If you are over the age of 40, perhaps a bit older, you have lived long enough to see a great fad get going, peak and then fade away completely. Lots of fads run their course in a few months, obviously, but social movements tend to build slowly and then stick around for a while, before disappearing down the memory hole. One of those fads is atheism, which had a good run in the 80’s and 90’s. It started to peter out in the 90’s, had a brief revival in the aughts, but now seems to be headed to oblivion.
The so-called “new atheists” are not ready to throw in the towel on their reason to exist, as it were, but that’s to be expected. Harris and Dennett moved all their chips into the middle of the table with the atheism stuff. It got them the attention they desired, so as a gambler will wear a diamond pinky ring to recall his one big score, these guys still proudly wear their atheism. All of them have moved onto other things, but they will expound upon their hatred of religion if the crowd demands it.
Of course, anytime the word “new” gets attached to something old, it means that old thing is now dead. It also means that old thing had some serious internal defect that eventually killed it. The “new right” made an appearance when it was clear Conservative Inc. was just a ruthless money racket. The previous iteration of “new right” appeared in the 70’s when everyone agreed the old right was dead. The reason “new atheism” got going is everyone agreed that regular old atheism was creepy and weird.
The central defect of atheism, old and new, is it is an entirely negative western identity and entirely dependent on Christianity. Specifically, it requires people of some status to defend Christianity and the Christian belief in the super natural. Atheism has always been the oxpecker of mass movements. Everything about it relies on its host both tolerating it and thriving on its own. It’s why atheism has had its spasms of success when Christianity in America has had a revival, as in the 80’s and the 2000’s.
Atheists will deny this, of course. They will argue, as Dennett often does, that the steep decline of Christianity is proof their arguments were superior. The reason they no longer talk about their thing is they won and their enemy is dead. The fact that there are plenty of Muslims and crackpot feminist airheads around spouting magical oogily-boogily never seems to get their attention for some reason. The only guy to venture into this area was Dawkins, but the Prog quickly reminded him who pays his bills.
That’s always been the tell with atheism. Belief in something as insane as male privilege or implicit whiteness should get their attention. After all, these are not just beliefs in the supernatural, they are primitive beliefs in the supernatural. Men of the classical period had more plausible and complex beliefs than people like Amy Harmon. She is a click away from demanding human sacrifice. Yet, the new atheists were never much interest in those magical beliefs. They were too busy hounding the last Christians.
That’s another tell. Atheism has always been a popular pose on the Left, because it was a useful signal. The bad whites loved their boom sticks and sky gods. The good whites rejected all those crazy beliefs. It’s why atheists tended to focus on the mainstream of Christianity, like Catholics and mainline Protestant churches. Mormons were always an easy target. They avoided the Jews and black Baptists. Sure, once in while a zinger against the tribe would be tossed in, but the enemy was always white Christians.
The decline on atheism is a good example of the perils of negative identity. When you define yourself as being in opposition to someone or something, you inevitably become a slave to it. Your very existence depends on it. As the main Christian churches collapse in scandal and bizarre attempts to move Left, the enemies for atheists to attack are getting more difficult to find. Attacking Christians is like beating up a puppy. Only the severely mentally disturbed think Christians have any power today.
The other thing working against atheism is it has been mostly male. That’s an interesting thing, given that the American Atheists was created by a woman in the 60’s. Then again, Madalyn Murray O’Hair was just a cat’s paw for the usual suspects. Her role was to be the point the spear in the war to decouple Christianity from American civic and cultural life. Since then, atheism has been a male thing. Given the declining status of males on the Left, particularly white males, it is no surprise that atheism is dying.
Given the state of affairs in the West and the crippling decline in the Christian churches, it is hard to see atheism having another revival. Christianity appears to morphing into a private, bespoke thing in order to survive outside the Progressive orthodoxy. That makes it a worthless enemy for atheists. You can never know, of course, but it looks like public Christianity is done for. That means atheism is done for as well, unless it moves onto Judaism or Progressivism and that will never be allowed.
thezman wrote: “Lots of fads run their course in a few months, obviously, but social movements tend to build slowly and then stick around for a while, before disappearing down the memory hole. One of those fads is atheism, which had a good run in the 80’s and 90’s. It started to peter out in the 90’s, had a brief revival in the aughts, but now seems to be headed to oblivion.”
