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The Forum > Article Comments > Why have a Global Atheist Convention? > Comments

Why have a Global Atheist Convention? : Comments

By David Nicholls, published 3/4/2012

Religion has gone too far and it is up to the non-religious to let them know that.

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A jamboree of atheists, Luciferase? Yuk! I'm glad you didn't think it up…

Here is a collective noun that might work, hope it's not too obtuse – it even encompasses Pericles' comments:

'A ration of atheists'.
Posted by WmTrevor, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 4:54:12 PM
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I'm still cross. So here's a bit more of the same.

Prior to "New Atheism", I was perfectly content with my ability to respond to enquiries from my Christian friends, about my lack of belief in their God. Or any other God, for that matter. It was simple, straightforward, and left both sides amicable.

Now I am expected to defend the views of Richard Dawkins. Whose books, I have to say, hold absolutely no appeal for me whatsoever, in the same way that books with titles like "Can Man Live without God", given to me by religious friends in an effort to get me to see life their way, sit unopened on my shelf.

I am now supposed to know the names of all these "New Atheist" spokespeople, and to be conversant with their views on taxation, education, Islam and a whole raft of other stuff.

Their views, whatever they may be, might be identical to, or diametrically opposed to mine, on any number of topics. They may also change from time to time, who knows. So how come their are the voices that now define atheism?

Who gave them the right to speak on behalf of atheists? The answer of course is "no-one", they simply decided one day that they would co-opt a perfectly straightforward stance that says "there is no God", and turn it into a commercial bestseller.

There is a word for people who do that sort of thing. History is full of them.
Posted by Pericles, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 5:04:22 PM
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*and fashioned it to represent appropriate vessels to contain and nurture the message and hope that the great religious sages espoused. It is all about meaning and message.*

Well its all about symbols, Poirot. The human mind works by association.
Runner no doubt feels good, when he drives past his
church and sees that cross on top. If you take a look in many Muslim
homes, you will see a picture of the Hajj, where millions gather
in Mecca and hundreds of thousands throng around the black stone.
Now the black stone already had relgious meaning before Mohammed
invented Islam and people worshipped various stone gods in that part
of the world.

So those huge structures, along with the throngs of people, give
comfort to believers and display the power of their various
religions. People are awestruck and it gives them confidence in their
belief.

Squeers, the problem here is not really atheists, it is you and your
pet fetishes. Because people use reason to disagree with religion,
you'd prefer them to use reason to rave on against capitalism and
the cushy lifestyle which we lead.

Pericles is correct. Atheism is one thing. Trying to use it for
all these other pet peeves which people have, makes no sense at
all.
Posted by Yabby, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 5:36:23 PM
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<What do you mean by “prevailing order of things”?>
I mean the political/ideological order, but the implications are more profound than that and I’ve pre-empted the question to a large extent above. Reality is not just “out there”. It might be if we were lions or polar bears, but we’re ideological creatures and reality is not simply something we bump up against. This is not to say we don’t bump up against it, but that these days when we do it comes as a bit of a shock, like if we have a near collision while driving—we’re suddenly appraised of the reality behind the contrivance. This is an exaggeration but the point is that our whole world and everything we encounter is both real and ideological. We don’t individually grow up and go through a laborious process of naming things and thinking up philosophies, we inherit them. Reality is not merely that which is garnered by the senses, it’s that least of all—and they only sense surfaces, though somehow the brain/mind makes “sense” of it all. Reality is what we’ve been taught it is, not directly but by consensus, and our consensus is language, the most mutable of non-things. The physicist is not dealing with reality, though via empiricism she’s attempting to cut through the cultural/symbolic flab to analyse reality direct—though her perspective is still formed by language! True empiricism is extraordinarily difficult, at best, because it’s “not” empirical; empirical evidence is a “translation” of reality into linguistic/conceptual form, and the findings are necessarily rendered in the same terms. Study etymology and note the evolution of language. Why does language evolve? Because it’s not a stable thing apropos reality; it relates, rather, to the symbolic order, to the current take on reality—and of course random mutation.

tbc
Posted by Squeers, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 7:05:25 PM
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cont..

The prevailing order of things is the lens through which we “think” we view reality, but it’s only representation, vetted and embellished by the prevailing cultural/social/political order. A full moon is never just the moon; it inspires us, makes us “irrational”. True empiricism is the impossible task of screening all that out until all that’s left is subject-object relations, but what are these without language? Lions and polar bears, who couldn’t give a stuff? What is the subject who cares? Is it merely carrying out the prevailing obsession with the object—like academia, researching for the sake of it, or like bees gathering nectar? Or is it “intelligent”? Wherefore then this intelligence if it isn’t a collective attribute of the hive? The subject is subject to the symbolic order and the object barely exists in itself; this ought to be the rationale of the atheist—and so it is with Marx—how else does he explain human prescience? The object is always second-hand, and so is the subject, thus the atheist is a collectivist. The liberal-rationalist cheats—he’s an ego-maniac after all—and “rationalises” the problem as pure “correspondence” between subject and object. But why then the need for empiricism? The theist, with some justification, calls it God-given. Reality is either available to us individually, which suggests something essential, like a soul, or it’s culturally “processed”, and “this” is what we’re scrutinising—processed reality. This might seem verbose, but I can’t be more succinct.
Yabby’s a master at reducing things; perhaps he can find suitably dismissive terms.
Posted by Squeers, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 7:06:08 PM
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I wrote: “Rationality can only be appealed to. Irrational people cannot be converted by rational appeal to become rational.”

Squeers follows: “ Luciferase fails to understand my point above that rationalism remains irrational as a mode of pontification. Calling yourself a rationalist doesn't make you one. I'm sure we all think we're rational!”

We’d better get down some definitions:
*Through empiricism knowledge comes from sensory experience
*Through rationalism knowledge comes from reasoned deduction.
*A rationalist arrives at knowledge through rationalism.
*Rationale is the deductive pathway followed by a rationalist
*Rationality is the exercise of reason.

Someone irrational (lacking rationality) is unable to properly reason, hence engage in rationalism.

For example, despite being patently obvious, after thoroughly convergent reasoning (some described on this thread), that the Noah story of the bible can’t possibly be true, people still swear it’s entirely true. I hope Squeers would agree such people are irrational. If, instead, he’s saying we’re floating about mad in some Lewis Carroll universe and all rationale is equally absurd, he is again parading his post-modernistic dogma.

In real science, empiricism is the arbiter of whether knowledge arrived at through rationalism should be kept or jettisoned. Beyond science, such knowledge, whether true or false, is valid regardless. (It’s worth explaining here, for Squeers’ sake especially, that if empiricism supports a proposed hypothesis, it does'nt simultaneously prove the rationale underlying the hypothesis).

It’s clear he doesn’t really understanding how science works (experimental design, validity, models), which gentleman George is too polite to say plainly. Hence he remains lazily committed to post-modernist critique of science while simultaneously denying it!

Whatever, it’s all irrelevant as in his last two posts he reduces all argument to a stream of consciousness. A cue for my exit, so thanks all for the great thread and discussion
Posted by Luciferase, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 10:16:25 PM
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