Hmm yeah, I used to watch Thunderf00t's stuff until his anti-Sarkeesian/Feminist/Islam stuff and that really turned me off his channel, though there are still worthwhile skeptic/atheist channels to look out for.
I watch a couple atheist channels and some of the assumptions that youtube makes about what else I might be interested in based on that are pretty bad. The current annoyance is a video called "your brain on feminism" that it keeps bringing up. I do my watching on my TV and I don't have a "I'm not interested in this" option. Occasionally, I have to hop on a computer and straighten it out.
Like, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the two people who came in here so far and identified as agnostic rather than atheist probably have some community-based biases for doing so. There's baggage in some areas for saying that you are atheist. And in some ways, you don't want to identify with a small group of bad apples among the atheist community who are saying terrible things on social media, never mind the cultural perceptions among religious communities that atheists are "cold, rational, unfeeling robots who have never known The Grace of God (TM)".
Heck, I'm atheist, but I used to be a Christian. A small part of the reason I broke from Christianity was because I didn't want to be associated with people who did horrible things in the name of Christ.
You lose that bet.
My family, community, workplace and friends are pretty left leaning and non-religious, and I'd be considered more out of place if I identified as Christian than if I identified as atheist.
Shadowhope on
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Hmm yeah, I used to watch Thunderf00t's stuff until his anti-Sarkeesian/Feminist/Islam stuff and that really turned me off his channel, though there are still worthwhile skeptic/atheist channels to look out for.
I don't beat around the bush about this: Tf00t's interest there is strictly financial. He was bitching for the longest time about how his channel wasn't highly trafficked and that he didn't know if he could make a living off of YouTube's partnership program as a result.
Then an opportunity came along for high exposure and he abandoned any principles he might've had to make a quick buck off the back of angry, sexist nerds.
I will occasionally call myself an "atheistic agnostic" instead of a "weak atheist" when I'm feeling especially nebulous. I use "atheist" more and more largely to be assertive and firm, which I get to do because of my relative privilege.
I find myself annoyed at how limited the vocabulary is in certain explicit positions.
"Atheism" is a terrible word for what we mean in most conversations in Western society; we usually actually mean "Naturalism" and/or Materialism."
I am also not aware of any terminology describing how someone would react to a revelation of the supernatural. There seems to be a bias toward assuming that everyone would just fall in line if deities or other supernatural worship-demanders showed up one day, regardless of who they were. As such, I usually have to explain "I don't believe gods exist, I don't believe your god exists, I would never worship any of the gods, some gods I might respect, but the way you describe yours is someone I'd want to punch in the mouth."
I offer a qualified agreement:
I personally have no bones about identifying as an atheist, however strong people may feel that term implies a level of certainty, and this is why:
(Spoilered because, while I do not intend for the following to be offensive, by it's nature it is going to likely offend a reader if they are a theist. Don't read below if you feel a strong criticism of your beliefs is going to piss you off):
The preponderance of fraud - and by that I mean people running deliberate, malicious, for-cash scams - is so ubiquitous, and this contrasts so egregiously against a total lack of genuine articles in terms of miracles, prophecy, divine works or divine places, that I feel that the terms 'religion' and 'scam' are all but interchangeable. Every single damn 'prophet' we have a half decent record for is unquestionably a matchstick man, every single event posited as a miracle that we were able to examine has been shown to be a simple street magic trick used with a deliberate intent to deceive victims into surrendering their agency & very often their money as well.
I hear, "I am a church going Catholic," and my brain directly translates that into, "I am being scammed out of my money by the Catholic church every week,"
In that sense, I feel that organized religion is inherently harmful - although I don't like to say so, because I don't mean that in the same way Harris/Dawkins/Dennet/Hitchens etc mean.
I'm utilitarian. If it makes you happy, go for it. If it doesn't do anything for you, don't do it. And you know what? Some religious people are pretty cool.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I will occasionally call myself an "atheistic agnostic" instead of a "weak atheist" when I'm feeling especially nebulous. I use "atheist" more and more largely to be assertive and firm, which I get to do because of my relative privilege.
I find myself annoyed at how limited the vocabulary is in certain explicit positions.
"Atheism" is a terrible word for what we mean in most conversations in Western society; we usually actually mean "Naturalism" and/or Materialism."
I am also not aware of any terminology describing how someone would react to a revelation of the supernatural. There seems to be a bias toward assuming that everyone would just fall in line if deities or other supernatural worship-demanders showed up one day, regardless of who they were. As such, I usually have to explain "I don't believe gods exist, I don't believe your god exists, I would never worship any of the gods, some gods I might respect, but the way you describe yours is someone I'd want to punch in the mouth."
I offer a qualified agreement:
I personally have no bones about identifying as an atheist, however strong people may feel that term implies a level of certainty, and this is why:
(Spoilered because, while I do not intend for the following to be offensive, by it's nature it is going to likely offend a reader if they are a theist. Don't read below if you feel a strong criticism of your beliefs is going to piss you off):
The preponderance of fraud - and by that I mean people running deliberate, malicious, for-cash scams - is so ubiquitous, and this contrasts so egregiously against a total lack of genuine articles in terms of miracles, prophecy, divine works or divine places, that I feel that the terms 'religion' and 'scam' are all but interchangeable. Every single damn 'prophet' we have a half decent record for is unquestionably a matchstick man, every single event posited as a miracle that we were able to examine has been shown to be a simple street magic trick used with a deliberate intent to deceive victims into surrendering their agency & very often their money as well.
I hear, "I am a church going Catholic," and my brain directly translates that into, "I am being scammed out of my money by the Catholic church every week,"
In that sense, I feel that organized religion is inherently harmful - although I don't like to say so, because I don't mean that in the same way Harris/Dawkins/Dennet/Hitchens etc mean.
This is too cynical for my tastes.
I mean, it definitely happens. Televangelism is a scam for sure, for example. But I sincerely doubt that the average local pastor or whatever is cackling maniacally while the collection plate is going around. I assume most of them are sincere in their beliefs, for good or ill.