My understanding is that both the number of atheists in the world and the percentage of all people in the world who are atheists is increasing. Here is a link to Win/Gallup poll from 2012:
https://www.scribd.com/document/136318147/Win-gallup-International-Global-Index-of-Religiosity-and-Atheism-2012
According to the poll, in 2005, 4 percent of the world’s population was atheist. In 2012, 7 percent of the world’s population was atheist. See page 13 of the poll.
However, according to a 2017 Pew poll, although the number of people in the world with no religion is likely to increase between now and 2060, the percentage of the world’s population with no religion is likely to decrease over the same period of time. Here’s a link:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/07/why-people-with-no-religion-are-projected-to-decline-as-a-share-of-the-worlds-population/
According to the Pew poll, birthrates are higher among countries with relatively large percentages of religious people than they are among countries with relatively low percentages of religious people.
Also, it should be noted that some people with no religion believe that one or more Gods exist. So, the Pew poll isn’t fully helpful in terms of helping one have a good idea of whether the percentage of atheists in the world will be higher or lower in 2060 than it is now.
In addition, if a country percentage of religious people were to stay the same forever, then England. would have a lower percentage of atheists than it does now. People can have different beliefs about whether God exists than their parents.
I’m an atheist. I think it’s unlikely that any Gods exist. I know of the existence of a huge number of things (including my car), and I don’t know of the existence of anything that is even remotely similar to a God. Analogously, I know of the existence of a huge number of things, and I don’t know of the existence of any planetary body that is even remotely similar to a planetary body that is at least as large as the planet Jupiter and composed at least 90 percent of the element gold. And I know that it is unlikely that any such planetary body exists.
If public Christianity is dead, that’s a good thing. Christianity always thrived better underground. Think Rome.
Surprised no one mentioned Murray’s blood splattered exit from this life. shows that god has a fine sense of humor…
This analysis is of course right. Atheism was not principle-based, just a tool used to hammer away at core Western foundations. Similar to the left’s prior defense of free speech. Had nothing to do with supporting free speech in principle, just wanted their voices heard. Now that we are ruled by the Left and Christianity is dead, religion is promoted and free speech does not exist.
Like every other group or group identity, there are many factions. This speaks about Atheist factions who are unintelligent, idiots, morons, uneducated and poor critical thinkers who cannot truly articulate or defend why they don’t believe in any god or “higher authority”. As Carlin once said, and I’m paraphrasing, the best way to become an Atheist is to start out a Catholic. I’ve studied world religions and read all sides of the argument. To keep it simple, I tend to believe god is a construct created by humans to create identity groups to aid in group survival. And we’re the only ones capable of something like that on the planet, That doesn’t make us correct that a god exists though. This won’t be a popular post, but before anyone starts calling me immoral, I will point out the idea that one doesn’t need a god to respect all life and have good morals and values. Somewhere along the way everyone just took as fact that religious people are the only ones who can be moral. I am pro life and respect others rights (don’t start libertarian bashing please). I enjoy almost all the Zman posts, they make me think about a great many things from different angles. But I question Atheist bashing as much as I do libertarian bashing.
I look into the eyes of my 4 year old granddaughter and ask: “What or Who created this beautiful, innocent, sweet child?”
The answer that she “evolved” from some primordial ooze and some shit-tossing ape totally by a “chance chemical reaction” is ridiculous on its face. No one knows how we got here and where we go after we leave. No one.
And no one ever will. Ever.
I’m not sure how to decipher the subtext of that. But I will rhetorically (and comically) respond with:
But a god who tells you he loves you, gives you a set of rules for you to live by (read:control your behavior) and then tells you if you don’t follow them strictly you will suffer and burn in hell forever is NOT ridiculous on its face?
