Misused labels of Atheist and Atheism

[Vonsalza]

Vonsalza:

Bradskii:

And obviously God doesn’t have an actual mouth and vocal chords but if evolution had taken a different path and we were now blessed with multiple pasta-like limbs, then I guarantee you that we’d be referring to God’s noodly appendages.

Well… if I’m not particularly troubled by that, is it a bad thing? Was there a more clever rebuke there that went over my head (as occasionally occurs)?

It’s that God is whom we want Him to be. He is a reflection of ourselves. He is made in our image.

If by “our” you mean large cultural groups, then sure. I’ve no problem with that. I’ve seen black, blonde, even Vietnamese Jesus.

If Christendom were to come to the denizens of planet Colanderia of the Pastafari race, then I’ve no doubt that the local diocese will prominently display a rugged cross with a little fettuccine nailed to it. Or hung on it. Or however they’d like to adhere the pasta to the cross.

“Thus God doesn’t exist” doesn’t seem to follow.

 

[Bradskii]

I’m referring to one God as I am on a Catholic forum. My actual view Is:

It’s that gods are whom we want them to be. They are a reflection of ourselves. They are made in our image.

Hence the view that only one can be true or they are all false.

 

[rcwitness]

I’m referring to one God as I am on a Catholic forum. My actual view Is:

It’s that gods are whom we want them to be. They are a reflection of ourselves. They are made in our image.

Hence the view that only one can be true or they are all false.

Do you honestly believe Jesus was a reflection of man???

 

[Vonsalza]

I’m referring to one God as I am on a Catholic forum. My actual view Is:

It’s that gods are whom we want them to be. They are a reflection of ourselves. They are made in our image.

Hence the view that only one can be true or they are all false.

If only one group can be right, you might have a point.

But I think what’s just as likely - that god is like medical school in that a bunch of people have gone there, but we still encounter this irritating reality that when we ask 10 doctors for an opinion on the bump on our arm, we generally get 10 different opinions. And occasionally more than one will work.

From the apostle Paul; “For now we see through a glass, darkly”.

But as a disclaimer, there are plenty of folks who would attest that my view isn’t Catholic. And they’re probably right. As said elsewhere, I’m a theist before I’m a member of any defined faith group.

 

[Bradskii]

Bradskii:

I’m referring to one God as I am on a Catholic forum. My actual view Is:

It’s that gods are whom we want them to be. They are a reflection of ourselves. They are made in our image.

Hence the view that only one can be true or they are all false.

Do you honestly believe Jesus was a reflection of man???

He was what we’d like to see in ourselves. He was the better nature of man. He was someone we could all try to emulate. A martyr for His cause. A true friend. A loving son. Compassionate. Honest. Humble. Just.

Nobody kept records of what He said. Nobody wrote contemporary accounts of what He did. But when the story was written, we were told of the man the writers thought we’d like him to be.

 

[Bradskii]

Bradskii:

I’m referring to one God as I am on a Catholic forum. My actual view Is:

It’s that gods are whom we want them to be. They are a reflection of ourselves. They are made in our image.

Hence the view that only one can be true or they are all false.

If only one group can be right, you might have a point.

But I think what’s just as likely - that god is like medical school in that a bunch of people have gone there, but we still encounter this irritating reality that when we ask 10 doctors for an opinion on the bump on our arm, we generally get 10 different opinions. And occasionally more than one will work.

From the apostle Paul; “For now we see through a glass, darkly”.

But as a disclaimer, there are plenty of folks who would attest that my view isn’t Catholic. And they’re probably right. As said elsewhere, I’m a theist before I’m a member of any defined faith group.

As an atheist I find things to be quite simple. I don’t believe in gods. But generally I find it’s usefull, when someone professes Christianity, to find out in which god they believe. As in, what works for you?

And as you imply, ask ten Christians and you’ll get a dozen different replies.

 

[Damian]

Faith is the realization, it is a supernatural gift.

Can you explain this more? Realization of what?
Someone said that faith is a virtue that the deity looks for in people.

Hebrews 11
And without faith it is impossible to please him.

So the deity is looking for a virtue in people that it has to give to them to begin with?

 

[Vonsalza]

As an atheist I find things to be quite simple. I don’t believe in gods.

I don’t find it to be simple at all. There are so many cultural functions facilitated by the supposed God that atheism simply doesn’t have a good replacement for. And when pressed about it, the reply is often some limp cop-out. “That has nothing to do with atheism!” Unfortunately, “If I break it, I don’t have to fix it” is bit irresponsible.

If there’s no God, what is the basis of law that isn’t laughably arbitrary? What’s the basis of morality that can replace it in a way that doesn’t have the same subjective pitfalls as the religion it’s supposed to supplant? Hell, if there’s no divine cop, why be good when I’m pretty sure I can get away with it on a temporal basis?