My litmus test is: does a specific religious community actively discourage critical thought in favor of pushing a very specific, rigid set of beliefs? Then that's bad. If you're encouraged to invest time and effort in building your own personalized interpretation of the faith? Then that's probably healthy.
I will occasionally call myself an "atheistic agnostic" instead of a "weak atheist" when I'm feeling especially nebulous. I use "atheist" more and more largely to be assertive and firm, which I get to do because of my relative privilege.
I find myself annoyed at how limited the vocabulary is in certain explicit positions.
"Atheism" is a terrible word for what we mean in most conversations in Western society; we usually actually mean "Naturalism" and/or Materialism."
I am also not aware of any terminology describing how someone would react to a revelation of the supernatural. There seems to be a bias toward assuming that everyone would just fall in line if deities or other supernatural worship-demanders showed up one day, regardless of who they were. As such, I usually have to explain "I don't believe gods exist, I don't believe your god exists, I would never worship any of the gods, some gods I might respect, but the way you describe yours is someone I'd want to punch in the mouth."
I offer a qualified agreement:
I personally have no bones about identifying as an atheist, however strong people may feel that term implies a level of certainty, and this is why:
(Spoilered because, while I do not intend for the following to be offensive, by it's nature it is going to likely offend a reader if they are a theist. Don't read below if you feel a strong criticism of your beliefs is going to piss you off):
The preponderance of fraud - and by that I mean people running deliberate, malicious, for-cash scams - is so ubiquitous, and this contrasts so egregiously against a total lack of genuine articles in terms of miracles, prophecy, divine works or divine places, that I feel that the terms 'religion' and 'scam' are all but interchangeable. Every single damn 'prophet' we have a half decent record for is unquestionably a matchstick man, every single event posited as a miracle that we were able to examine has been shown to be a simple street magic trick used with a deliberate intent to deceive victims into surrendering their agency & very often their money as well.
I hear, "I am a church going Catholic," and my brain directly translates that into, "I am being scammed out of my money by the Catholic church every week,"
In that sense, I feel that organized religion is inherently harmful - although I don't like to say so, because I don't mean that in the same way Harris/Dawkins/Dennet/Hitchens etc mean.
This is too cynical for my tastes.
I mean, it definitely happens. Televangelism is a scam for sure, for example. But I sincerely doubt that the average local pastor or whatever is cackling maniacally while the collection plate is going around. I assume most of them are sincere in their beliefs, for good or ill.
My litmus test is: does a specific religious community actively discourage critical thought in favor of pushing a very specific, rigid set of beliefs? Then that's bad. If you're encouraged to invest time and effort in building your own personalized interpretation of the faith? Then that's probably healthy.
Sorry, I should have been clear: my criticism wasn't aimed at pastors (who I consider to mostly be equivalent to the average attendee), but rather the progenitors of a given religious system.
I consider myself agnostic, and I tend to dislike it when people call me an atheist, even though my beliefs overlap far more with atheists than with theists. There's a quote by William L. Rowe: "In the popular sense of the term, an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in the existence of God, while a theist believes that God exists, an atheist disbelieves in God." Practically speaking, there's essentially no difference between how my beliefs impact my overall view of the world and what is right and wrong, but I think that the distinction is nevertheless an important one. Theists and atheists both believe that the universe exists in a certain state - though obviously, they disagree about the nature of the state. As an agnostic, I take no position and claim no knowledge of the universe.
This is plainly, bad epistemology.
Either you are an atheist, because you acknowledge that the arguments for a god fail. Or you are a theist because you think they succeed. Or, you think that the arguments are arguments that you are unqualified to judge the validity of, or you think they are undetermined as to their validity and are thus, an agnostic.
Plainly, the arguments for theism fail, they are uniformly bad - so you would not be justified in being a theist or agnostic under those criteria.
The maintain agnosticism despite that is to carve a special epistemological exception without cause - usually, holding the evidence for a position to be an empirical question relating to facts, but for its rejection requiring proof. Which is not a workable epistemology - it is confusing synthetic and analytic propositions. And furthermore, it is inconsistent in that it is an exception granted only to deities.
If you inventory the assumptions that go into this, it quickly becomes clear why agnostics exist.
Account not recoverable. So long.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Hmm yeah, I used to watch Thunderf00t's stuff until his anti-Sarkeesian/Feminist/Islam stuff and that really turned me off his channel, though there are still worthwhile skeptic/atheist channels to look out for.
I don't beat around the bush about this: Tf00t's interest there is strictly financial. He was bitching for the longest time about how his channel wasn't highly trafficked and that he didn't know if he could make a living off of YouTube's partnership program as a result.
Then an opportunity came along for high exposure and he abandoned any principles he might've had to make a quick buck off the back of angry, sexist nerds.
I don't know if that's more disappointing or less than if he was actually just an MRA anti-Islamic type honestly.
Personally Skeptic/Atheist youtubers I've been watching/keeping up with are AronRa, Potholer54, Armoured Skeptic, Logicked, and TheBibleReloaded. I don't agree with these guys all the time (The BibleReloaded especially can go to some unnecessarily vulgar places) but they're usually either entertaining, educational, or both (and the BibleReloaded's Atheists Read the Bible series is encouraging me to familiarize myself with the Bible)
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
I think it's way worse for Tf00t in moral terms that he chose to basically set a market rate on his principles (...and that market rate was around the level of whatever you make from ad impressions on YouTube as a bigger channel).
With Love and Courage
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Hmm yeah. Compromising your morals for money over just having shitty morals is probably worse.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
What is there of interest in an atheist channel? Unless you're opposing a culture where you're in the minority, or highlighting some particularly egregious fault in a community that needs action from those around it - is there really much to say other than 'this is silly'?
Not wanting to belittle the life of those guys in Sri Lanka who lost their lives for this sort of thing, it seems something that'd be very local and community dependant. Guess I just need to count my blessings for the CoE.