No thanks, I don’t need an invisible man’s rules and threats to live a good life, raise good children, know right from wrong, and be happy. I also don’t need to blame an invisible man when things aren’t going my way, or pretend that praying for things absolves me of the need to do things for myself. As every day goes by I am reaffirmed that religion is just another way to control others by an elite few.
Glad our pioneers didn’t have your philosophy.
On point Gangster.
Totally agree. You’re spot on. The comment from some here just makes them look dumb and willfully ignorant. Ursula believes atheists are a parasitic class?? Lol! Unbelievable.
I’m a big fan of the Z man too mate. He’s off the mark on this one, but hopefully the surface he’s scratched will yield a Z classic down the track.
I consistently scratch my head at this apparent need many atheists have to be insulting toward those who may be believers.
Always seemed to be a lot of hubris attached to the belief.
Have to say I agree totally. But hubris is too descriptive, it’s more of a smug cuntishness thats the main defining characteristic. Some guy previously banged on about excrement writing and then proceeded to head on to the standard operating proceedure of slagging off every believer as being just sleep maaaann. One thing for me is the difference in aesthetics. When you go to Rome and enter into St Peter’s basillica or visit the baroque Churches the sublime architecture is beautiful. As it is in the Gothic Churches of the High Middle Ages. The Pantheon of Rome, Shinto shrines of Japan. It’s something Heartiste has talked about, the sense of the transcendent. A lot of the guys who have commented on the post are quite normal non Theists, not a whiff of cuntishness, but its the main fault of all non Spiritual belief systems that it can’t appeal to transcendent beauty
Islam has some pretty good architecture. Maybe you can enjoy that little aesthetic for a while.
Hate to burst your ignorance bubble, but there is no SOP for exercising one’s mind besides incorporating reason, truth, and logic.
if the Christian god exists, then the islamic god exists; hinduism is legit; in fact, all of them must be, because all of their believers believe in their gods just as much if not more than you – with the same lack of evidence. Therefore, they all simultaneously exist, or simultaneously not exist. Take your pick.
If you have any evidence feel free to share it, or maybe you’re just special and god chose you?
Categorizing all atheists with leftism is an incorrect and insulting assumption.
I’ve been around atheists like that. It’s douchery for sure. But are you inferring that all atheists are like that? Because it always seems to me a vast majority of those who consider themselves religious and are 100% believers have acted in the same way (insulting and demeaning) when they encounter an atheist. It’s a two way street.
Atheists are a parasitic class. They won’t do well if they don’t have people of belief to live off of. The beauty of Christianity is that it provides enough wiggle room, via tolerance, for the unbelievers to live well. However, society needs enough Christians to keep a functional and desirable society afloat. Without the Christians, society sinks to the degenerate levels we see today, with Islam waiting in the wings to fill that secular vacuum. With Islam, there is no wiggle room, nothing but Islam: Islamic religion, Islamic culture, Islamic government. That’s what all these supposedly intellectually superior post-religion snobs are bringing us to. Laughing as they carelessly throw away the Christian beliefs that gave rise to the best civilization the world has ever known and usher in authoritarian, backward secularism and Islam.
Where to begin: Parasitic? That’s a strong soundbite, but can you elaborate? How exactly are atheists living off of others or exploiting anyone? I’m not aware of any atheists who go around pushing (forcing) their ideas on others like Christian based religions do. You’ve forgotten the violent history of Christianity. Read some history. Some starter examples: the crusades, any of the first popes (hint, they had armies and prostitutes!). It’s easy to “throw away Christian beliefs” that are highly and obviously hypocritical (Second hint: look up Cognitive Dissonance). And last, I don’t consider Islam a religion, at least not on the same level as most other religions (excluding perhaps mormons who were founded on an equally preposterous foundation, or obviously scientology). Islam was founded by a war general who was raised up to a god level. Of course now that i wrote that out, it does make me draw a parallel to Jesus.
