The Twilight of Atheism

Well, that is coming to it from the other end, certainly.

PS - between pride in this thread and pimping that consumption tax organization(pimpin' is one of the seven deadly sins, right?) in the other...you sure are walking close to the edge.

 

last night at the bar, as i was sitting next to zarathrustra and the dalai lama i decided that i believe.

 

Was the Dalai Lama at Rudz? Man, I miss everything. No big deal about Zarathustra. He's there every night.

 

Actually that's not how it was explained to me-- I always got the response, "Well, we don't really know what will happen to your soul, that's up to God, but the only way to guarantee your way into Heaven is to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ".

Or something like that, I forget. It was a long, long time ago.

I decided I would try getting into Heaven by buying a Porsche. Equally likely to succeed in my opinion and a hell of a lot more fun while on Earth.

I don't think it's something you can really control, so it's not worth worrying about. I sincerely tried Christianity and I just never really believed it. I look at it this way-- if I could try as earnestly as I did and still truly not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and if true belief is absolutely required to get into Heaven, then I did all I could and I'm going to Hell anyway.

Hopefully the devil has a nice ventilated area for BBS administrators.

 

I know they do some good but as with every evil there is always some sort of good associated with it if you think about it. Let's take sickness and disease for example. It is something that most people would consider a bad or evil thing. Well the good in sickness and disease is that there is huge field devoted to helping and sometimes suring those with ailments, the medical field and all those involved. I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for it. Could you imagine how many people would be without jobs if there were no sickness or diseases? Also if there were not these ailments just think of what the population of the world might be right now.

I do realize that they do some good for almost all communities they are in but from what I have seen I just really don't like the bad part, so much so sometimes that it makes me neglect the good.

 

If there was a hell and the devil was against god, and he ran the place wouldn't it more like Las Vegas then Torture?

I'm in the Czech republic I think its interesting that 60 percent of the population is atheist

 

The Dalai Lama then laughed at your fundamental delusion.

 

and what a hearty prideful laugh it was

 

Atheism demands that people rely on themselves to develop a moral code of behavior. Atheism asks people to take responsibility for their past and future. It's not surprising that people want some father figure in the sky to "save" them. It's easier that way. It's also easier to worry about your own salvation ("Jesus is my personal saviour") rather than the reality of other people's suffering. "Religion" and "God" as practiced by most people I have encountered have more to do with social control, power, and ego gratification than spiritual transendence, community, or grace. The most powerful argument for the existence of God is the ability of people to still believe, to still have faith in the concept, itself, in the face of the overwhelming historical evidence that religion is the biggest racket of all time. Color me sceptical.

 

Atheism is a reactive movement, so it will finally be dead when we are all atheists. I dont think the struggles of formal atheist movements can be interpreted in any way as the triumph of religion.

I would say:

(1) that in general, the number of active believers is continuing a slow decrease in most parts of the world.

(2) that secularism is still increasing.

(3) that amongst people with thought out belief systems (e.g. scientists, who have a professional need to have a "view of the world"), the proportion of atheists is rather high and probably also still increasing.

 

Any reasonably intelligent person knows the the more you learn the more questions you have and that mankind is 2005 is no where close to understanding the nature of existance.

If someone wants to believe that complexity and improbability imply a creator, fine. But why do they have to claim it's irrefutable? Why is it that their creator can exist without cause but the observable universe cannot? Why must the source be something anthropomorphic?

(Ah, pondering the imponderable on a rainy day...indulginging the illusion of conciousness afforded by my complex organic machinery)

 

The assumption has to be that the universe is infinite because 'nothing', that which is beyond something is by definition infinite, "nothing would have no beginning and no end since it isn't anything". And if our known stellar system arose from nothing it would be preposterous to think that others couldn't in another place or time.

I think our observable system is complex but not chaotic because all interaction of energy and mass is governed by a common set of laws. Chaos is just in the eye of the observer.

I don't think I ever seen it said that complexity is a function of scale. Hell, tell that to a quantum physicist.

You just have to step outside the humancentric point of view. Our sense of time is laughably small even on a geologic scale much less a cosmic scale. We cant even envision a multi-cosmic scale where stellar systems like our observable 'universe' may come and go or exist in numbers as vast as the stars we can see.

Religion is a social science that has more to do with psycology, ethics and politics than it does with astronomy or quantum physics.

 

Actually current theories think that the expansion of the known universe is accelerating due to the phenomenon of dark energy, so it could keep expanding, forever. (or back in to itself depending on it's shape???)

 

Thanks for the welcome. And my apologies for being so late in getting to this.

I agree with this and your characterisation of these movements as reactionary. From one perspective this seems obvious but I honestly don’t encounter too many people who understand this. They continue to see these movements as progressive when they are almost wholly critical, and I’ll use the word “deconstructive” but mean it largely the way it’s popularly used.

To clarify my earlier point, I still haven’t read the article but I see things just starting to change. The boomer generation were the initiators of much of the protest/deconstruction oriented movements and they reinforced each other in this mentality and eventually gave each other good jobs for being keepers of faith of the “angry protester”. But, post boomers began to see this as significantly empty and not solving problems. Yes, the criticisms of these groups were often very valid, but they deconstructed without reconstructing a better vision for society, so what was left was a fragmented society and fragmented people. The pomo folk are right in here too. Barthes brilliantly dismantled many of the images and propaganda of the French state, and Foucault and Derrida became possibly the most influential philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. But they all steadfastly deny the metanarrative. (If you can think of a better word so we don’t lose everyone who isn’t familiar with Lyotard please help me out here). (And strictly speaking I guess Foucault didn’t deny metanarratives, he said he didn’t know or care whether they existed. What he was interested in was exposing the old corrupt metanarratives.)

So in this fragmented context of deconstructed* metanarratives and seemingly unhappy and unfulfilled “angry protesters” who didn’t seem to be making much progress solving societies practical problems, many mostly younger people started to turn in different directions. (Some of the boomers themselves turned into Neocons in response to the chaos, but that’s another discussion.) Part of this turn was a turn to exploring different kinds of spirituality. There were lots of new agey movements springing up, and a big rise in Buddhism, and a rise in “Christian Fundamentalism” and also in fundamental Christianity. (The two are not necessarily the same, and often aren’t the same, but that’s a different discussion too). I think this change started occurring some time ago (10 to 15 years?) but was essentially an undercurrent here in Canada. At the levels of power we had our 60’s icon of a Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, in the 70’s, a reaction to his by then personal unpopularity in the 80’s which lead to a brief and disastrous spell with our 80’s neocons (which are fundamentally different that the US version in some key ways) and Brian Mulroney, and then back to a more fiscally responsible but still largely aimless leader who was a disciple of Trudeau, Jean Chrétien.

But now I think the undercurrent is rising to levels of prominence. I think globally the younger generations have been shocked out of our happily oppressed state as contented slackers by 9/11, by the threat of terrorism and what lies behind it, and by the Bush administration and what they stand for. The angry protest generation never had a bigger vision. They never really tried to put all the deconstructed pieces together in a better way, a self critical way that could continually face its wayward parts and yet be coherent enough and seek enough of a consensus to be powerful enough to address real world problems. Humans are social creatures and as such we need to have and want to have bigger and “just” visions and metanarratives to help structure our laws and policies. (I could expand on this and if I did Habermas’ name and Communicative Action, or something like it, would come up a lot.) The angry protest generation abandoned this idea. (And of course Lyotard suggested that to even attempt to generate metanarratives would be to do violence to individuals’ separate realities. ) But IMO the younger generations are realising, in a dramatic way, that if we don’t do this someone else will, and someone else is. Exhibit A might be The New American Century project, but there are other exhibits too. (Strictly speaking Lyotard was not all wrong. But like the rest of the pomo crowed he was only addressing half the story. Theirs is the antithesis to the thesis that they reacted to, the corruptions of the worldview of the day. But what we need now is the synthesis to take us the next step forward.)

So, to bring this back to the question of atheism, I think that as a response to the chaotic and largely unsuccessful nature of the protest/deconstruction/postmodern boomer generation, one feature of which was a legitimate response to the oppressive and corrupt structures of “Religion” but which led to a tendency towards a steadfast denial of spiritually in general (another example of deconstruction without reconstruction), the younger generations began to explore the concept of spirituality again. It has existed from the beginning of time, after all, and not even the generation that declared themselves the “end of history” can extinguish it. I don’t think that until recently, however, it has tended to be something seen as legitimate by mainstream liberal society, which is what Canada tends to be.

That reference was at least partially for you, but I think it’s relevant to the issue too.

I’ve discussed this a bit above but I’ll address it more specifically here. I think they are similar in their denial of the metanarrative. And while we could call them enlightened, (and much of the associated criticisms are indeed that), as you mentioned they aren’t progressive. They run contrary to the project of the enlightenment (on purpose and they are quite specifically intended to do just that), but they are not consistent with an enlightened renewal of the project of enlightenment, the likes of which Habermas speaks of, if you follow what I’m trying to say. I would say that they both deconstruct without reconstructing, (but I know I’m making poor Jacques rotate in his grave when I do. )

I agree that atheism will always be around. I think spirituality, at least at one level, is not something we’re born with. It is an area of conscious exploration and new awareness, and there will always be people who don’t travel this path and to whom it will appear that spirituality is merely an ungrounded rationalisation.

I think formal postmodernism will be a fad, (and Habermas is smiling at your description of it as being conservative. When I read Habermas say this and made the connection it was a huge moment of realization for me that explained soooo much about why that mindset frustrated the **** out of me, btw). But the will and mentality oriented toward criticizing social structures in general will always be around and will always be useful, but it needs to be taken the next step IMO. I think there will always be more extreme counter culture figures like Foucault who see our society from the outside and therefore see things that we don’t and can make legitimate criticisms, and probably some that aren’t legitimate. But the way forward from here is not to simply trash it all. The way forward is to take the responsibility to put forward a proposal for a better solution and to engage in a process of communicative reason to come to agreements about how to proceed … for now. And when validity claims are raised against those structures in the future then the process repeats. Yes, this process won’t be easy. Yes, power corrupts and those in power have a tendency to resort to instrumental reason to justify what they want to do, but those who wish to be progressive and who wish to be part of building the next society must continually engage in it and in the end it will win out. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. There are different ways to walk people thorough this or encourage them to walk through it, but in the end it is a natural process that people go through. They engage dilemmas, to use Kohlberg’s term, and come to transcendent levels of understanding. The pomo crowd didn’t do this. The popomo crowd, us, need to pick up where they left off. We need to talk and collectively work through dilemmas to chart a course for the new global century, but we won’t be doing this with the belief that we have all the right answers or that we are discovering absolute truth. We do is as part of a never ending process, thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis, which becomes a thesis that will be opposed by an antithesis and the dilemma will be worked through to an synthesis, etc. And the question of spirituality is part of this and indeed spiritual growth works this way too.

Ramble, ramble. Feel free to ask me about the unintelligible parts and I’ll see what I can do to explain myself better.
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* I should acknowledge that as a fan of Derrida my use of this term may well be driving you nuts. If you can think of a better term I’ll use it and let Jacque rest in peace.

 

Do you have to write in that style to get tenure?