What is there of interest in an atheist channel? Unless you're opposing a culture where you're in the minority, or highlighting some particularly egregious fault in a community that needs action from those around it - is there really much to say other than 'this is silly'?
Not wanting to belittle the life of those guys in Sri Lanka who lost their lives for this sort of thing, it seems something that'd be very local and community dependant. Guess I just need to count my blessings for the CoE.
Most of the atheist channels on YouTube got their start based on a few things:
- The Kitzmiller vs Dover Trial
- The popularity of VenomFangX
- The rise of Ken Ham
- The rise of Kirk Cameron / Ray Comfort
- The election of a heavily creationist-slanted Texas Board of Education
They were responding to creationist bullshit that was actually threatening the U.S. education system at the time.
With Love and Courage
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I haven't been able to find the post I liked best on the topic of weak/strong hair splitting from MrMister, but I did find the second best.
The more important point re: "strong vs weak" atheism isn't "believe vs know", it's where you put the negative in the sentence "I do ____ believe/know/am reasonably sure God does ____ exist", in my opinion.
It's true, those things are different. But you're wrong if you think that said difference is illuminating in the context of a "third way" between atheism and agnosticism. Consider the following:
1) "I don't believe that Obama is a Muslim"
-versus-
2) "I believe Obama isn't a Muslim."
If I agreed to the first, but absolutely refused to agree with the second, then that would imply that I thought things were really up in the air: like, he totally could be, or maybe he isn't, but for whatever reasons I just can't settle on one or the other.
As it turns out we already have a word for that, and it's "agnostic."
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
If an objective universe exists, we have no direct access to it. Everything we observe and feel is filtered through our subjective experiences. The subjective nature of the human condition is inescapable. Our capability to function as well-adjusted people is entirely predicated on our ability and willingness to suspend disbelief. The degree to which we do so varies, both between individuals and between context. Belief is an incredibly touchy and complicated subject which influences literally all human knowledge.
This passage is literally the GEM. It is a bad argument. Suffice to say it does not follow.
Edit: also, I had this professor (not Stove, the author of the paper) for a semester at university. I found him humourless and strict in an entirely unliveable fashion. He sent me out of a lecture once for reasons I do not recall.
That paper does not even try to make arguments in a logically valid form.
Also, how do you feel about the following statement: "We can only understand numbers through their relation to other numbers"
Going last to first:
I don't pretend to have anything more than the ability to gesture toward the issues within the philosophy of mathematics, but it strikes me as a plausible position to take (seemingly contra empiricist conceptions of mathematics, compatible with the rationalist and platonic schools. Of course, without further context I couldn't really say. I am curious as to what the connection to the validity of the argument is - so please elaborate.
As for the paper, I don't think it is particularly unclear in its arguments but I don't know what you mean by "logically valid form" (presumably the various reviewers and editors of Philosophy 77, 2002 did not perceive this flaw either).
However, there are two main objections which apply depending on the form of the argument:
The argument assumes what it seeks to prove - it seeks to establish that there is a separation between our subjective experiences and the world as it is by positing/assuming that our experience of the world must be disconnected from the world
If the argument is phrased such that it does not posit the circular separation above then the conclusion does not follow from the premises. It is perfectly consistent to say that all experience of the world is mediated by our perceptual and cognitive experience and that it accurately or reliably reflects the world as it is, or is otherwise connected to it
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
What is there of interest in an atheist channel? Unless you're opposing a culture where you're in the minority, or highlighting some particularly egregious fault in a community that needs action from those around it - is there really much to say other than 'this is silly'?
Not wanting to belittle the life of those guys in Sri Lanka who lost their lives for this sort of thing, it seems something that'd be very local and community dependant. Guess I just need to count my blessings for the CoE.
Most of the atheist channels on YouTube got their start based on a few things:
- The Kitzmiller vs Dover Trial
- The popularity of VenomFangX
- The rise of Ken Ham
- The rise of Kirk Cameron / Ray Comfort
- The election of a heavily creationist-slanted Texas Board of Education
They were responding to creationist bullshit that was actually threatening the U.S. education system at the time.
Yeah a lot of it started out as "Anti-creationism" stuff, taking a stand against a seemingly influential and growing segment of fundamentalist thinking that seemed to be gaining traction in the US (and elsewhere to a lesser extent) and a lot of them never lost steam, though many of them do more than just refute creationist stuff.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
MrMister made the best post on the topic of this being a spurious distinction ever.
Unfortunately I have not yet been able to find it and I must sleep.
Don't get the thread locked before I do or you will only be cheating yourselves.
MOST distinctions are spurious, if you choose to be strict enough about your parameters.
It's the classic "paradox": a mound of sand a hundred feet high can be called a hill, but a single grain of sand cannot. If you remove one grain at a time, at what point does the hill stop being a hill? The answer is that the question was framed wrong from the start. Hill-ness was never an objective, measurable property to begin with. In all cases, it's just matter in some configuration; it doesn't care what you call it. Hill-ness is just a concept we use as a tool to understand and communicate an idea. It is not at all surprising or paradoxical that the distinction is arbitrary or contentious under certain conditions; it was always going to be a matter of subjectivity.
It doesn't follow that "hill" as a conceptual category is useless. If I ask you a question about the terrain, and you say, "It's above sea level. The distinction between flat land, hills, and mountains is spurious compared to the more important distinction between a continent and an ocean," you aren't technically wrong, but you completely failed to indicate how difficult the hike is going to be, which is the entire reason I asked to begin with.
Is the distinction between atheism and agnosticism fuzzy and indistinct in certain ways? Yes, absolutely. But we voluntarily choose to invoke the distinction when we choose one word over the other to describe ourselves, or someone else. They have different connotations; they have different types of cultural baggage. If you have a genuine interest in understanding the various ways people respond to theism, you're obligated to make an effort to unpack that. If you want to play epistemology lawyer and say, "Nope, this word technically means this specific thing and nothing else; the feeling you describe has no word and therefore no conceptual merit", you can, but in so doing you're completely missing the actual subject of the conversation.