Sorry to get in so late. Probably no one will even read this. No one likes to talk about this much, but I think that much of our attitudes toward the metaphysical lies in innate predispositions that are cultivated by experience and learning (and by that I do not mean “education”). Like so many other things in life, we have predispositions, probably of a somewhat genetic nature that allow for imprinting of basic coordinated thought and behavior patterns and these in part determine how we respond to the world around us. All of us have some basic belief system that has been formed under these rather nonspecific conditions. Thus we have a combination of nature and nurture going on while these beliefs are being formed.
As such, we are both products of our genetic makeup and our environment, plus we are able, through insight, to influence our attitudes somewhat. Seen this way, it is easier to see how someone who is raised in a city where everyone is an unconscious atheist to become an unconscious atheist himself, just as many people are rather unconscious believers; however, it is getting rather hard to find these individuals ever since the end of the middle ages.
The question has been raised, why not believe in 999 other gods? When I read ancient literature I can easily see myself believing in whatever pantheon was in vogue at the time, and defending it against unbelievers for many reasons, one of which would be the benefit of piety in society, as religion served a more civic purpose back then. And I would defend the private religions of the families (it is rather stunning to see how many people are completely unaware of this aspect of religion in classical times) for similar reasons.
If you study religions in their historical context, it is easy to see how it has evolved with social evolution, and how necessary it is to that. There is a symbiosis between the development of society and religion in history. And that symbiosis has been obscured by the application of outside influences like political aspirations, greed, intellectual hubris, through the ages.
This, in part, goes back to the idea of co-evolution of complex thinking and religious thought mentioned by Zman. These are similar concepts. In one, the more complex mind is more capable of religious (metaphysical) thinking, and this ability to think abstractly affects man’s ability to deal with the world around him. A good example being the belief that the world might be expressable and undestandable by use of mathematics. This is a metaphysical belief that originated about 750 BC (Pythagoras). And it developed as a part of a religious system with Pythagoras at its head. IOW, the same people who “believed in sky fairies” gave us the metaphysics we use today to understand the world. Our problem is that some us don’t realize when we are thinking metaphysically, and when we are not, which, in fact, is almost never.
There are two books which should be required reading for an understanding of these issues. The Great Chain of Being, by Arthur Lovejoy, and The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science by E A Burtt.
I think there may be some validity in your observations of genetic/environmental predisposition as drivers of the religious impulse, but they don’t address intuition or mystical experience. Is there a genetic/environmental explanation for direct experience as well? See Bruce Charlton on intuition.
Most metaphysics probably have their origins in intuitions. At yhe same time, I don’t believe that intuitions are as spontaneous as we may like to think they are. Our brains mull things around outside of our immediate consciousness more than we would like to think, and we arrive at understandings in more than a flash of enlightenment. Try reading up on the differences between ratio and intellectus thinking. Joseph Pieper. Nicolas of Cusa.
As always, you’re beautiful and informative, teapartydoc. Thank you and God bless you.
Is this a joke post? Evidently even the great Z man is capable of excrement writing. Two seemingly unthought through posts in a week – odd.
You make the mistake of equating atheism with leftism. Such a basic error. Do u believe ALL atheists are leftists or will become leftists? It may surprise you to learn that many people are atheists purely because they like to have evidence before they blindly lead themselves into a belief system.
Deriding people for not being sheep and basing beliefs on evidence derides your own intelect.
Good post.
I worry that our side is increasingly pegged as the side of G-d. It makes for easy mockery and fractions our base.
Only k*kes say “G-d.” You’re a tool, in all senses. I used to love your posts. Who do you want to be with?
And only Hebes can’t write ‘kike’ without using asterisks.
You’re proving my point. To wit, this comment section is nothing but brigade voting, triggered snowflakes and hysterical ad hominem.
No wonder the Z thought better than defending his column down here – just a few days back, he bragged that he had the smartest commenters on the internet, and now look at this infantile dumpster fire.
Who do you want to be with?
I could ask you. Do you want the D-Right to be the party of God?
What you say is true but I think you miss the point of the post. Now that the left has won and Christianity is dead, the left will no longer reward those making arguments on behalf of Atheism, and they may in fact get you into trouble.
