Who could have anticipated such a thing? Oh, right, there's hate-filled screed on his facebook page along with a photo of his gun.
Is North Carolina turning into some kind of medieval theme park?
Chapel Hill was always the nice part of the state when I was there.
Can I ban all instances of the joke schema substituting "atheist" for "muslim" in calls for moderates to reject and denounce, problem with atheist culture, etc.?
The first link doesn't work for me either, but I thought that was because I'm not logged into Facebook.
I don't know what the FB link tells you, but thanks to the local robber baron heir-subsidized news, I know his head looks kind of like a penis.
There's a January 20 post on his page with a picture of a holstered revolver on a scale with the caption "Yes, that is 1 pound 5.1 ounces for my loaded 38 revolver, its holster, and five extra rounds in a speedloader."
Was he into ultralight hiking also? That's the kind of thing they do on the internet, except with hiking gear instead of guns.
I've been trying (and failing) to get a date with a very nice Muslim woman. One of the striking things about talking to her is the level of paranoia she has over this sort of thing and over government bullshit. It's kind of justified, as both her daughters (13 & 16) are on the no-fly list despite the fact that they were born in the US and have never lived outside it, and she's clearly identifiable by her features as being South Asian.
Just keep sending her messages about how you have no interest in killing her.
9: That's the one. Chilling, alongside the soccer-playing lion video and the photo of him and his wife at Disney World. Something something banality of evil something.
To the extent that it's justified, it's not exactly paranoia, is it?
14: As my father used to say, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
From the reporting I've read there appears to be a home invasion angle as well since that is getting absolutely no play at all despite "home invasion" being right up there with "terrorism" as a media bugaboo.
My FB feed is, of course, filled with links to stories about this, including this commentary from a Muslim friend-of-a-friend in New Orleans:
Three young Muslims were killed execution style by a white man in North Carolina. 87% of mass shootings in America are committed by caucasians. When will caucasians admit there's something wrong with their culture, when?!!! When will we have caucasian reform?
What sucks is that both atheists and Muslims are unpopular religious minorities in the United States. Theological differences notwithstanding, the two groups should be allies.
The Big Men of the new atheism are jerks to a man. Misogynists, islamophobes, and general shitheads. I hate agreeing with them on so many issues when they are so completely horrible on others that I care a lot about.
Theological differences notwithstanding, the two groups should be allies.
Most concise summary of world history I've ever read.
In related news, there's a TPM piece up just now about a well-known conservative commentator's take on the American ISIL hostage killed the other day. Won't link, too nauseating.
22: Oh, wow. What the fuck is wrong with people?
Oh, wow. What the fuck is wrong with people?
Mere minutes after I write 21, along comes an even more concise summary of world history.
23: Debbie Schlussel is a low-rent version of Pamela Geller. Being pointedly offensive while shaking the Israel cheerleader pompoms is her entire schtick.
a low-rent version of Pamela Geller
Things that shouldn't be possible and yet exist.
25: As though Geller herself is the classy version. It's hard to imagine a more damning way to describe someone.
That's because of zone regulations the prevent the construction of high rise-Pamela Gellers, forcing up rents.
30: no way. My mom married two of them (not simultaneously).
Your mom has a type, and that type is the worst.
This is one of the rare instances where I can't deduce the Fox News take from first principles. The two possibilities I can think of are a) run the names of the victims through the mud, or b) say that the killer thought murder was okay because a godless Democrat is in office. Could they do both at once?
27: Haven't read the linked article, but I would imagine that "less extreme version" or "more civil version" is slightly more accurate than "low-rent version."
As my father used to say, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
What is a three syllable word that means you think people are out to get you?
Perceptive.
33: Either way, but once again, as in every other incident in human history, the Christians are blameless.
Shooter seems to have been for gay marriage, so maybe he shot them because they hate our freedoms.
33: So far their take is to highlight police reports that the shooting resulted from a dispute over a parking space and had nothing to do with bias.