The Sorites paradox doesn't have any obvious analogy to the question of atheism vs agnosticism. Nor do I think it is necessary as we can talk about the distinction, or lack thereof .
I don't think endlessly introducing new terms for the social reasons of connotation as opposed to their semantic and argumentative content is particularly helpful. Playing "epistemology lawyer" is exactly appropriate to my mind because that is the basis of apparent distinction between so-called weak and strong atheism and agnosticism. Furthermore, to have a discussion we must agree on the meaning of the terms we use - and there are solid arguments about the appropriateness of terminology based on their utility.
Happily, there is also a MrMister post about this:
The first link from google: "Adeism is identical to the position of weak atheism, nontheism, or negative atheism"
This is precisely what I was complaining about. This isn't helping anyone understand the issue, it's just hiding everything in a random pile of terms, and the only reason it exists is so that people can say: "oh, but I'm an a-diest! It's a much more sophisticated position, for reasons that I will leave unspecified and which would be irrelevant even if I spelled them out."
Well, they usually don't say that last part. I take it as implicit.
Here, here, let me take a turn: I'm an atheistic voluntarist cognitivist! See, it means that I believe claims about the divine are factual, consciously controlled, and false. Aren't we so happy now that we have this term, this term which I so generously graced you all with? From now on, I will employ this term in every conversation, and correct people when they fail to do so. It is a very important term.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I consider myself agnostic, and I tend to dislike it when people call me an atheist, even though my beliefs overlap far more with atheists than with theists. There's a quote by William L. Rowe: "In the popular sense of the term, an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in the existence of God, while a theist believes that God exists, an atheist disbelieves in God." Practically speaking, there's essentially no difference between how my beliefs impact my overall view of the world and what is right and wrong, but I think that the distinction is nevertheless an important one. Theists and atheists both believe that the universe exists in a certain state - though obviously, they disagree about the nature of the state. As an agnostic, I take no position and claim no knowledge of the universe.
This is plainly, bad epistemology.
Either you are an atheist, because you acknowledge that the arguments for a god fail. Or you are a theist because you think they succeed. Or, you think that the arguments are arguments that you are unqualified to judge the validity of, or you think they are undetermined as to their validity and are thus, an agnostic.
Plainly, the arguments for theism fail, they are uniformly bad - so you would not be justified in being a theist or agnostic under those criteria.
The maintain agnosticism despite that is to carve a special epistemological exception without cause - usually, holding the evidence for a position to be an empirical question relating to facts, but for its rejection requiring proof. Which is not a workable epistemology - it is confusing synthetic and analytic propositions. And furthermore, it is inconsistent in that it is an exception granted only to deities.
If you inventory the assumptions that go into this, it quickly becomes clear why agnostics exist.
Hmm yeah, I used to watch Thunderf00t's stuff until his anti-Sarkeesian/Feminist/Islam stuff and that really turned me off his channel, though there are still worthwhile skeptic/atheist channels to look out for.
I watch a couple atheist channels and some of the assumptions that youtube makes about what else I might be interested in based on that are pretty bad. The current annoyance is a video called "your brain on feminism" that it keeps bringing up. I do my watching on my TV and I don't have a "I'm not interested in this" option. Occasionally, I have to hop on a computer and straighten it out.
Thunderf00t's science content is pretty good and he keeps it pretty isolated from his views on feminism
an atheist channel I've been bumping into lately that has no part of bashing feminism in any way which is pretty good is thebiblereloaded
like a lot of their stuff is rough but I get the impression that their channel is going to get pretty big as they get better at what they do
that is until they're killed by terrorists after they put out their Quranreloaded series
override367 on
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
In fact, academic experts in the fields that do study religious extremism find that the supernatural beliefs themselves are rarely the probable cause for violent acts.
That sounds really interesting, does anyone know where I could find this kind of stuff? I don't even know what academic fields would be considered experts in this; it seems a bit beyond religious studies and anthropology.
I've always been under the impression things like poverty and disenfranchisement were the bigger factors, which make people vulnerable to destructive ideologies, but I've never seen any research in to religious extremism as quoted above.
I've only scratched the surface of this over the last few days (entirely because of our brief discussion of the conflict between Harris and Atran) but what I have seen of Atran's work doesn't support that conclusion. Rather, it maintains that it isn't the strongest predictor of terrorism. Rather Atran contends/shows it is the membership of organisations that foster a group identity. Indeed what I have read is in no way mutually exclusive to the concept of religiosity being a motivating factor or even THE motivating factor. Essentially, the distinction between "this is the primary predictor of extremism" is not the same as "this is the motivation for extremism"
Regarding the poverty and disenfranchisement - that much is clearly false in that the histories of perpetrators of many of the recent acts of terrorism in the name of Islam were from middle class, educated backgrounds. Atran does detail that the Palestinian organisations that undertake suicide bombing explicitly choose the best off people they can as a public relations tool and apparently, this is effective.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
My favorite atheist media is Reasonable Doubts/The Doubt Cast, which alas, has just done their final episode.
Someone break down how atheism can be anti-feminist?
I know the usual boogeymen are homosexuals and minorities on rather ridiculous "evolutionary Darwinism" platforms, but how would that apply to women?
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I don't think the philosophy itself is anti-feminist, it's just that many of the most vocal proponents are the sort of frustrated, somewhat educated white men who also tend to make up the anti-feminist movement.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Someone break down how atheism can be anti-feminist?
I know the usual boogeymen are homosexuals and minorities on rather ridiculous "evolutionary Darwinism" platforms, but how would that apply to women?
It's not.
But atheistic movements may be.
There are two factors and I am attempting present these without judgement or bias as much as possible:
Atheists tend to have strongly universal conceptionsof rationality; atheists who organise in particular. While feminism's egalitarian goals seek to redress privilege and grant greater credence toward the perspectives of the disenfranchised. These two factors are in constant conflict. While atheists and their organisations tend to approve of conflict and challenge this is strongly not the preference of the feminist communities who view such activities as hostile. Regardless of which side you sympathise with (or even if it is neither) the conflict is inevitable.
