Atheism that limits, or atheism that empowers?

[fluffybiscuits]

[QUOTE=Monetpenny;248894]Cap't Con,
You raise an interesting point wrt the beliefs of ordinary Catholics.
I read about a survey that was conducted on Canadian Catholics.
31% of them that attend mass weekly do not believe in god.
There are obviously a lot of people who believe in god but don't attend mass & I know it is Canadian data, but if almost a third of those that attend mass weekly are atheist what future does catholicism have in Ireland?[/QUOTE]

A bleak one at the very best!

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Interesting point there Monetpenny came up in US politics recently I think where the Obama administration seems to have realised that there is a sort of archimedean lever between 'official' dogma and what the congregation actually thinks.

I think there were two test points- where the Obama administration noted that surveys indicated that the catholic population to a majority had no problem with civil marriage for gays.

And more obviously on that very interesting maneouver around the Healthcare bill where Obamas crowd ambushed the Conference of Bishops by making them attempt to rally the indignant troops against the provision of contraception in making healthcare providers whether catholic or not be obliged to provide- without exemption.

To me these looked like philosophical Trojan Horse testers- I think the US administration at senior level has realised that there is a gap between the 'official' hardliners of church leaderships in the states and the congregations and they are prepared to exploit it.

On the Healthcare bill drama Obama's Whitehouse outmaneouvered the hardliners by going over their heads to the more thoughtful congregation and the bishops found their support soggy in the home constituency.

There is a massive gap between what it says on the hardliner belief box and what people on the ground actually feel and I think this is evident in a lot of places now including Ireland.

That is the gap for the Archemedean political lever which seperates the wingnuts from the reasonable majority.

Catholicism in Ireland is about to splinter into a hardline faction I think gathered around the fairly frantic and surprisingly small if overly vocal in number.

The Irish catholic church may be revived and prove initially popular as a response to the disgraces of the past but may dissipate into social ethic rather than religion- a saner catholicism perhaps?

[20 yards of linen=1 coat]

Hard to justify the madness of religion with the madness out of free market economics though

No one on this thread is doing that. The point I was trying to make, having been provoked into thinking about it in a new way by Hapax's thing about seeing agents as the cause of phenomena immediately inexplicable in other terms, is that that faculty is at work in loads of stuff that we do.

Another example, this time presumably less controversial.

Bees. The little cells that they use to make honey, that make up a honeycomb, are almost all hexagonal in shape, with a few pentagonal one's scattered about. Now, if you were to look at that phenomenon and try to explain it on the basis of the actions of each individual bee deliberately setting about to build a perfect hexagon or pentagon, you wouldn't get very far, not seeing a protractor, ruler, pencil or pocket calculator anywhere in the hive. But if instead you look upon the whole thing as if it were designed as well as possible by an intelligent agent, and ask, what is the most efficient way of making this hive, in terms of the resilience of the structure (determined by the maximisation of surface area, for some reason I cant remember now) energy, time, and resources? Then the answer you get is that each cell should be hexagonal, except that if you do that then the walls don't curve, and so you need a few pentagonal ones thrown in to get a nice hive shaped hive. And when they actually sat down and watched the bees at it, they found that they make roughly square shaped ones, which then melt into the shape which minimises surface tension when the body heat of the bees acts on the wax. But youre still left with the mystery, without treating the whole thing as if it were doing something as well as it could possibly be done, of why the beautiful and orderly hexagonal grid comes into existence. People had to apply what was known about physical forces and engineering from other fields to figure it out.