I agree that my mom has a type. But really, they are just like regular people if you can keep from shooting them on sight.
I've lived in Pittsburgh long enough that it seems believable. But Chapel Hill seemed roomier.
33: One thing Fox News is sure to tell us: this is definitely not a tragedy that could have been prevented through liberty-destroying liberal Obama socialist gun-control measures.
"Gay marriage activist kills married couple, sister"
just like regular people if you can keep from shooting them on sight.
That seems like asking a lot.
40: Interesting. Next time I'll try to restrain myself.
33: Surely they can do both at once. That's why they get the big bucks. They are skilled shills.
20: As an admitted new atheist*, that's mostly true. Certainly more true than it should be and I want it to be. I condemn this slaughter, and the people whose rhetoric is in service of this hatred.
* By which I mean I'm an atheist and PZ Myers and Rebecca Watson and people like that are closest to my perspective. I think the People's Judean Front terminology for that is "Atheism+", where the plus stands for morality, feminism, and other additives to make your engine run smoother. While PZ can be contemptuous and an ass, I don't think he's hateful.
I'm an atheist, but I really only celebrate it on Christmas and Easter.
Vaguely on-topic: I was attending a lecture the other day, and the professor made the assertion that atheists were prevented from making contracts during early years of the US, specifically because they couldn't swear an oath to God, and thus their word was worthless.
That would also be a problem for a couple different Christian sects, who also can't swear oaths to God. Actually it would probably be a bigger problem for them because there's nothing stopping an atheist from swearing an oath to God - literally nothing, in fact, because they don't think there's anything (supernatural anyway) to hold them to that oath.
While PZ can be contemptuous and an ass, I don't think he's hateful.
Well, at least he's usually on the side of the (non-existent) angels when fucking Dawkins goes off on one.
literally nothing
Falsely swearing a public oath is a little anti-social, I think.
In other (This Land is Our Land) news, Sami Al-Arian is released and deported after 11 years of confinement without ever having been convicted...
...and in Tyler Texas, a black trans woman was shot and killed Monday.
39: Father of one of those killed provides context that would dispute that:
But the women's father, Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, who has a psychiatry practice in Clayton, said regardless of the precise trigger Tuesday night, Hicks' underlying animosity toward Barakat and Abu-Salha was based on their religion and culture. Abu-Salha said police told him Hicks shot the three inside their apartment.
"It was execution style, a bullet in every head," Abu-Salha said Wednesday morning. "This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt. And they were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far."
Abu-Salha said his daughter who lived next door to Hicks wore a Muslim head scarf and told her family a week ago that she had "a hateful neighbor.""Honest to God, she said, 'He hates us for what we are and how we look,'" he said.
52.last: And another in New Orleans on Tuesday.
More to the OP and thread, I have said before that I dislike the concept and affiliation "atheist" both on logical and social grounds, believing the identity to be intrinsically arrogant and aggressive. Besides indequate.
I vastly prefer nihilist, existentialist, nominalist, Buddhist, or other.
30 Muslim atheists are the worst.
31
30: no way. My mom married two of them (not simultaneously).
Muslim Mormon atheists are the worst.
misplaced close tags: even worse than Muslim Mormon atheists.
55: I just go with "I'm not religious." But then I have a hang-up about group labels.
55: Or skeptic, materialist, Epicurean, Stoic, Fabian, communist...there are so many other ascriptions of unbelief, disbelief, and alternative ways of believing that I have to agree with Kaufmann that self-identification as "atheist" is deliberately provocative and almost only that.
"Atheist" is both meaningless and rebellious.
"Existentialist" is too French. Buddhist is actually another religion. Stoicism is too much of a pain. You should go with "nihilist." That's what the marketing people would say if Atheist hired marketing people and the marketing people weren't the assholes who came up with "Bright."
You should go with "nihilist."
Dude, that's not even an ethos.
It really doesn't come up much, but I tend to use "atheist" mostly because it's an out group (IRL; online, not so much) and I feel that it's good to be loudmildly vocal and proud.