Atheists who organise tend to be socially awkward, self-impressed and unpleasant while also being middle class straight white men. Atheist organisations and events overwhelmingly reflect this demographic and are thus faced with pressure for diversity or outreach by feminist atheists and critics. Due to the animosity of the above, the typical response of any group of internet nerds to criticism and likely elements of latent (or not so latent misogyny) the response is often #GG-esque. This then leads to generalisations as to atheism having a misogyny problem and other hostile characterisation of atheists by their feminist critics and the media and the conflict escalates
It is also... not heard to find faults with the arguments made by feminists, if you are going to take a strict materialist position accepting only hard science levels of falsifiability and confirmation.
Feminism argues for how the should about be. And, the world hasn't actually been many of those ways.
Feminism is... more or less an ideology in a lot of ways and scepticism can attack that.
And there are is the whole demographic thing, and contention that has happened because of specific events. And... There are a lot of atheists who are also assholes and bigots and all those other things that people frequently are, particularly ones where dedicate their lives to a single cause and seem to surround themselves with like minded people, and use conformity to... whatever notion of right they hold as a measures of personal value.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
It is also... not heard to find faults with the arguments made by feminists, if you are going to take a strict materialist position accepting only hard science levels of falsifiability and confirmation.
Feminism argues for how the should about be. And, the world hasn't actually been many of those ways.
Feminism is... more or less an ideology in a lot of ways and scepticism can attack that.
And there are is the whole demographic thing, and contention that has happened because of specific events. And... There are a lot of atheists who are also assholes and bigots and all those other things that people frequently are, particularly ones where dedicate their lives to a single cause and seem to surround themselves with like minded people, and use conformity to... whatever notion of right they hold as a measures of personal value.
Obviously I agree very strongly with the bolded. I just didn;t want to lob that grenade.
In fact, academic experts in the fields that do study religious extremism find that the supernatural beliefs themselves are rarely the probable cause for violent acts.
That sounds really interesting, does anyone know where I could find this kind of stuff? I don't even know what academic fields would be considered experts in this; it seems a bit beyond religious studies and anthropology.
I've always been under the impression things like poverty and disenfranchisement were the bigger factors, which make people vulnerable to destructive ideologies, but I've never seen any research in to religious extremism as quoted above.
I've only scratched the surface of this over the last few days (entirely because of our brief discussion of the conflict between Harris and Atran) but what I have seen of Atran's work doesn't support that conclusion. Rather, it maintains that it isn't the strongest predictor of terrorism. Rather Atran contends/shows it is the membership of organisations that foster a group identity. Indeed what I have read is in no way mutually exclusive to the concept of religiosity being a motivating factor or even THE motivating factor. Essentially, the distinction between "this is the primary predictor of extremism" is not the same as "this is the motivation for extremism"
Regarding the poverty and disenfranchisement - that much is clearly false in that the histories of perpetrators of many of the recent acts of terrorism in the name of Islam were from middle class, educated backgrounds. Atran does detail that the Palestinian organisations that undertake suicide bombing explicitly choose the best off people they can as a public relations tool and apparently, this is effective.
I don't disagree with this; I think we may be talking past each other a little bit (...and in fairness, I think the same has sort of been true of Atran / Harris as their feud has elongated).
Part of the problem may be that Atran has particular objections to positive claims made by Harris in End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. I think tomorrow I might try to focus that part of the discussion by doing a bit of a 'Let's Read End of Faith," in this thread.
With Love and Courage
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
In fact, academic experts in the fields that do study religious extremism find that the supernatural beliefs themselves are rarely the probable cause for violent acts.
That sounds really interesting, does anyone know where I could find this kind of stuff? I don't even know what academic fields would be considered experts in this; it seems a bit beyond religious studies and anthropology.
I've always been under the impression things like poverty and disenfranchisement were the bigger factors, which make people vulnerable to destructive ideologies, but I've never seen any research in to religious extremism as quoted above.
I've only scratched the surface of this over the last few days (entirely because of our brief discussion of the conflict between Harris and Atran) but what I have seen of Atran's work doesn't support that conclusion. Rather, it maintains that it isn't the strongest predictor of terrorism. Rather Atran contends/shows it is the membership of organisations that foster a group identity. Indeed what I have read is in no way mutually exclusive to the concept of religiosity being a motivating factor or even THE motivating factor. Essentially, the distinction between "this is the primary predictor of extremism" is not the same as "this is the motivation for extremism"
Regarding the poverty and disenfranchisement - that much is clearly false in that the histories of perpetrators of many of the recent acts of terrorism in the name of Islam were from middle class, educated backgrounds. Atran does detail that the Palestinian organisations that undertake suicide bombing explicitly choose the best off people they can as a public relations tool and apparently, this is effective.
I don't disagree with this; I think we may be talking past each other a little bit (...and in fairness, I think the same has sort of been true of Atran / Harris as their feud has elongated).
Part of the problem may be that Atran has particular objections to positive claims made by Harris in End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. I think tomorrow I might try to focus that part of the discussion by doing a bit of a 'Let's Read End of Faith," in this thread.
I very much agree with regard to talking past each other re: Harris and Atran
Have you read Harris' latest that he did in conjunction with Maajid Nawaz? Harris claims to have had his views significantly changed as a result of their interactions I wonder if they are onsequently less objectionable to Atran
In fact, academic experts in the fields that do study religious extremism find that the supernatural beliefs themselves are rarely the probable cause for violent acts.
That sounds really interesting, does anyone know where I could find this kind of stuff? I don't even know what academic fields would be considered experts in this; it seems a bit beyond religious studies and anthropology.
I've always been under the impression things like poverty and disenfranchisement were the bigger factors, which make people vulnerable to destructive ideologies, but I've never seen any research in to religious extremism as quoted above.