Now. The point I'm trying to make is that you have to treat something which is immediately inexplicable in other terms (it's not each individual bee deciding this as they go along and then getting together en masse to delegate the necessary work) as if it were designed by an intangible "creator" being, otherwise you don't get anywhere. "Irrational" conceptual movements like this are, if not the only way, at least played a decisive role in the creation of anything like "modern science", and allowed for the stripping of things like the sun of the meaning and respect that they were once accorded because of the apparently miraculous nature of their operation, and the way they seem to provide just exactly what we need, free of charge. So it's only natural, and will continue to happen as long as we can't explain things, that people will have "irrational" beliefs, that will be productive, and interesting, and exciting, and beautiful and give life meaning. And to deride them as stupid because they haven't been to reduced to atoms bumping into eachother (itself an irrational reduction), is disgusting IMO.

And is it not miraculous? And should it not be treated as such? And is the way the bees hive actually comes about not any less amazing than if the glory of God was manifested in each juncture of the grid? I say we should worship bees, and the sun, and people. But that's different from what I said in my last post, and the main problems I have with the militant atheists on this thread and when I encounter them face to face.

'The opiate of the masses' implies someone is selling the opium to the masses.There is always a dealer involved whether that be Legs Benedict or Lloyd Bankfein (who, incidentally remarked that Goldman Sachs were 'doing Gods work'- in other words making money from the kept stupid).

I'm all up for getting rid of the priests, of whatever vocation. In over 70 posts has anyone actually defended any organised church, at any time?

[Hapax]

The point I'm trying to make is that you have to treat something which is immediately inexplicable in other terms (it's not each individual bee deciding this as they go along and then getting together en masse to delegate the necessary work) as if it were designed by an intangible "creator" being, otherwise you don't get anywhere.

I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly here. We do now have an explanation of this phenomenon in the bottom-up application of simple rules at a local level, as you describe, so why would we need now to appeal to the notion of a "creator" being? Or is it that you're saying that, before we had the possibility of recourse to complexity theory, and lacking any other satisfactory explanation, the notion of a "creator" was then a useful placeholder to remind us of our lack of a scientific understanding?

"Irrational" conceptual movements like this are, if not the only way, at least played a decisive role in the creation of anything like "modern science", and allowed for the stripping of things like the sun of the meaning and respect that they were once accorded because of the apparently miraculous nature of their operation, and the way they seem to provide just exactly what we need, free of charge. So it's only natural, and will continue to happen as long as we can't explain things, that people will have "irrational" beliefs, that will be productive, and interesting, and exciting, and beautiful and give life meaning. And to deride them as stupid because they haven't been to reduced to atoms bumping into eachother (itself an irrational reduction), is disgusting IMO.

I'd go along with that. Well, without the disgust, which seems a little in excess.

And is it not miraculous? And should it not be treated as such? And is the way the bees hive actually comes about not any less amazing than if the glory of God was manifested in each juncture of the grid? I say we should worship bees, and the sun, and people. But that's different from what I said in my last post, and the main problems I have with the militant atheists on this thread and when I encounter them face to face.

I thoroughly distrust the words "miracle" and "miraculous". Makes it sound like there is a clear, complete and totally binding set of rational scientific rules for how things should behave, and we've identified some phenomenon which equally clearly transgresses those rules. If you don't accept the completeness of that rule system to begin with, then you don't have miracles, merely exceptions, things not yet accounted for, but which may be accounted for by more data, or by a future paradigm shift. And all of that without claiming that "rationality" either does, or ever will, provide complete and comprehensive answers.

Rather than worshipping all and sundry, I'd incline more to the anti-sacral of "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him". Or Blake, who somehow managed to reconcile wonder with an appropriate rage.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Sod it. People like a gamble. Why not get rid of all priests and see what happens? Which would leave us with the theory that god or gods oversee us but never speak to us or have simply lost their voice.

There is a disconnect here. People defend 'belief' as it is expressed and annunciated by organisations which were never even mentioned by their own earthly prophets. The jesus construct is never recorded as having mentioned cardinals, bishops, priests or nuns at any stage.

it is therefore entirely possible that the whole construct of church most often associated in the Irish mind with religion is either an error or a faked up and very human addition.