I'm frightened to Google "National Existentialis[t/m]" but it seems like the sort of name that miserable twerpy jackasses who play at petty political pedantry would adopt between posts about the Second Amendment and immigrants.
The term may have been ruined by the Sam Harris's of the world, but for a long time it was important to me to say I was an atheist. There's a certain amount of pressure to be mealy-mouthed about it, and I wanted to push back against that pressure. I knew a lot of people who weren't willing to say they affirmatively did not think God exists, because people would think they might be amoral monsters. That was back before the Republican party ruined Christianity, of course.
I'm perfectly happy with "atheist." Agnostic sounds too mushy. Sure, in a way it was more fun to identify as an atheist before there was a movement with some prominent spokes-peens, but whatever. I still think the visibility is a good thing, and as I'm typing that I realize that behind it somewhere lurks the idea that there's something virtuous about being an atheist, which is dumb, or that the world would be a better place with more atheists in it which...ok, fine, I tentatively believe.
ok, fine, I tentatively believe.
The inverse of Pascal's wager.
prominent spokes-peens
My hero.
I'm willing to straight up assert that there's something virtuous about being an atheist, though that doesn't mean much more than the fact that not being one seems to invariably involve believing something really metaphysically significant for no apparent reason or, much more often in my experience, pretending to. Since that seems like a bad thing to do it follows pretty much immediately, though, just like with any other virtue, attributing it to someone means relatively little because "all things being equal" requires equalizing basically every other possible moral evaluation of a person which is kind of pointless.
Also the strong tendency for people to take faith to be a really central virtue is part of what results in general distrust of atheists so pointing out that on its own it really has no moral value (and is actually kind of not a great thing at all) is pretty important. I suspect but have literally no evidence whatsoever that a large chunk of people who call themselves agnostics are really just atheists who still believe that faith is a virtue, and so end up stuck in an awkward position. I also suspect that this group is shrinking as a result of the 'new atheists' being really public about atheism so, all problems with them aside, it's probably a good thing that they're out there doing it.*
*Except for Sam Harris. Fuck that guy.
Nah. No point to atheism, in itself. Nietzsche got that right.
In practice, the question "Do You Believe in God?" really translates to "What is your Sidgwickian Method of Ethics?" since almost any answer starts to make a more pluralistic Habermasian public discussian possible? "Catholic? then we can talk about inequality and pass on abortion for now. Okay?"
And in most cases, as I said almost any answer will do. "Egalitarian Neo-Confucianist" or "Benthamite on even days, Millian on odd," any nonsense will in most cases get you out of the room with a smile.
But answering "What is your Method of Ethics? with "Atheism," since atheism cannot in itself be a foundation for any ethical judgements is just answering
"How do you make ethical judgements?" with
"Fuck you."
Prominent atheists rally to explain why the dead Muslims had it coming, report no news outlets anywhere in the world.
Yeah but bob that's the reason no one ever answers "what is your method of ethics" with "atheism", which kind of undercuts the first couple bits of that post.
29.2: I agree with you about agnostics, but I think the "new atheists" are an effect, and not a cause. The last 15 years have been one long education on the perils of religious extremism, both Christian and non-Christian, so the idea that faith is itself a virtue isn't really tenable in the way it may have seemed back in 2000.
No one (here) is answering "What is your method of ethics?" with "atheism". In fact, I mention above that I find atheism in-and-of-itself is insufficient, and that's common among people who identify as atheist. It's answering a different question, concerning epistemology.
I don't know enough about the theory of ethics to know how "do you believe in god?" equates to "what is your Sidgwickian Method of Ethics?", but I don't see how that could be anything but a false equivalence if you're deriving "atheism"="fuck you" from it. "Do you believe in god?" contains many questions, and "atheism" answers some of them, but if in the context you mean something else and atheism is not answering the specific question you care about, ask that. Or, if it's really what you want, take the response as a "fuck you" and consider the conversation shut down. Whatever.
And yes, fuck Dawkins. He's an embarrassment. I have carefully shielded myself from knowing what Harris thinks, but he can probably fuck off, as well.
The last 15 years have been one long education on the perils of religious extremism, both Christian and non-Christian
This sounds right, except for the "Christian" part, for which I think the last 15 years are the least appropriate 15 years to cite, perhaps ever.
Dawkins seems to have gotten kind of awful in the last five years or so (and was probably awful in some ways before, though less significantly). But I would chalk that up at least partially* to having spent a really long time being savagely and dishonestly attacked for saying things he either didn't say or said in a very different context. So I kind of suspect that part of the problem is that his ability to respond reasonably to someone saying "this is a really unreasonable thing to say" or "this is really not what you should be saying" or whatever has basically disappeared and he immediately doubles down hard whenever anyone does it.
*The misogyny I don't know about, that could easily have been there the entire time.
Also I can't help but feel like 73 meant a different post number...
74.2 - Sidgwick argued* that all ethical theories could be divided into (1)utilitarianism**, (2)egoism***, and (3)intuitionism. What this could possibly have to do with talking about atheism it totally unclear and almost certainly gibberish.
*Badly, with peculiar and weird long term consequences for the discipline, at least when it came to the interpretation of any ethical writings prior to like 1600.
**The obvious one, but we should maximize the good overall.
***Still consequentialist but not general.
****Deontological, or having to do with abstract duties which are known through reason. (The term is a little awkward given how we use the word now, but think of Kant here.)
76: As opposed to when, the Forty Years War? In living memory, Christianity was largely non-extremist, and the active tendencies were the liberalizing ones. The big Christian idea in the 70s, the "Jesus was the first hippie" era. If you were raised a mainline Protestant, Christianity seemed earnest and innocuous, a vaguely beneficent desire to make the world a better place. The Congregationalists made earnest sex education videos! Then most of those people drifted away, and the entire public image was hijacked by the right.
78: I admit nothing.
79: Oh, thanks! I'll have to keep that in mind next time I talk about religion.
I saw Dawkins speak 10 years or so ago, he gives an entertaining talk and I don't recall it being too shouty or hate-y. I mean, yes he had his shtick about children are indoctrinated but he's always talked about that.
In living memory, Christianity was largely non-extremist, and the active tendencies were the liberalizing ones. The big Christian idea in the 70s, the "Jesus was the first hippie" era. If you were raised a mainline Protestant, Christianity seemed earnest and innocuous, a vaguely beneficent desire to make the world a better place. The Congregationalists made earnest sex education videos! Then most of those people drifted away, and the entire public image was hijacked by the right.
I think this applies to the US but not to Europe. If anything, Christianity over there is even more earnest and innocuous. And yet the atheist activists over there seem much more angry.
This is relevant to the mixed politics part of the thread- the closing speaker at our conference was like pure distilled essence of conventional DC political thought. It was about disease and epidemics and policy responses to those, but when someone asked a question about the US response she literally recited all of the following tropes: There used to be a political middle but now everyone is equally polarized and that's why nothing gets done. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich disagreed but at least they'd get a drink together, now leaders are never even in the same room. The far left and far right have converged to cause policy problems by being libertarian albeit from different angles.
I especially liked the Clinton-Newt point. It used to be Tip and Ronnie but I guess people have forgotten the whole impeachment thing. Maybe 20 years from now people will lament how Chelsea and Prescott can't get put aside their differences like Obama and Boehner did back in the day.
79: Only the two concluding chapters of the book.
Sidgwick">http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/sidgwick/me/me.b04.c06.s05.html">Sidgwick
It is, however, desirable, before we conclude, to examine carefully the validity of this assumption, in so far as it is supported on ethical grounds alone. For by the result of such an examination will be determined, as we now see, the very important question whether ethical science can be constructed on an independent basis; or whether it is forced to borrow a fundamental and indispensable premiss from Theology or some similar source....essentially Kant's necessary postulates without saying so.
It is not just incredible arrogant and condescending to deny Authority as a Method of Ethics, it is also empirically false.
74:Atheists want to be righteous rebels, on the side of the angels.
And yeah, in any conversation that has meaning, "Do you believe in God?" translates to "How do you justify Ethical Judgements"
Inability to swear an oath was used as a bar to keep atheists from taking a seat in the Commons until the late 19th century - Bradlaugh. Also Jews, but by the time the first Zoroastrian was elected to the Commons they let him swear on the Avesta.
And yes, I don't think atheists could testify in court on oath until quite late, which put them at a disadvantage. (Mind you until very late the accused in criminal cases couldn't testify on oath either because that would put their immortal soul in peril if they perjured themselves to save their skin.)
Ok, so precisely none of that means anything related to what you're saying. He may have argued that god is important for one of the views but not all of them, but that's neither here nor there. (Also I think it's pretty damn unlikely, especially as the best you've got there is talking about the fact that eternal reward/punishment for acting well would collapse utilitarianism and egoism into the same view. Clearly it would, but he notes that:
I find that I undoubtedly seem to perceive, as clearly and certainly as I see any axiom in Arithmetic or Geometry, that it is `right' and `reasonable' for me to treat others as I should think that I myself ought to be treated under similar conditions, and to do what I believe to be ultimately conducive to universal Good or Happiness. But I cannot find inseparably connected with this conviction, and similarly attainable by mere reflective intuition, any cognition that there actually is a Supreme Being who will adequately reward me for obeying these rules of duty, or punish me for violating them.
Also his division of views is, as I've pointed out, a terrible one if you're considering anything outside the very narrow debate he's engaged in. (Go on, try to account for the way people do virtue ethics now and/or in the classical or hellenic period. This is rhetorical because in fact you cannot I've seen it tried and the result is invariably embarrassing.)
But most importantly no you are still wrong when people say they are atheists they are not in fact talking about normative ethics they are saying they do not think God exists. Stop playing silly games here. They could just as easily still talk about authority as the source of morality (Sidgwick, note, does not include that as one of the respectable methods of ethics), but generally do not because they are not morons.
Oh and, really obviously, many christians or other theists do not in fact start talking about God the second you ask them how they justify ethical judgments because God does a shitty job of that one. This point (about God) was like "Number 1 Success of Philosophy!". I mean, come on we've got like two here and it's not too much to ask of someone who takes themselves to be arguing about this to know that. Certainly a lot of other people do.
...talking about normative ethics they are saying
they do not think God exists.
So what is this then empirical science? The God-o-meter registers zero? We looked way way far with the Hubble and didn't find nobodaddy?
We should use pragmatics or semantics or semiotics to parse what people are saying when they claim atheism, because it is not a scientific, not a factual, statement.
Metaphysics? The Prime Being outside all Being and The First Cause Before all other causes? What the fuck does that even mean, so I can know what to not believe in.
The word "God" has a social and moral meaning, or no meaning at all. If it has a social or moral meaning, then atheism is a unprincipled statement of vague opposition or a gesture against foundationalism.
This point (about God) was like "Number 1 Success of Philosophy!". I mean, come on we've got like two here and it's not too much to ask of someone who takes themselves to be arguing about this to know that. Certainly a lot of other people do.
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence, especially "we've got like two here". Do you mean that there are two theists among the unfoggedtariat?
No they're talking about goddamn normative ethics for crying out loud. And the distinction between that and theology is old as all get out.
There's something a lot easier than semiotics to parse what people are saying when they claim atheism, and that is to ask them what they are saying which, in fact, is usually "I do not think that God exists". Since there are any number of different normative accounts consistent with there being no god (for example: utilitarianism; Kantian deontology; Aristotelian virtue ethics; basically anything that doesn't explicitly include God in a starring role; egoism; and so on) then taking a stand on that doesn't commit you to a damn thing.