I've only scratched the surface of this over the last few days (entirely because of our brief discussion of the conflict between Harris and Atran) but what I have seen of Atran's work doesn't support that conclusion. Rather, it maintains that it isn't the strongest predictor of terrorism. Rather Atran contends/shows it is the membership of organisations that foster a group identity. Indeed what I have read is in no way mutually exclusive to the concept of religiosity being a motivating factor or even THE motivating factor. Essentially, the distinction between "this is the primary predictor of extremism" is not the same as "this is the motivation for extremism"
Regarding the poverty and disenfranchisement - that much is clearly false in that the histories of perpetrators of many of the recent acts of terrorism in the name of Islam were from middle class, educated backgrounds. Atran does detail that the Palestinian organisations that undertake suicide bombing explicitly choose the best off people they can as a public relations tool and apparently, this is effective.
I don't disagree with this; I think we may be talking past each other a little bit (...and in fairness, I think the same has sort of been true of Atran / Harris as their feud has elongated).
Part of the problem may be that Atran has particular objections to positive claims made by Harris in End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. I think tomorrow I might try to focus that part of the discussion by doing a bit of a 'Let's Read End of Faith," in this thread.
I very much agree with regard to talking past each other re: Harris and Atran
Have you read Harris' latest that he did in conjunction with Maajid Nawaz? Harris claims to have had his views significantly changed as a result of their interactions I wonder if they are onsequently less objectionable to Atran
I haven't; I have to admit that I kind-of tuned-out Harris after reading Waking Up, which is more or less a derpy New Age self help book. I can't bash it enough, honestly.
With Love and Courage
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
More on atheism and feminism.
One of the studies that the Reasonable Doubt podcast discussed in their God Thinks Like You segment found the following:
Atheism tends to be strongly correlated with the autistic spectrum - and it was/has been speculated that amongst the effects of autism is a reduced internal theory of mind, which is to say, that those affected do not perceive or consider the mind of other people as strongly as the general population and that this translates to not perceiving minds and thus deities within non-human things.
Men are also much more likely to be on the spectrum.
The spectrum is also thought to extend well into what we consider 'normal'.
And thus, one aspect of the overwhelming maleness of atheism is explained.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
In fact, academic experts in the fields that do study religious extremism find that the supernatural beliefs themselves are rarely the probable cause for violent acts.
That sounds really interesting, does anyone know where I could find this kind of stuff? I don't even know what academic fields would be considered experts in this; it seems a bit beyond religious studies and anthropology.
I've always been under the impression things like poverty and disenfranchisement were the bigger factors, which make people vulnerable to destructive ideologies, but I've never seen any research in to religious extremism as quoted above.
I've only scratched the surface of this over the last few days (entirely because of our brief discussion of the conflict between Harris and Atran) but what I have seen of Atran's work doesn't support that conclusion. Rather, it maintains that it isn't the strongest predictor of terrorism. Rather Atran contends/shows it is the membership of organisations that foster a group identity. Indeed what I have read is in no way mutually exclusive to the concept of religiosity being a motivating factor or even THE motivating factor. Essentially, the distinction between "this is the primary predictor of extremism" is not the same as "this is the motivation for extremism"
Regarding the poverty and disenfranchisement - that much is clearly false in that the histories of perpetrators of many of the recent acts of terrorism in the name of Islam were from middle class, educated backgrounds. Atran does detail that the Palestinian organisations that undertake suicide bombing explicitly choose the best off people they can as a public relations tool and apparently, this is effective.
I don't disagree with this; I think we may be talking past each other a little bit (...and in fairness, I think the same has sort of been true of Atran / Harris as their feud has elongated).
Part of the problem may be that Atran has particular objections to positive claims made by Harris in End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. I think tomorrow I might try to focus that part of the discussion by doing a bit of a 'Let's Read End of Faith," in this thread.
I very much agree with regard to talking past each other re: Harris and Atran
Have you read Harris' latest that he did in conjunction with Maajid Nawaz? Harris claims to have had his views significantly changed as a result of their interactions I wonder if they are onsequently less objectionable to Atran
I haven't; I have to admit that I kind-of tuned-out Harris after reading Waking Up, which is more or less a derpy New Age self help book. I can't bash it enough, honestly.
I haven't read it but what I know of it it does sound execrable. I guess they can't all be hits.
Atheism and feminism are neither in conflict nor agreement. They really don't cross paths in and of themselves, whatever the social environment associated with either may be.
"There is/n't a deity" doesn't say anything about gender roles one way or another.
A theist could believe that their deity has made women the superior gender, or that it considers gender identification a sin.
An atheist could believe that any of those are part of the fabric of the universe without any deity getting involved.
Similarly, becoming a communist doesn't give you a Russian accent.
Don't you think that most discussions about this topic will talk, and rightly so, not only about the abstract notions but also about the reality of these... belief sets? ideologies? movements? attitudes?, and that this includes the followers? If it was irrelevant how religious people and atheists act in the world, this would be a very short discussion. Obviously one atheist dick or religious goose doesn't yet say anything about the group as a whole, but if either group shows tendencies towards X, even if X isn't inherent in the group's beliefs, it's still worth looking at that correlation and discussing whether it means something.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Don't you think that most discussions about this topic will talk, and rightly so, not only about the abstract notions but also about the reality of these... belief sets? ideologies? movements? attitudes?, and that this includes the followers? If it was irrelevant how religious people and atheists act in the world, this would be a very short discussion. Obviously one atheist dick or religious goose doesn't yet say anything about the group as a whole, but if either group shows tendencies towards X, even if X isn't inherent in the group's beliefs, it's still worth looking at that correlation and discussing whether it means something.
Most people are more or less pretty okay so long as you don't give them power. A pretty large number of people are pretty bad with power. Religion is bigger because it has a much better argument for giving people power - a deity said so. All atheism has to offer is a sense of superiority that comes from thinking you know better than your neighbor in a way that is better-supported by academia and history.