I am always struck by just how biblical is the “Big Bang” explanation for the creation of our universe. It just “poofed” into existence 13 billion years ago, out of nothing and for no reason at all.
And the Lord said “Let their be Light. And, lo, there was was Light”.
“Let THERE be light…..” (tuts to himself).
By the way, The Big Bang Theory was developed by the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre.
Yes. I bet he had a vision from God, explaining it all to him.
I hope you’re young and just don’t know better. I didn’t, until life and the gracious spirit taught me. But for Him I go thence. There is so so so much more — beyond us. You don’t see? Maybe you will, hopefully soon. It’s miraculous, beautiful, all that is.
There is so so so much more — beyond us. You don’t see?
I appreciate your good wishes in the spirit they are given, but I suspect I see more than most religious people in that regard: talking snakes, flying horses, water to wine? Am I supposed to be awed by such parlor tricks?
The real world is MUCH more impressive, much more breathtaking in scope and wonder than anything dark age goat-herders could dream up, as they were cowering in a cave, afraid of the thunder.
“The real world is MUCH more impressive, much more breathtaking in scope and wonder than anything dark age goat-herders could dream up, as they were cowering in a cave, afraid of the thunder.”
^this. 👊
Somewhere I read this quote supposed to be from Albert E. Can’t verify it.
“God does not play dice with the universe.”
Deus… volt?
https://me.me/i/heresy-what-the-fuck-man-me-irl-8751676
Lots of hate for athiests in here. As an atheist D Righter I’ve resigned myself to not criticizing Christianity publically. Which is not that difficult to do. But it becomes harder when the Dissident Right disparages athiests so badly and broadly, (as today’s post and comments do). It’s like, us D-Right athiests have chosen to be mild toward Christianity, but the D-Right won’t return the favor toward athiests. I mean, Z didn’t even throw athiests the usual “they’re not ALL bad” bone that such diatribes usually offer. He just full on crushed us.
Frip is our lovable gadfly. Don’t let us get complacent. I do worry about the amount of time you spend in bars.
Haha! I know right?
In a strange bit of irony, yes…public Christianity is dying or dead. As well it should be. It was a creation of a Chrustianuzed Rome and a poor substitute for personal righteousness. What is happening now is that Christians are being confronted again with…not an atheistic society…but a pagan one.
Only a life of personal integrity, devotion to truth, and pursuit of righteousness can do battle with the magical thinking and oogly boogly arguments of the weak minded but ambiguous. They worship Moloch with dead infants and invoke magical curses with racist this or gender that.
Nobody spent time attacking Judaism because it is an ethnic religion and ethnic groups are taboo topics for derision, except white ones I suppose. Islam had a similar issue, though I think it mostly came down to the willingness of Muslims to kill atheists and the unwillingness of secular authorities in the west at stopping them.
Christianity is a curious case. Unlike other “universal,” religions, it actually achieved universality and a pan-racial following. Which at once makes it the most popular and appealing evangelical faith, though also the easiest target from subversives.
Anyhow, New Atheist (any atheist) thought is simply the same old rehashed Judeo-Saxon diaspora ho-hum that generated controversy every century or so. Smart and unscrupulous people tend to make great charlatans.
Are atheists against God or religion? Can you believe in god and not be religious, I often pray but aren’t joined to any church or religion I did go to catholic school.
I don’t see any evidence that atheism is dead. If you’re suggesting that regressive leftist dogma is a kind of religion, I would agree, but I don’t see how that relates to those of who fail to believe in the supernatural.
Fun topic, I’ll play. I’m not talking religion or philosophy here, I’m just pointing out simple human experience that 7B people can agree on.
Every night you fall asleep tucked safe under the covers, first thing that happens is your consciousness begins to dream, and consciousness dreams an entire new cosmos into existence, made out of nothing but consciousness (no matter, bricks or mortar required). Second thing is your consciousness inserts you into your own dream as a dream character. Wow. Remember, this is all happening in consciousness, your dream character is not made of matter, everything in the dream including you the dream character is a “no-thing”, made out of consciousness. The whole time you remain tucked under the covers, asleep. No matter, time, or space is required.