And no, foundationalism is yet another, distinct thing. Seriously what do you even take yourself to be arguing here?
90 - No we've got like two successes. The other canonical one is Russell's argument against Frege (the set-of-all-sets-that-do-not-contain-themselves one). This is an old joke about philosophy - that it has established two things (everything else being disputed). One is in Euthyphro and the other is that bit by Russell.
MHPH, I applaud your patience and knowledge.
Seriously what do you even take yourself to be arguing here?
"I do not think that God exists".
(God is that Toyota to your left. Do you not believe in that Toyota? That Toyota is not God. Wait...)
That this is a fucking null statement, complete nonsense, even and especially admittedly to the ones making it.
It relies on the circular logic you are using yourself when you claim the statement is self-explanatory.
It. is. only. performative. " Performative utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth-evaluable"
I would love to take credit for that but in fairness it's almost entirely the rum, I mean, for the diligence at least.
Also, so, bob, your argument here is that atheists certainly don't mean it and are just being showy about "I don't need your rules, maaannn"? That it's basically just a form of teenage rebelliousness, where people are saying "YOU'RE NOT MY SUPERVISOR!"?
I mean, I've seen that position before in the more conservative evangelical traditions so I guess it's a possibility. But outside of that people don't tend to take that sort of thing seriously.
96:Pretty much. I gave a long list above of better things to be. Atheism isn't even nihilism. Just a pout.
atheists certainly don't mean it
Mean fucking what? I never get a satisfactory answer to that and you certainly have avoided it.
And pointedly it can't even reasonably be interrogated or explored.
Atheism is the voiding of a concept to make it accessible to unbelief.
Hi, I'm an atheist and I believe that humans don't have any special knowledge or communication with any sort of creator deity--or set of deities, or endowed beings, supernatural forces, or whatever--of the sort described throughout human history (check Wikipedia or your local library for the details, they're extensive and probably won't fit in the margins of this comment). By saying I believe a negative, I mean I place a low enough probability on events (in the probabilistic sense of the word) of that sort occurring that I don't see any way in distinguishing it from non-existence, (In practice I think this is one of those P(X)=0 but X!=\emptyset cases) and I choose to behave as if it were in fact non-existent.
I think it's important to call this out with a word because my disbelief informs my thoughts. I can then separately choose an ethics based on existence in this world as we observe it. The common word in my culture for this is "atheist" and so I choose to use it. I could also use "skeptic" and sometimes do but I've been using the world "atheist" for a while and I'm comfortable with it. For a long while I identified as an "agnostic"--and really that's more proper in a strict sense, but it doesn't well describe the whole behave-as-if-it-weren't-so bit of it.
So yes, there's a degree of identity in it, but it isn't the entirety of it. Which I guess makes it a fucking null statement, complete nonsense.
Anyway, self-policing other communities' self-descriptors is shitty. Don't be shitty. This is extremely tedious and boring--nobody ever wants to hear another "privileged white boy embraces his disbelief" stories--and I apologize for vomiting upon this forum with this. I truly did like it more when we talked about how much atheists were assholes, not that their utterances were contentless.
So Dawkins could not just shut up and not say anything:
Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
Alas, criminal individual killers exist. But there's only 1 ideology now that preaches the legal killing of dissenters. And it isn't atheism
99: He has a moral compass that reliably points south on certain issues. Screw that guy, but he's useful to calibrate against.
My defending Myers above was prompted by reading his response, which is a little overly defensive and has a horrible title but is pretty clear on what this means to atheism as a practice:
His murderer was an atheist who seemed to ignore the tolerant part of atheism...[*snip* unnecessary callouts to assholes]..translated contempt for bad beliefs into violent hatred for those who hold those beliefs.
It's easy to do. I don't think there's a significant component of atheism that preaches for violence against believers, but there are a large number of atheists who seriously try to argue that atheism should include no moral component at all
The killer was one of us. He had received the message that murdering Muslims does not expel one from the community of atheists. That has to change. You cannot say that atheism is merely an abstract idea without implications for human behavior and simultaneously dissociate yourself from this crime.