Atheism is also not built into any kind of community structure. There's no real way to use atheism to force people to do useful things, and atheism lacks a threat to apply that isn't coming eventually anyway, so the closest thing to good things happening because of atheism is when it happens to show up theists. Otherwise it's just good people doing good to do good and not because it thinks it gets them brownie points with a deity, which gets attributed to them being good people and not to them being atheists.
Otherwise it's just good people doing good to do good and not because it thinks it gets them brownie points with a deity...
While I'm sure this is true for some or even many people who call themselves religious, I still take issue with it as a generalisation. If you do something that will please your girlfriend/boyfriend/parent/sibling/child, does that automatically mean you're only doing it for the brownie points? I'd say that in the absence of actual evidence either way, it's just as likely that people who do good do so because they consider it to be the right thing to do, and they ascribe this to a belief system only after the fact, rather than going into every situation thinking "What will get me closer to that 'Doin' good, buddy' achievement with God", "What will benefit society most?" or "WWKD (What Would Kant Do)".
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Otherwise it's just good people doing good to do good and not because it thinks it gets them brownie points with a deity...
While I'm sure this is true for some or even many people who call themselves religious, I still take issue with it as a generalisation. If you do something that will please your girlfriend/boyfriend/parent/sibling/child, does that automatically mean you're only doing it for the brownie points? I'd say that in the absence of actual evidence either way, it's just as likely that people who do good do so because they consider it to be the right thing to do, and they ascribe this to a belief system only after the fact, rather than going into every situation thinking "What will get me closer to that 'Doin' good, buddy' achievement with God", "What will benefit society most?" or "WWKD (What Would Kant Do)".
The point is that someone who does not believe in the supernatural cannot be threatened or promised by the supernatural.
An atheist is just as subject to "Oh dang I want that guy to like me" as a theist, but not so much "Oh dang I want that creature that can make me suffer for all eternity to like me."
Atheism has no compelling elements, theism can have some.
Edit: I'm also trying to stay away from the extremes of possible actions. Please let's not go there.
Atheism and feminism are neither in conflict nor agreement. They really don't cross paths in and of themselves, whatever the social environment associated with either may be.
"There is/n't a deity" doesn't say anything about gender roles one way or another.
A theist could believe that their deity has made women the superior gender, or that it considers gender identification a sin.
An atheist could believe that any of those are part of the fabric of the universe without any deity getting involved.
Similarly, becoming a communist doesn't give you a Russian accent.
Yeah, why would atheism and feminism cross paths? What has religion ever done to women?
Posts
I watch a couple atheist channels and some of the assumptions that youtube makes about what else I might be interested in based on that are pretty bad. The current annoyance is a video called "your brain on feminism" that it keeps bringing up. I do my watching on my TV and I don't have a "I'm not interested in this" option. Occasionally, I have to hop on a computer and straighten it out.
You lose that bet.
My family, community, workplace and friends are pretty left leaning and non-religious, and I'd be considered more out of place if I identified as Christian than if I identified as atheist.
I don't beat around the bush about this: Tf00t's interest there is strictly financial. He was bitching for the longest time about how his channel wasn't highly trafficked and that he didn't know if he could make a living off of YouTube's partnership program as a result.
Then an opportunity came along for high exposure and he abandoned any principles he might've had to make a quick buck off the back of angry, sexist nerds.
I offer a qualified agreement:
I personally have no bones about identifying as an atheist, however strong people may feel that term implies a level of certainty, and this is why:
(Spoilered because, while I do not intend for the following to be offensive, by it's nature it is going to likely offend a reader if they are a theist. Don't read below if you feel a strong criticism of your beliefs is going to piss you off):
I hear, "I am a church going Catholic," and my brain directly translates that into, "I am being scammed out of my money by the Catholic church every week,"
In that sense, I feel that organized religion is inherently harmful - although I don't like to say so, because I don't mean that in the same way Harris/Dawkins/Dennet/Hitchens etc mean.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
My litmus test is: does a specific religious community actively discourage critical thought in favor of pushing a very specific, rigid set of beliefs? Then that's bad. If you're encouraged to invest time and effort in building your own personalized interpretation of the faith? Then that's probably healthy.
Sorry, I should have been clear: my criticism wasn't aimed at pastors (who I consider to mostly be equivalent to the average attendee), but rather the progenitors of a given religious system.
If you inventory the assumptions that go into this, it quickly becomes clear why agnostics exist.
I don't know if that's more disappointing or less than if he was actually just an MRA anti-Islamic type honestly.
Personally Skeptic/Atheist youtubers I've been watching/keeping up with are AronRa, Potholer54, Armoured Skeptic, Logicked, and TheBibleReloaded. I don't agree with these guys all the time (The BibleReloaded especially can go to some unnecessarily vulgar places) but they're usually either entertaining, educational, or both (and the BibleReloaded's Atheists Read the Bible series is encouraging me to familiarize myself with the Bible)
Not wanting to belittle the life of those guys in Sri Lanka who lost their lives for this sort of thing, it seems something that'd be very local and community dependant. Guess I just need to count my blessings for the CoE.
Most of the atheist channels on YouTube got their start based on a few things:
- The Kitzmiller vs Dover Trial
- The popularity of VenomFangX
- The rise of Ken Ham
- The rise of Kirk Cameron / Ray Comfort
- The election of a heavily creationist-slanted Texas Board of Education
They were responding to creationist bullshit that was actually threatening the U.S. education system at the time.
I don't pretend to have anything more than the ability to gesture toward the issues within the philosophy of mathematics, but it strikes me as a plausible position to take (seemingly contra empiricist conceptions of mathematics, compatible with the rationalist and platonic schools. Of course, without further context I couldn't really say. I am curious as to what the connection to the validity of the argument is - so please elaborate.
As for the paper, I don't think it is particularly unclear in its arguments but I don't know what you mean by "logically valid form" (presumably the various reviewers and editors of Philosophy 77, 2002 did not perceive this flaw either).
However, there are two main objections which apply depending on the form of the argument:
Yeah a lot of it started out as "Anti-creationism" stuff, taking a stand against a seemingly influential and growing segment of fundamentalist thinking that seemed to be gaining traction in the US (and elsewhere to a lesser extent) and a lot of them never lost steam, though many of them do more than just refute creationist stuff.