You can’t tell the difference between a nighttime dream and the waking state. So how do you know your waking state isn’t just another dream state you wake up into? When you’re the dream character, you think everything is real. But nothing is real, it’s all only consciousness, all just a dream of the consciousness of the one tucked in bed.
Or perhaps the dreamer is God.
Given the discoveries of quantum physics in the last 25 years, especially double slit, quantum eraser, an entanglement, it seems wise to consider your simple human experience, and what it means.
For me the religion of materialism that science is hooked on is going down, it appears idealism is more aligned with what we think we know.
And what could be better for all religious thinking, than if science we’re to prove materialism a fundamental error in our understanding.
Please don’t label me atheist here, my personal mode is “there is only God, besides which nothing exists”
Those last three paragraphs are very insightful, and reminds me a bit of Eric Voeglin’s comments on the end of secularism, and I have to say your comments on materialism hit the mark. As pseudo religions Marxism and Progressivism both have as their highest value’s equality, albeit weaponised into a psychotic envy. I think for us one of the defining traits is our recognition that equality, despite being superficially desireable is impossible. Its immeasurable as God/Nature/Gnon does not distribute the traits that determine status, intelligence or wealth equally. In a time of hyper abundance we have never been more neurotic, apathatic, or depressed. And throughout the West and the North East Asia we are increasingly not even turning up for the future. Material needs are catered for, so why are we dying out?
On many occasions I’ve been dreaming and part of me knew it was really a dream because it was too weird to be true.
I’ve often thought dying is probably like thinking you’re having a bad dream, except instead of waking up at the moment of death like in a dream, you do the opposite.
There’s certainly some truth in this essay, but it uses a limited definition of “atheism” without spelling it out, resulting in some statements that are bizarre on the surface of it. The idea that atheism’s origins are in the 1980s and 1990s is one of those. Spinoza was accused of atheism in the 17th century and Hume in the 18th, with solid grounds for the charges in both cases. My own atheism dates to the early 1960s. And I’m just as skeptical of the Jewish and Muslim gods as I am of the Christian. And the Hindu and the Chinese and the Polynesian and the Amerind and the African.
There’s considerable insight to be gained from looking at Leftist politics as a religion with sacred books and dogmas. But Leftist politics aren’t theistic, and there’s not much to be gained from construing opposition to them as atheism. With regard to then, I’m a dissenter, or even the enemy, but I’m not atheistic.
I understand that Zman bangs these out in short order, and I appreciate his doing so. His essays five or six days a week are part of the start of my day. There are themes here that could be disentangled into two or three essays. I hope to be able to read them soon.
Fark man, such a good comment. The fact you’ve got a negative here says something about the clarity of comprehension by some here on this topic.
An argument could be made that atheism began with Socrates. I think it was ‘The last days of Socrates’ where Socrates asks “Is what the gods say moral because they are literally just and moral, or are they moral just because the gods say they are?”
Food for thought kiddies. Bon appetite 😏
Though they are far and few between, there are unbelievers (or atheists, if you prefer the more loaded term), who are not wacko enviro-lefty loons. There are some who, after long deliberation, simply cannot accept, say, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead or that he was born of a virgin. (Or that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse, or that Ragnarok will occur).
John Derbyshire, Heather McDonald, and Razib Khan count among them. None are leftists, all are quite erudite and accomplished.
It sounds like a weasly cop-out, but I’ve come to the conclusion that “atheist” is too loaded a tern. It’s used in such a way that it refers to much more than the lack of belief in God. It has the connotation of an angry, smug, none-too-bright herd person who hasn’t really done the hard work of engaging with the great minds of the Western canon (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc., etc., etc.) enough to defend whatever position they espouse. And rightly so. It’s “atheism on the cheap” for our loudest atheists.
I bristle at being lumped in with these people. But I do not believe in the supernatural. I do not believe in the tenets of the faith I was raised in (Catholicism), and haven’t since I was 12.
Though for a long time it left me very puzzled that so many did believe, people who I respected and were smarter than me. (One HS math teacher was a priest with a PhD in math).
The book “Religion Explained”, by Pascal Boyer, hit me like a thunderclap, and I no longer puzzle at why so many are believers. And no longer consider their belief “misguided”. Razib has long touted this book, along with “in Gods We Trust” by Scott Atran as laying out a framework for understanding, from a naturalist perspective, the phenomena of religion. (Don’t worry, it’s not a Gorillas in the Mist type thing).
Z-Man, if you haven’t read Boyer, you might want to consider it. (It’s up there with Nicholas Wade’s work.)
https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Evolutionary-Origins-Religious/dp/0465006965
I have been part of what we are now calling the Dissident Right for 40 years and I am an atheist. That simply means I do not believe there are any gods — no invisible people who live in the sky. I could not believe in them, even if I wanted to, no more than I could believe that walking under ladders or knocking on wood makes any real difference.
Do you believe in the invisible people? You don’t say you do. If you don’t, then you are an atheist, whether you like it or not, because atheism is simply lack of belief in gods.
Atheism, whether admitted or not, is on the increase because science has made the fantastic stories told by historically-based religions unbelievable to rational minds. Sure, many smart, educated people claim to believe. Some even convince themselves they do. But most don’t and can’t — at least not like they believe in, say, gravity.
The Dissident Right must not tie itself to the literal belief in gods. Leave that to the Evangelicals and Islamists. I don’t understand why you even think this is something worth discussion.
Mainline Christianity certainly is on the decline in Western Europe and the United States, but versions of Christianity are doing fairly well in Africa, Latin America and even Asia. There’s a pretty good discussion of this phenomenon in Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, The Coming of Global Christianity. In theory, this Christianity (much more magical and charismatic than the Euro-North American variety) should be an even more tempting target for atheists, but it would involve ridiculing Africans, Mestizos, Amerindians and Chinese, and that probably doesn’t appeal to them.
Dirt world christians will save Christianity just as Iraqi democracy will bring peace to the middle East, or copying the US Constitution will make mexico a first world country. It’s all a variation of magic dirt, magic document, magic book. Christians have been told by athiests that you believe in magic so long you’ve started to believe it yourselves. Culture is always and irrevocably downstream of and dependent on genetics.
I have been on what we are now calling the “Dissident Right” for 40 years and I am an atheist. Simply means I do not believe there are any gods — no invisible people who live in the sky. I see no evidence for religious beliefs. Do you believe in those invisible people? If you don’t, then you are an atheist, whether you like it or not, because atheism is simply lack of belief in gods.
Atheism, whether admitted or not, is actually on the increase because science has made historically-based religions unbelievable for rational minds. Of course, many smart, educated people claim to believe. Some even convince themselves they do. But most don’t — not like they believe in, say, gravity.
The Dissident Right must not tie itself to the literal belief in gods. I don’t understand why you even think this is something worth discussion.
You mean invisible people, like George Washington? I have personally never seen him. Therefore he must never have existed. Complete figment of imagination. Like Julius Caesar, Xerxes, and who knows who else.
Atheism (true atheism, not the larping 99.99%) is not a denial of God, it is a denial of metaphysics, along with the science you tout upon which it depends. Good luck with that.
Nobody ever claimed that George Washington was invisible.
Destroying Christianity is key to destroying western civilization and white people, and our schools, media, government have been cultivating us toward this degenerate, weak secular state for decades.
It is sad to see the state of the most theologically and intellectually fountain of The West. Like one of the previous commentators it’s brittle state in comparison to Orthodoxy or something as repulsive as islam is shocking. That said, if the Creep in the Vatican or the head of a major denomination was to come out with a statement similar to the Dalai Lama’s https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dalai-lama-europe-refugee-crisis-immigration-eu-racism-tibet-buddhist-a8537221.html%3famp I think you would see the European Peoples and their diaspora flock to it in droves
Don’t care about Atheists, Agnostics, Islamists, Shintoists, Rock Worshippers, Tree Huggers, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
As for me, give me liberty or give me death:
“Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle”
It is time for “Muscular Christianity.” Way past time.