And as you imply, ask ten Christians and you’ll get a dozen different replies.

And ask many atheists about how we’ll fill the cultural hole previously filled by god and you’ll often get demurral or sophistry about sky fairies and invisible unicorns… Which is guess is still demurral of a sort.

 

[Damian]

He is not an “it”, but a person. He is pleased that we walk by faith because faith sees the Spirit, which is good, kind, compassionate, loving, hopefull, merciful, bold, wise, etc. The Father created us to know Him and follow Him. Flesh and blood (our intellect and mind) cannot see Him. Our mind is created and to be used, but not to be a moral guide.

I use the ambiguous “it” for the deity, because everyone has a different view of how they define a deity.
How can faith see something, if it is a belief that does not require evidence or reasons? To me it sounds like an assertion of what someone would like reality to be. Like I would like reality to be more harmonious than where we are now and I am working to that, but since we have other pressures that come into conflict with that, I don’t see that happening unless we are forced to change our conflicting freedoms. For example, the freedom to have as many children as we want, but then now having wars over limited resources for overpopulation problems. But we have evidence and reasons for that being a problem and that we can move towards that. That’s why I hope we can get to this point, faith seems to imply something beyond reality. Like the faith in the existence of the supernatural. This is where this word gets muddy to me, it continually gets interchanged from how I use the word “Hope” for things that we can do (but its hard) and the belief in things that have no evidence in reality at all, like the supernatural.

Our mind is created and to be used, but not to be a moral guide.

Okay, I don’t prescribe to dualism, the separation of the soul (all things moral) and the biological mind. I can point to studies that show that damaging the mind will change your personality and morality and all the intellectual markers that make us individuals. For example, there was a patient that had a split brain operation and the left side of the brain was an atheist and the right side was a christian. I can point to that as reasons why I don’t believe the dual position. Can you tell me what you use for evidence of the dual position?

Faith is not defined as something believed in with no evidence or reason!

How do you define it then? You just went on to describe your deity as a person and that faith sees the spirit, but you just used a mystery to explain another mystery to me. The characteristics you listed off,

which is good, kind, compassionate, loving, hopefull, merciful, bold, wise, etc

are characteristics of people, but you ascribe those to a spirit, but haven’t told me how you distinguish between a person and a spirit. Are you saying that the spirit is what I call characteristics of the person and the physical person is just a meat car being driven around by the spirit? If that is the case, how did you find this “spirit” to be there?

 

[Damian]

To compel someone to action.

Okay so the spirit to move people is another way of saying you convinced someone to take an action? isn’t that just having a dialog?

We betrayed God. We disobeyed the perfect Spirit, whom gave and sustained our life. Are you familiar with Adam and Eve?

Yes I have heard this story, but adam and eve did that, not me. What did I do or you or anyone else do to “fall”?

Not sure I believe you here. If you truly dont want eternal life, you must not love life. Maybe you dont… i dont know.

Sorry, but if I told you something true about me, it’s true about me. You can ask for clarification about what I meant, but you need to accept that it is true for me. My mortality is what drives me to want to do better now, to live a richer life because it is slowly coming to an end. It’s our knowledge that we are here just for a limited time that drives me to make a difference while I can. I don’t get another chance to do well by others. My immortality is through being remembered and loved for what I was able to do for others.

 

[Damian]

Nope - who it was is irrelevant to the truth of their claim. The scientific experts agree with this model, so I accept their review as the current best model of reality so far.

 

[Damian]

That conveniently avoids saying anything about Global Warming example.

Because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Why do you think it does? What do you think I was getting at then?

You can’t make an improvement here. What, are you going to compare how “best method” and “candidate method” measure truth? How are you going to find out the right answers in a way that could beat the “best method”?

The best method creates the most accurate model of reality when applied. That is my measurement of what is the “best” method. If you have a better method that creates a more accurate model of reality, then let me know. I don’t know of one that is better than the scientific method.

So, you want the excuses like “Beliefs can’t be chosen.” and “Beliefs are inevitably based on evidence.” to excuse you but not them.

They can still hold to their beliefs if I was unable to persuade them. I didn’t know that they did not know what an atheist is or what it means to be one. Now that I know they do have that information, and they still act like a bigot, then yes, I will be justified in thinking they are a bigot. If you don’t like group X because of Y and group X says that Y has nothing to do with a moral assessment of them and you still don’t like group X because of Y for a moral assessment of them, you went from being ignorant to a stupid bigot. Stupid is when you are given the evidence and reasons for why position X is wrong and you still hold that position. You are willingly continuing this. You have just turned into a political troll to promote an agenda instead of changing after an understanding is reached.

Someone who is “factually wrong” started with false premises or made a wrong step. And thus was not “logically correct”.

Every mathematical model of reality that failed at the experiment is what I call being logically correct but factually wrong. They didn’t have the data that they gained from running the experiment, so based on their limited knowledge, they are logically correct. Being logically correct does not mean you are correct about reality because our logic is as good as what we understand about reality. And we don’t understand all of reality yet. That is why the tests are needed, to update our logical models and continue to improve them.

And it looks like it is only based on being scared.

Okay if that’s what you can reduce it to. I can find other reasons beyond that, like saying I believe our logic works based on the reference point of our experienced reality. Since we can not experience what goes on beyond that point, I am not going to assume our logic works there.
“scared” point is just a red-herring to me. That lets me know what you think on this, it’s not what I think on this because that’s where you went with it, not me.

 

[MPat]

How can faith see something, if it is a belief that does not require evidence or reasons? To me it sounds like an assertion of what someone would like reality to be.

No, that is not what faith is.

Perhaps it would be easier to see what we understand by “faith” after looking at

.

There we see a professor (Walter Lewin) show an experiment with heavy pendulum, putting his head right next to its initial position. After that people applaud. Can you explain why?

For we know the Law of Conservation of energy just as well, as he does. But then, I’m not sure I would try such an experiment… Yet why? There is no real danger in it!

And that’s where faith comes in. Faith is the virtue by which we trust the conclusions of reason, when feelings tell us to run away.

And yes, such a virtue does deserve applause.

In that case faith was trusting conclusions of Physics. In our case “the” faith is trusting the Revelation, Church.

And if you can’t demonstrate even faith in Logic, you aren’t going to get anywhere close to faith in God.

Because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Why do you think it does? What do you think I was getting at then?

If you have a better method that creates a more accurate model of reality, then let me know. I don’t know of one that is better than the scientific method.

Now that I know they do have that information, and they still act like a bigot, then yes, I will be justified in thinking they are a bigot.

And here we can see what happens when you have no faith in Logic.

For in each case I asked you to try out the same form of argument with other content, other propositions. To see if it works. And in each case you refused.

Well, I can’t cure your lack of faith in Logic. Especially if you do not cooperate.

 

[Damian]

236 The Fathers of the Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia). “Theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we know a person, the better we understand his actions.

Can you clarify this for me?

faith, which is the substance[1] of things hoped for,

So faith is hope here.

giving as it were a substance in our minds to such things as we are in hopes and in expectation of hereafter,

Hope for things with no evidence of but we can imagine what that could be like. Okay, isn’t that what all fictional writers do?

and making them present to us before they come to pass

Can you explain what this part means?

It is also a sure conviction[2] of things that appear not.

Again hope in things with no evidence but wishing it to be so.

For when God has revealed things,

Here evidence is provided by a deity to its select favorites but not everyone else.

and we believe them upon the divine and infallible authority of the revealer,

Trusting the messenger without verification. Depends on the claim. My neighbor claims to have a pet dog, I’ll believe him. If he claims to have a ghost in his attic, I will not until enough evidence of that claim has been presented.

we have a greater certainty of them than any demonstration can afford us.

Demonstrated claims will always supersede non-demonstrated claims. That is why I trust doctors and not homeopathy for me.

 

[Damian]

obtained[3] a testimony from God that their actions were pleasing to him.

God rewarded its personal favorites here with the evidence of the claims of the supernatural before people were justified to believe these claims. I’m okay with waiting till the evidence is presented. Otherwise would you want to be a defendant on trial where the jury has already convicted you and the judge rewards them for that?

Faith is the basis, the foundation supporting our hope; for unless there be faith, there cannot possibly be any hope. Menochius.

This just makes “faith” sound like the deity will reward people for living their lives on how they wish reality would be and then the deity reveals to them the information they would need to understand how reality actually is. Or is that not a fair assessment of these passages? Wouldn’t that make a lot of people, who do not worship the correct deity, spend a lot of their time wishing for what reality would be like instead of what I do, just limit my understanding of what reality is based on what reality has actually presented so far and dealing with that?

 

[Damian]

There we see a professor (Walter Lewin) show an experiment with heavy pendulum, putting his head right next to its initial position. After that people applaud. Can you explain why?

I’ll refer back to my explanation between belief and hope:
Belief is what we understand to be all possible results of an experience. Like flipping a coin. I believe heads or tails will be the result based on all the experiments we have run on this.
Hope is desiring a specific known possible result, regardless of how rare it is. Since I desire Heads to appear after placing a bet, I hope Heads is the result.
All you are describing there is what I would call, “Hope” because of all the experiments we have run, the professor is willing to place his head on the line based on all the previous tests that are documented as this result.
That is not what people have been describing as “faith”. They are saying they have faith in place of hope but there is no testing data for that position, there is no data at all to support that position. To my coin flip analogy, based on how they have defined “faith”, they would have faith that the coin would never land at all after being flipped. There is no data in this reality that indicates that is even a possibility on the list of possible known outcomes, regardless of how rare.

For in each case I asked you to try out the same form of argument with other content, other propositions. To see if it works. And in each case you refused.

I addressed this, we’ll just have to disagree on this because I don’t really know what your disagreement here is.

 

[Dan123]

If there’s no God, what is the basis of law that isn’t laughably arbitrary? What’s the basis of morality that can replace it in a way that doesn’t have the same subjective pitfalls as the religion it’s supposed to supplant? Hell, if there’s no divine cop, why be good when I’m pretty sure I can get away with it on a temporal basis?

The basis is generally based on an evaluation of well-being, empathy, and harm. The argument isn’t that those are better systems to supplant religion, the argument is that those are what we actually use. Would you follow a religion that taught you murder was okay? What if they told you not only was murder okay, but that those telling you murder was okay had infallible inspiration from God? Of course not, which means you’re comparing that religions teachings to something, your own conceptualization of right and wrong. Likewise you find a lot to agree with when it comes to whatever faith you do follow, because they align with what you understand intuitively to be ‘good’. The question becomes do you get better results from acknowledging the subjective nature of this or pretending it’s objective, though then we risk arguing from consequences and not truth.

If there IS a divine cop why have laws at all? Why would we need to impose punishment if God’s going to do it perfectly in the end? Come on lets at least acknowledge every single culture, faith, etc has worked out enough rules for us to generally coexist. Atheists aren’t running around committing crimes at increased rates, in fact some studies suggest the opposite though I don’t find them to be large scale enough to say definitively. The “atheists want to eat your babies” stuff is beneath you.

There’s a lot of formerly very religious European countries that have shifted away from that heavily and amazingly they haven’t all fallen apart. The cultural holes don’t seem to be the issue you think they would be.

 

[MPat]

I’ll refer back to my explanation between belief and hope:
Belief is what we understand to be all possible results of an experience. Like flipping a coin. I believe heads or tails will be the result based on all the experiments we have run on this.
Hope is desiring a specific known possible result, regardless of how rare it is. Since I desire Heads to appear after placing a bet, I hope Heads is the result.
All you are describing there is what I would call, “Hope” because of all the experiments we have run, the professor is willing to place his head on the line based on all the previous tests that are documented as this result.

No, trusting conclusions of Physics, having faith in them, is not merely “desiring” that they would be true.

Let’s face it: you have prepared no word for it.

I addressed this, we’ll just have to disagree on this because I don’t really know what your disagreement here is.

Oh, that’s easy. I want you to think. You want to avoid thinking and to do what you can with feeling.

I want you to trust reason’s conclusions without reservation. You are scared that maybe you’d be wrong.

Of course, that is not a rational fear: you are very wrong in many ways anyway. But I irrational fears are rarely defeated by reasoning alone.

 

[Vico]

…
Can you explain this more? Realization of what?
Someone said that faith is a virtue that the deity looks for in people.
…
So the deity is looking for a virtue in people that it has to give to them to begin with?

A definition of realization is: the fulfillment or achievement of something desired or anticipated.

Per Catholic teaching, man cannot extricate himself from the tendency to sin, without the grace of God, however God gives that first to which man adds cooperation. Through cooperation which manifests faith, Catechism:

143 By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God.2 With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, “the obedience of faith”.3

For common difficulties with Christian faith see: https://www.crediblecatholic.com/

 

[Vico]

…

Heb 11:1

[1] Now faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not.

Haydock Commentary

All this chapter is a commendation and recommendation of faith, which is the substance[1] of things hoped for, giving as it were a substance in our minds to such things as we are in hopes and in expectation of hereafter, and making them present to us before they come to pass.

• Faith does provide a way to visualize what will be, which is a faculty of imagination for us since we do not have the ability to see the future with certainty on our own capabilities.

Heb 11:2

[2] For by this the ancients obtained a testimony.

Haydock Commentary

– It is also a sure conviction[2] of things that appear not. For when God has revealed things, and we believe them upon the divine and infallible authority of the revealer, we have a greater certainty of them than any demonstration can afford us.

• It is sure when it is based upon infallible authority. We have Jesus Christ and those experiences which the apostles reported about the countless miracles and the resurrection and ascension and other events.

Heb 11:

3 *By faith we understand that the world was framed by the word of God; that from invisible things visible things might be made.

Haydock Commentary

By this virtue of faith, they of old, our forefathers, obtained[3] a testimony from God that their actions were pleasing to him. Wi. — Faith is the basis, the foundation supporting our hope; for unless there be faith, there cannot possibly be any hope. Menochius.

• The Theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity, which are given with supernatural grace of God.