The Sorites paradox doesn't have any obvious analogy to the question of atheism vs agnosticism. Nor do I think it is necessary as we can talk about the distinction, or lack thereof .
I don't think endlessly introducing new terms for the social reasons of connotation as opposed to their semantic and argumentative content is particularly helpful. Playing "epistemology lawyer" is exactly appropriate to my mind because that is the basis of apparent distinction between so-called weak and strong atheism and agnosticism. Furthermore, to have a discussion we must agree on the meaning of the terms we use - and there are solid arguments about the appropriateness of terminology based on their utility.
Happily, there is also a MrMister post about this:
Then, please do inventory these assumptions.
Thunderf00t's science content is pretty good and he keeps it pretty isolated from his views on feminism
an atheist channel I've been bumping into lately that has no part of bashing feminism in any way which is pretty good is thebiblereloaded
like a lot of their stuff is rough but I get the impression that their channel is going to get pretty big as they get better at what they do
that is until they're killed by terrorists after they put out their Quranreloaded series
I've only scratched the surface of this over the last few days (entirely because of our brief discussion of the conflict between Harris and Atran) but what I have seen of Atran's work doesn't support that conclusion. Rather, it maintains that it isn't the strongest predictor of terrorism. Rather Atran contends/shows it is the membership of organisations that foster a group identity. Indeed what I have read is in no way mutually exclusive to the concept of religiosity being a motivating factor or even THE motivating factor. Essentially, the distinction between "this is the primary predictor of extremism" is not the same as "this is the motivation for extremism"
Regarding the poverty and disenfranchisement - that much is clearly false in that the histories of perpetrators of many of the recent acts of terrorism in the name of Islam were from middle class, educated backgrounds. Atran does detail that the Palestinian organisations that undertake suicide bombing explicitly choose the best off people they can as a public relations tool and apparently, this is effective.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/reasonabledoubts/
They were fun, well educated, calm and informative. With the exception of Dave Fletcher who got on my nerves in a smug SJW sort of way.
I will miss the Doctor Professor Luke Galen most of all.
I know the usual boogeymen are homosexuals and minorities on rather ridiculous "evolutionary Darwinism" platforms, but how would that apply to women?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
But atheistic movements may be.
There are two factors and I am attempting present these without judgement or bias as much as possible:
Feminism argues for how the should about be. And, the world hasn't actually been many of those ways.
Feminism is... more or less an ideology in a lot of ways and scepticism can attack that.
And there are is the whole demographic thing, and contention that has happened because of specific events. And... There are a lot of atheists who are also assholes and bigots and all those other things that people frequently are, particularly ones where dedicate their lives to a single cause and seem to surround themselves with like minded people, and use conformity to... whatever notion of right they hold as a measures of personal value.
Obviously I agree very strongly with the bolded. I just didn;t want to lob that grenade.
I don't disagree with this; I think we may be talking past each other a little bit (...and in fairness, I think the same has sort of been true of Atran / Harris as their feud has elongated).
Part of the problem may be that Atran has particular objections to positive claims made by Harris in End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. I think tomorrow I might try to focus that part of the discussion by doing a bit of a 'Let's Read End of Faith," in this thread.
I very much agree with regard to talking past each other re: Harris and Atran
Have you read Harris' latest that he did in conjunction with Maajid Nawaz? Harris claims to have had his views significantly changed as a result of their interactions I wonder if they are onsequently less objectionable to Atran
I haven't; I have to admit that I kind-of tuned-out Harris after reading Waking Up, which is more or less a derpy New Age self help book. I can't bash it enough, honestly.
One of the studies that the Reasonable Doubt podcast discussed in their God Thinks Like You segment found the following:
Atheism tends to be strongly correlated with the autistic spectrum - and it was/has been speculated that amongst the effects of autism is a reduced internal theory of mind, which is to say, that those affected do not perceive or consider the mind of other people as strongly as the general population and that this translates to not perceiving minds and thus deities within non-human things.
Men are also much more likely to be on the spectrum.
The spectrum is also thought to extend well into what we consider 'normal'.
And thus, one aspect of the overwhelming maleness of atheism is explained.
I haven't read it but what I know of it it does sound execrable. I guess they can't all be hits.
"There is/n't a deity" doesn't say anything about gender roles one way or another.
A theist could believe that their deity has made women the superior gender, or that it considers gender identification a sin.
An atheist could believe that any of those are part of the fabric of the universe without any deity getting involved.
Similarly, becoming a communist doesn't give you a Russian accent.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Most people are more or less pretty okay so long as you don't give them power. A pretty large number of people are pretty bad with power. Religion is bigger because it has a much better argument for giving people power - a deity said so. All atheism has to offer is a sense of superiority that comes from thinking you know better than your neighbor in a way that is better-supported by academia and history.
Atheism is also not built into any kind of community structure. There's no real way to use atheism to force people to do useful things, and atheism lacks a threat to apply that isn't coming eventually anyway, so the closest thing to good things happening because of atheism is when it happens to show up theists. Otherwise it's just good people doing good to do good and not because it thinks it gets them brownie points with a deity, which gets attributed to them being good people and not to them being atheists.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
The point is that someone who does not believe in the supernatural cannot be threatened or promised by the supernatural.
An atheist is just as subject to "Oh dang I want that guy to like me" as a theist, but not so much "Oh dang I want that creature that can make me suffer for all eternity to like me."
Atheism has no compelling elements, theism can have some.
Edit: I'm also trying to stay away from the extremes of possible actions. Please let's not go there.
Yeah, why would atheism and feminism cross paths? What has religion ever done to women?
active atheism
like why consciously be an atheist and join atheist movements and listen to atheist podcasts
I don't believe in God but I don't really get that part of it
this is a sincere question, I have some preconceptions about this but I kind of want to set them aside and think it through again from the beginning
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades