/atheism/ - Atheism

>>6617

If you say that you are an agnostic, that still makes you an atheist. Gnosticism is a position of knowledge, theism is a position of belief.

>>6625

I'm guessing they didn't want to be burned at the stake.

>>6625

When speaking just of the western world atheism was not something one could be open about until the enlightenment era. It's possible that individuals privately held doubt but it would have been suicide, in some cases literally, to defend that position.

>>7551

This.

>>7551

Yes it needs more Harris & Kraus, but no need to shit on the underrated Gould.

>>7592

>underrated

Nah, he was a fraud and his contribution to science and atheism was negligible at best.

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071

>>7609

Actually that's my bad, I got him confused with Victor Stenger somehow. Gould was the guy who wrote a number of books evaluating the bible in detail, I remember now. Never read them.

>>6626

they should have. whether we agree with Marx, Rand or not doesn't make them less important philosophers

>>6613

>>6614

>>6619

>>6764

>atheist or agnostic?

see >>6074 that might help you with your confusion

>>6764

I don't know whether Jobs was an atheist or not, I doubt it. But I know he was a superstitious magical-thinking faggot of the worst kind who though fruit therapy would be more effective at treating his cancer than scientific medicine. Good thing he's gone, for this and many other reasons.

>>7543

what went wrong with the USA? It was based on freethought and liberal views of the Enlightenment, most if not all of its founding fathers were less than christian and religious fanatics to say the least; and 238 years later it is almost impossible for an atheist to hold a public chair

>>6761

Carlos "Fatass" Slim is a maronite christian though.

>source

I'm a beaner, and he's of lebanese ancestry

I find it ironical, yet not strictly correlational, that the irreligious agnostic magnates are more charitable than the christian ones, or at least that's the naive impression. In practice I despise BIll Gates because his unethical source of income (a fucking quasi-monopoly based on freedom-denying software) isn't justified, regardless of whether his charity is doing good or not.

By the way…

>Bill Gates

>intelligent

pick one.

the goy was intelligent enough to bang the naivety of a new market at the right moment and at the expense of users' knowledge and freedom; and that's pretty much it. the most demanding piece of software he ever wrote was a BASIC interpreter (the most retarded kind of translator one can come up with and for one of the most retarded programming languages known on earth). I have programmed things at least as complex and maybe more complex at undergrad school. Everything else Gates sold wasn't his own and low-quality software anyway.

>>7620

It seems that most christians are agnostic since most christians admit that it is a matter of faith. If they were sure that god existed, faith wouldn't be required.

>>6613

http://www.celebatheists.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_atheists

>>7611

>>7592

what's wrong with Vic Stenger?

Jay Gould has produced good science too, but I don't agree with him at all on religious grounds.

His "non-overlapping magisteria" bullshit that that science and religion make claims about different things and are thus are never in conflict is, first of all, empirically false and also an excuse to keep the mediocrity of religious claims afloat or to win the sympathy of the moderately religious masses.

I don't root for the persecution of religions and theists, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't criticize the ideas I think are deeply wrong.

>>7620

Yet no theist states that they are an agnostic. And rightfully so, because if you deny a position of belief based on insufficient knowledge, you still don't believe and that makes you an atheist.

>>7619

>what went wrong with the USA?

Nothing new, just politics. The USA is still by legal definition a secular country, despite the motto we have engraved on our currency. It's just that the political conservatives in our country use christianity as a rallying call. This doesn't actually have to do with theology, it's just identity politics. Mormons for example are gladly accepted on the right despite the fact that their holy book is considered heresy. They fit into the social and economic group of the right.

We don't try people under religious law and there is no state religion or punishments for blaspheming any particular religion. Although ironically it's the left who might be trying to change that with their insistence on hate crime legislation and accusations of islamaphobia.

I would agree though that the liberty experiment is coming to a close. We're buckling under the weight of our own bureaucracy and Americans have signed away their freedoms in exchange for the illusion of security. Our elected officials increasingly bend to the whims of lobbyists and "special interests groups" at the expense of liberty. Our population is growing too large for actual representation to take place.

This is nothing the founding fathers didn't predict, it's why they thought a reset button was needed for any government. But at this point the USA is far too large and powerful for that to be feasible. Short of total economic collapse I don't think we'll be seeing any revolution.

Bit off topic though.

>>7641

This actually makes a lot of sense, but why did it catch on in that era?

>>7645

It has to do with continued massive immigration from Europe. The elite tended to be rational, especially in the Northern cities, but the immigrant frontier peasants were not, and "cold" rationality was less appealing to illiterate laborers than muh feels.

Napolean was also defeated and the Catholic church regained some power. Catholics immigrants decided to restore authority to Rome rather than to continue with their own independant Catholic churches. At the same time the right of publication by the new Protestant preachers were protected by the Enlightenment thinkers, and their ideas spread. At the same time the country moved from republicism towards more popular democracy, and appealing to the minority of Enlightened became less effective than appealing to all the Awakened.

Here's the link where those possible causes come from:

https://books.google.com/books?id=s8A1nN66yRYC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=decline+enlightenment+of+rationality+america+revival&source=bl&ots=gXYgodtBOy&sig=HGZOY_ZuD3r9Z7o5X22UNwvm-X8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RCteVbHBN9HuoATrhIG4Dg&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=decline%20enlightenment%20of%20rationality%20america%20revival&f=false

See also

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/01/1354991/-Modern-Pre-enlightenment-America-and-the-Hundred-Year-Culture-War#