Yeah, I'll stand by all that.
Atheists sure seem to like getting trolled.
98: I think that at some level it can be useful rather than shitty to police others' beliefs, but context matters. Co-parenting with a Christian brings a lot of what I find unhelpful about certain versions of Christianity to the fore, for instance, and I'm okay with that.
104: Oh, definitely. (And I applaud your willpower, I wouldn't be able to put up with that.) And conversely if someone wants to criticize atheism as practiced, there's lots of room for that. I meant more that it's shitty to disparage some other group's choice of self-descriptor. (With some reasonable limits, like appropriation.)
105: Yeah, well, I have the consolation of thinking Jesus would have liked me better.
Yeah, well, I have the consolation of thinking Jesus would have liked me better.
Right? He seemed to have special place in his heart for the whores.
83: Christianity isn't entirely innocuous in Europe. Take, for example, the delightful antics of Ian Paisley, or the Serbian (and to an extent the Russian) Orthodox Church, or the Vatican's continuing mission to abuse children in pretty much every country it operates in...
And Jesus said, troll not, least ye be trolled. I am staying right out of this. May I be strong, as lb was.
I feel like if I play hard to get, Jesus will love me more. I'm just following the strategy laid out in Luke 15:11-32.
I do not perform atheism; I perform consequentialism. But I still don't believe god exists. On the other hand, I don't care much one way or the other.
107: It was actually an awful day on that front, but this is part of the two bigger fights about whether selfishness is a moral imperative and whether it's sad I'm going to hell. My arguments are the Beatitudes, among other things, and that I don't care because any god who can't handle people trying to figure things out for themselves isn't worth believing in anyway and the same goes for any god who'd rather people believe just to game Pascal's wager. Also, gswift gets me!
94. My formulation is that atheism makes sense because there is no credible evidence that the supernatural exists. However, disbelief in God or gods doesn't imply any particular moral or ethical structure exists that is "based on" that lack of deities. "The universe doesn't care about you" just means you can't pull Aquinas' trick of piling all the turtles on God and saying "done!" when formulating a moral code.
92 and 94: Sorry for being so thick. Thanks for the explanation. My knowledge of philosophy is much slimmer than it ought to be.
Oh, just when I thought the Bob Project might be exhausted! Religious Bob. Now there's some potential.
two bigger fights about whether selfishness is a moral imperative..... My arguments are the Beatitudes,
Jesus did say, "Blessed are the selfish, because they will get theirs - fuck you."
Religious Bob. Now there's some potential.
Yeah, certainly from a pot/kettle perspective. If atheism is performative, Marxism is a frickin' Broadway Show.
I'm pretty sure he's just doing the dumb postmodern thing where you invent a really complicated terminology and then when you say dumb things with it they sound impressive. In this case he's using 'performative' in such a broad way that basically any speech act would be performative, at which point the word 'performative' becomes totally worthless as a description of anything and basically only exists so someone can wave it around and go "hey look at me".
Having fun, guys?
The quote in 94 is from Austin
I have no problem with performance or performativity, at all, just like to understand what is being performed in a gesture or utterance.
Yeah Marxists fight and self-critique about the re-introduction of Idealism, abstractions, and transcendentals all the fricking time. In some sense, it is the whole fight.
I think "atheism" reproduces and reproduces metaphysics and immaterialism where it probably isn't wanted. It is religious (and reacted to as if I was "attacking a religion"), and if you want to see how that can work, go visit the Negative Theologians over at Adam Kotsko's blog. If you think my jargon is foggy and obscurantist.
Catherine Keller:
As you face the possible impossibilities of your own very different contexts of communication, I hope the unknowing helps you to host surprising new rhizomes of ekklesia. Even this present context, in its virtuality, its potentiality, poses entangling challenges. I hope that your tracing of the "panentheistic thread" running through the book will clarify the Christian stakes of the argument: finally, as you rightly iterate the final movement of the book, a matter not of 'believing in' but of doing--God. And as you note, that possible panentheism, smudged and darkened as it is, will remain for some impossible. But then it means to precipitate a whole host of discourses, discourses hospitable to those who question them.
