious concepts that are in the common understanding, a truth viewed only through a dim and clouded lens.
The problem here is that when you can convince people that heaven and the afterlife isn't a metaphorical understanding for the memories and empathetic reproductions of your thought-forms among the living but a place some material piece of you detaches from your body, and transitions to through some manner of spatial transit or a host universe reproduction in perfect form then, you can convince people to do some crazy shit like sacrifice the whole planet to a doomsday cult's desire for an apocalypse.
I would much rather use some "spiritual" language, but elucidate the material explanation in the margins, footnotes, or even the fore-matter.