Some people may need to believe in a god. That somehow gets interpreted into covering his sales reps on earth. There is no reason for this assumption other than what the people who make a living out of that profession tell you. This is not a good way to proceed- by handing over money and authority to people who have no proof whatsoever that what they are telling you is true and every motive in the world to lie to you.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

One last thought that just struck me all of a sudden- atheism has never been shown anywhere in recorded medical history as having been an aspect of or cause of, or faciitator of any kind of mental illness.

Religious belief has certainly been an association with madness when taken to extremes. Can't remember who said it but someone said if you want to see 'faith' in all its glory then take a walk down the ward of a lunatic asylum.

[20 yards of linen=1 coat]

I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly here. We do now have an explanation of this phenomenon in the bottom-up application of simple rules at a local level, as you describe, so why would we need now to appeal to the notion of a "creator" being? Or is it that you're saying that, before we had the possibility of recourse to complexity theory, and lacking any other satisfactory explanation, the notion of a "creator" was then a useful placeholder to remind us of our lack of a scientific understanding?

Yeah that post wasn't clear at all. Was just about to go at it again with editing.

What's productive about coming at it from the perspective of "if I or a mind like mine was trying to design this structure as efficiently as possible, what would it look like?" is that it gets you to the answer for why (as opposed to how, which is what I said first) you have the hexagon/pentagon arrangement. It allows you to apply the knowledge we have about surface tension and stress to the problem of the beehive. Or working the other way, gets you to insights about surface tension and stress if you ask "what benefits are there to the hive being designed in this way?"

Otherwise you're stuck at the bottom-up level of empirical observation, which shows you that there is a hexagon shape, and how it comes about (through squares melting into shape) but not why it is that you get such a complicated and apparently difficult to build pattern. Without making the conceptual leap of taking on the perspective of an intelligent agent engineering the hive, you can't get at the logical, mathematical bit of it. And that leap is either the same or analogous to the one which first gives rise to gods, according to that theory you linked to.

That's true I think.

I thoroughly distrust the words "miracle" and "miraculous". Makes it sound like there is a clear, complete and totally binding set of rational scientific rules for how things should behave, and we've identified some phenomenon which equally clearly transgresses those rules. If you don't accept the completeness of that rule system to begin with, then you don't have miracles, merely exceptions, things not yet accounted for, but which may be accounted for by more data, or by a future paradigm shift. And all of that without claiming that "rationality" either does, or ever will, provide complete and comprehensive answers.

I suppose I was maybe fuzzily thinking of "miracle" more in terms of "providence", as something granted us, and for which we should be thankful (maybe. if only to the sun itself, rather than a human-like god) or appreciative of, or take pleasure in, then as something which violates the laws of the universe or something.

Rather than worshipping all and sundry, I'd incline more to the anti-sacral of "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him". Or Blake, who somehow managed to reconcile wonder with an appropriate rage.

I don't know the quote about the Buddha. Does it click with the getting rid of priests while leaving what's holy? With maybe an additional everything is both holy and not holy. Or something. Zen hurts my brain.

Yeah Blake was figuring in what I wrote earlier. I guess I have trouble getting my anger and wonder to mesh. I tend to oscillate between the two in an unsatisfying way rather than anything else. I don't know if you can ever be angry and satisfied, so I've tried to forget my anger recently. Which I don't want to do, Rilke said "I don't belong to those who can be consoled by love. That's the way it is. For what, finally, could be more useless for me than a consoled life?" He said that in a different context, but in one which involved a discussion of religion, and I keep thinking about it. A religion which merely consoled would be opium alright. But anger tends to run away with itself, and then you get something like this or this, which, when I read it sweeps me along and gets me pumped, and I find it difficult to separate myself from the general thrust of it, but I definitely feel tends to deny something about life and the world which is "good", now, whatever about it being diminished.

I don't know. I feel without being holy life isn't worth much, and no amount of proselytising about selfish genes or the (real) evils of the catholic church gets you to a better conception of the divine.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

a better conception of the divine- always puzzled me about this distancing of the divine from the human.

No other fauna on the planet requires a divine so it must be something to do with human consciousness which we know to be a result of evolution, nutrition, the development of language skills.

The divine should be brought home and recognised for what it is- an element of the human condition that is irrevocably tied up with the search for answers. Not only do we externalise blame (the vase just broke) but we externalise also the gorgeousness of human existence as if it is too exquisite for humanity to be at all responsible for, even by accident.

Very shakespearian. Huge ego and crippled by modesty at the same time. The human condition.

[Monetpenny]

I know someone who applied for the diaconate program in the Irish Catholic church.
I thought it was interesting that prison visits was emphasised at every stage of the application process.
It was in the original literature.
It was in the lengthy application form.
It was mentioned in the original interview with the program director.
It was also brought up in the diocesan panel interview.

I read a book about what life was like for Berliners during WWII.
It was pretty amazing to read that the German people right up to & after the British/French declaration of war believed that Hitler was a good man & a peace-maker who would help Germany avoid war with the war-mongering French & British.
It got me thinking that the only evidence we have that god (if he exists) is good, is that it says so in the bible.
Think about it. He created cancer, MS, cystic fibrosis & many other fatal hereditary diseases.
He created parasites & viruses.
He created malaria & the mosquito to carry it.
He created the plague & the rat to spread it.

The sun shines every week or two & it doesn't rain so much that we don't all drown in a flood & we say 'thank god'.
People die of cancer every day of the week yet no-one thanks god for that.
In all the recent documentaries about the Titanic no-one praised god for the 1,514 lost to sea.

When comparing the propaganda departments of the Nazis & god, the jack-booted ones were amateurs.

[smiles]

I don't know the quote about the Buddha. Does it click with the getting rid of priests while leaving what's holy? With maybe an additional everything is both holy and not holy. Or something. Zen hurts my brain.

The quote is a metaphor, the "road" is the spiritual path and Buddha represents the concept of enlightenment, be it in the form of a teacher or a concept you hold within yourself.. Probably the most difficult hurdle to get over as the quote "whatever you think it is, it is not that" comes in... Killing Buddha on the road simply put is to forgo all concepts as they cannot liberate you..

[fluffybiscuits]

I know someone who applied for the diaconate program in the Irish Catholic church.
I thought it was interesting that prison visits was emphasised at every stage of the application process.
It was in the original literature.
It was in the lengthy application form.
It was mentioned in the original interview with the program director.
It was also brought up in the diocesan panel interview.

I read a book about what life was like for Berliners during WWII.
It was pretty amazing to read that the German people right up to & after the British/French declaration of war believed that Hitler was a good man & a peace-maker who would help Germany avoid war with the war-mongering French & British.
It got me thinking that the only evidence we have that god (if he exists) is good, is that it says so in the bible.
Think about it. He created cancer, MS, cystic fibrosis & many other fatal hereditary diseases.
He created parasites & viruses.
He created malaria & the mosquito to carry it.
He created the plague & the rat to spread it.

The sun shines every week or two & it doesn't rain so much that we don't all drown in a flood & we say 'thank god'.
People die of cancer every day of the week yet no-one thanks god for that.
In all the recent documentaries about the Titanic no-one praised god for the 1,514 lost to sea.

When comparing the propaganda departments of the Nazis & god, the jack-booted ones were amateurs.

Freewill is what the Catholics will call it .....

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

A similar cognitive dissonance that leads to the claim that civiliation arose with catholicism. When this is demonstrated as a false claim then the original claim is again made for 'religion' rather than one sect.

I've discussed this with people who are well aware that this claim is nonsense but still hold to it because faith makes them outrank fact and intellect. They will spend ages trying to find a nice way to build a comfortable assumption they know to be false. And will then persist with it as an article of faith.

It is desperate what this kind of stuff does to the mind. If you refer to catholicism as a sect or cult in Ireland in which description it more than comfortably fits they go mad because they are used to thinking of catholicism as 'real' and the other 'false' religions as cults or sects as they have negative connotations.

If they had been born somewhere else in the world they would more than likely have been of a different religious persuasion altogether. They know this yet cannot accept it. 'Faith' is a firewall and it really needs either a traumatic emotional episode under which it can be installed in the full-grown or authority figures acting as if that is the only conclusion when the child is young.

When a cult is ubiquitous in a society it appears normal and part of the culture and indivisible from it- and that describes Irish society still because it is installed via schools. Soon as that stops then the cult will die or at least be confined to those adults who become susceptible to it.

There is nothing in catholicism in Ireland that cannot be related to psychological conditioning. I think Ireland will be a case history in that kind of psychology eventually.

[Hapax]

What's productive about coming at it from the perspective of "if I or a mind like mine was trying to design this structure as efficiently as possible, what would it look like?" is that it gets you to the answer for why (as opposed to how, which is what I said first) you have the hexagon/pentagon arrangement. It allows you to apply the knowledge we have about surface tension and stress to the problem of the beehive. Or working the other way, gets you to insights about surface tension and stress if you ask "what benefits are there to the hive being designed in this way?"

Otherwise you're stuck at the bottom-up level of empirical observation, which shows you that there is a hexagon shape, and how it comes about (through squares melting into shape) but not why it is that you get such a complicated and apparently difficult to build pattern. Without making the conceptual leap of taking on the perspective of an intelligent agent engineering the hive, you can't get at the logical, mathematical bit of it. And that leap is either the same or analogous to the one which first gives rise to gods, according to that theory you linked to.

That's true I think.

Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't get it. We have now, thanks to the mathematics of complexity, and the computers which let us play with the maths, a model whereby the application of simple rules operating locally (in your example, bees building square cells, which are softened by body-heat, and change to 6 and 5-sided cells) gives an optimal arrangement at a high level. Why, then would we need to introduce the notion of a deity here?

I suppose I was maybe fuzzily thinking of "miracle" more in terms of "providence", as something granted us, and for which we should be thankful (maybe. if only to the sun itself, rather than a human-like god) or appreciative of, or take pleasure in, then as something which violates the laws of the universe or something.

Well, I think you are just using the wrong word, then. You can't just ignore the history of the word "miracle". Hume would have something to say about that, I think.

I don't know the quote about the Buddha. Does it click with the getting rid of priests while leaving what's holy? With maybe an additional everything is both holy and not holy. Or something. Zen hurts my brain.

Because that zen quote is figurative, it's susceptible of various interpretations, but I was taking it as an indicator of zen's perspective that nothing is sacred. If you're cold, and you find a wooden image of the Buddha, burn it. A more abstract example would be Dogen's treatment of the sutras he brought back from China at much risk: he proceeded to chop the language up in entirely ungrammatical ways, and then made those strange interpretations the basis of his own sermons.

Yeah Blake was figuring in what I wrote earlier. I guess I have trouble getting my anger and wonder to mesh. I tend to oscillate between the two in an unsatisfying way rather than anything else. I don't know if you can ever be angry and satisfied, so I've tried to forget my anger recently. Which I don't want to do, Rilke said "I don't belong to those who can be consoled by love. That's the way it is. For what, finally, could be more useless for me than a consoled life?" He said that in a different context, but in one which involved a discussion of religion, and I keep thinking about it. A religion which merely consoled would be opium alright. But anger tends to run away with itself, and then you get something like this or this, which, when I read it sweeps me along and gets me pumped, and I find it difficult to separate myself from the general thrust of it, but I definitely feel tends to deny something about life and the world which is "good", now, whatever about it being diminished.

I don't know. I feel without being holy life isn't worth much, and no amount of proselytising about selfish genes or the (real) evils of the catholic church gets you to a better conception of the divine.

Surely, to describe life as "holy" is to contrast it with something else that's not. What then is this thing that's not holy? That's why I like the zen rejection of the whole sacred/profane binary.

[20 yards of linen=1 coat]

a better conception of the divine- always puzzled me about this distancing of the divine from the human.

No other fauna on the planet requires a divine so it must be something to do with human consciousness which we know to be a result of evolution, nutrition, the development of language skills.

I'm happy for it to be found in what's human, but then you need to find out what "human" is, or which bits of the vast range of human activity we think are divine and which profane. Like, I have difficulty seeing the dole office as divine, but Hapax will tell me that that's my problem and not the Department of Social Protection's. What would Blake do?

We have now, thanks to the mathematics of complexity, and the computers which let us play with the maths, a model whereby the application of simple rules operating locally (in your example, bees building square cells, which are softened by body-heat, and change to 6 and 5-sided cells) gives an optimal arrangement at a high level. Why, then would we need to introduce the notion of a deity here?

Yeah I think you might be right actually. False positive

The quote is a metaphor, the "road" is the spiritual path and Buddha represents the concept of enlightenment, be it in the form of a teacher or a concept you hold within yourself.. Probably the most difficult hurdle to get over as the quote "whatever you think it is, it is not that" comes in... Killing Buddha on the road simply put is to forgo all concepts as they cannot liberate you..

Surely, to describe life as "holy" is to contrast it with something else that's not. What then is this thing that's not holy? That's why I like the zen rejection of the whole sacred/profane binary.

That definitely appeals to me. But aren't the other binaries that I'm still totally caught up in, like "good" and "bad", "desirable" and "undesirable", and whatever concepts that allow us to distinguish between the suffering and joy of others also thrown out? I don't know, it seems like if you lose those other things then that's a problem, you end up completely indifferent to the political, and see anger as something which must be overcome, rather than as a force which might exert change for the "better" (there is no better, is there?).

I guess what I'm hoping for is a conception of the political which coincides to a large extent with the theological. That might be completely the wrong approach. I don't claim to fully grasp this "fragment" of Benjamin's, but I find it really provocative and interesting.

The Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal, but the end
...
The profane, therefore, although not itself a category of this Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach. For in happiness all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in good fortune isz its downfall destined to find it.
...
For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.

To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.

He had a pretty clear distinction operating between the profane and divine, which was intimately connected to a keen and radical political sensitivity.

[Risen Lion]

There is a good review of Dawkins’ paean to atheism, ‘The God Illusion’ by John McAnulty, ‘Vulgar materialism meets the spirit world’. (http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Re...dDelusion.html). McAnulty contextualizes Dawkins’ attack on religion in his other writings, recognizing his contribution to popularising Darwin in ‘The Blind Watchmaker’, where ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID) is attacked. Creationist zealots still want to include ID in school science curricula, but Dawkins is himself a zealot in his vulgar materialist explanation of all behaviour through genetic reductionism in ‘The Selfish Gene’. He presents all living organisms as mere vehicles for transferring the ‘real’ world of the ‘selfish’ gene across the generations. In ‘The Selfish Gene’ he argues that “a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour.” Current society (capitalism) is the inevitable outcome of biological processes and a new society is only possible if we struggle endlessly against our own nature.

Dawkins’ atheism is devoid of social critique. His only criticism of religion is that it is unscientific – science being viewed in a narrow, positivist sense of what is observable. He has no conception of religion as a radical critique of an oppressive society, a plea for an alternative life, a liberating conception of humanity. His has nothing in common with the revolutionary radicalism of Marx:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
(Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February, 1844).

McAnulty points out that Dawkins tries to defeat religious dogmatism with his own dogmatism, and to do so on religion’s own ground – by, for example, double-blind experiments that prove the ineffectiveness of prayer. This is a vulgar materialist view based on a conservative and disempowering form of atheism, which accepts the capitalist status quo as the outcome of an evolutionary process.