I think "atheism" reproduces metaphysics and immaterialism where it probably isn't wanted.
This is certainly true. Atheism without the quotation marks. however, reproduces a shrug of the shoulders and a change of topic. None of the atheists I know in real life ever give the question of the supernatural a second thought unless they're talking to obsessive Americans.
Stanford "Atheism and Agnosticism"
"At its simplest, pantheism can be ontologically indistinguishable from atheism."
Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world. It offers an increasingly popular alternative to both traditional theism and pantheism. Panentheism seeks to avoid either isolating God from the world as traditional theism often does or identifying God with the world as pantheism does.
I tend to keep my atheism pretty firmly in the closet. That's rather the opposite of performative, no?
"At its simplest, pantheism can be ontologically indistinguishable from atheism."
Yeah, that's bullshit. Pantheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being yadda yadda yadda. Atheism just says "I don't think any of that God stuff is actually true."
As to why I give these questions any thought
"class consciousness is an ontology of social being"
Workers of the world unite when they change their ways of thinking. Not, incidentally, when I change them, but as part of the social, I am not irrelevant either. The list of thoughtcrimes* is very long.
*just kidding
Foxconn workers do not need Jobs' jobs and his understanding of jobs and job problems, but rather different kind of work that are not defined by the corporate ethos of people like Jobs. Foxconn jobs are too much based on the Jobs-ideology, but in order to become humane they need to become not-Jobs, which means that workers as subjects need to realize that they are not just "not-capital, the negation of capital" (Marx 1857/1858b, 274); they need to become conscious of this status in order to politically create the negation of the negative relationship between capital and labour in Foxconn factories, in China, in the West and in global capitalism. One needs to communalize Foxconn and Apple....Christian Fuchs, just for an example.
Note the dialectic between the concrete site (Foxconn) and the abstract analysis. But Marxists have to self-critique constantly.
126 - I think they just mean that, basically, if you decide that "god" just means "all the stuff" then you aren't positing anything additional in the world that an atheist would object to. (Atheists could, I think, still reasonably object on the grounds that either you're saying something absurd about the world (e.g., that it is morally perfect goodness that we should worship), or you literally are just an atheist pretending not to be in order to sound spiritual.)
Like happens a lot of the time in philosophy (I think), the things that look like uninteresting qualifiers - "can be" and "simplest" - are actually the really critical bits.
Also bob is quoting bits about two different views - so the bit about the world being in god and god being in the world is actually not about pantheism but panentheism.
I also want to observe that bob responded to my pointing out that he was just using fancy terminology to say a bunch of dumb things and make them sound interesting by saying that if I thought he was being obscurantist, then I should go see what some theologian is saying. I think this is pretty great because theologians are infamous for being somewhere between exactly that thing and not even using language at all.
Yeah, the Panenthist vs. Pantheist thing confused me. I ended up deciding it must have been a typo, because it was easier to assume that than to spend the time to educate myself about making a distinction about something I don't particularly care about.
I think they just mean that, basically, if you decide that "god" just means "all the stuff" then you aren't positing anything additional in the world that an atheist would object to.
I guess my objection would be that its larding up an evidence-based worldview with a crust of theism that can only complicate matters. I mean, sure, you could define God to mean "all the stuff" but I don't understand what that buys you. It just creates an additional level of woo abstraction that isn't necessary to the function of the cosmological model.
-- Look, the idea that toasters go to Silicon Heaven when they die is completely wacko.
-- But don't you yourself believe that God is present in all things? Aren't you a pantheist?
-- I just don't believe it extends to kitchen utensils. I'm not a frying-pantheist.
131. But my frying pans are seasoned! Surely they will go to Cast Iron Heaven.