So, are you going to try to force your religion on the rest of us? Like the Islamists?
I don’t force anyone to do anything. Except to get the eff off my property if I don’t like the cut of their jib. So go and worship nothing, yourself, rocks, moonbats, or whatever else you choose. You go your way and i’ll go mine.
Ha! We’re going to come to your property and not worship the hell out of you!
And there’s the crux of it folks. Not a religion. Just a way of looking at life personally. Riiigghht.
Is it true that superstitious people have no sense of humor?
Better have an invitation……
Evangelicals wield huge elective power, I believe(no pun). Probably the single most decisive electoral block is evangelical Christianity, which is a huge force, particularly in rural areas, fly over. I was thinking to myself that evangelicals have numeric power, but they lack intellectual philosophical moorings and intellectual self confidence, other than in some sui generis individuals like Buchanan and sobran.(always catholic it seems.) hence evangelicals tend to weld their ideology with some prominent ideology of the coastal elites in order to give themselves legitimacy. Neoconservatism and Christian Zionism are the huge prototype, which I view as a horrible Faustian bargain for us all. However, I think I see signs of evangelicism fusing with MAGA ideology. The evangelicals llove trump, as these judge and abortion issues have been his only real victories. Think of the antiabortion MAGA boys. It may be the dawn of something wonderful!
I myself am a Christian atheist. I follow the teachings of Jesus but my real metaphysical belief is atheistic or 99% agnostic. Jefferson called himself a Christian epicurean, and I think he meant the same in slightly cloaked form, as epicureans were atheistic in metaphysics.
Two words for that huge Evangelical elective power. “Vote harvesting”. It’s coming, nationwide. And that will be that.
Pretty much everything the Left is into works like that. I used to love all the “transgressive” art in our college town… that students had to be forced to attend, because it was all the same “epater les bourgeois” stuff from the 1920s. Turns out that everyone who thinks Orange Man Bad – which is everyone in such places — won’t pay $40 a ticket to see a play (or whatever) whose only theme is Orange Man Bad. (They will, however, tax the working class townies out the wazoo to subsidize those productions).
There will always be atheism, because there will always be a bunch of people who will always have a need to howl at the moon about something. When the Proggies take over and no one is allowed to complain about anything that is not on an “approved” list, Christianity will still be out there to bitch about. It may be a theoretical sort of Christianity that doesn’t actually exist in the real world, but when does anything need to be real any more to be denounced? The Left simply conjures up a thing that must “not be tolerated” because it is “not who we are”, and away it goes. Reality has nothing to do with it, and in that sense, the militant atheists are solid fellow travelers with the Left. If anything, picking on Christianity will grow, because who wants to endure the consequences of picking on the Muslims (or the Leftie Jews, for that matter), when that vague concept of Christianity is out there to be flogged, with all the virtue signaling points and social status that can accrue to taking such a stand?
There are a thousand gods. Christians are atheists when it comes to 999 of them.
I’m simply a tenth of a percent more atheist than a Christian.
I’m not sure I understand your thinking. Please define your terms and explain. If God is “a being of which no greater can be conceived”, how can there be a thousand? Are they all equally great so that there is no greatest, of which no greater can be conceived?
“Suppose I go along with the gag. Why do I dismiss all other gods?
Well, in part because there is ample reason to think they do not exist. But also – and far more importantly – because even if they did exist, they would all in various respects be less than ultimate and thus would not be truly divine and worthy of worship.”
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/04/further-thought-on-one-god-further.html
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/04/one-god-further-objection.html#more
The problem is often more that there are many Christians that see God as a “Big Buddy in the Sky” and not a “being of which no greater can be conceived”. The facile “one god further” argument usually comes from someone who gets their theology from some of the loonier aspects of Evangelical Christian culture.
The facile “one god further” argument usually comes from someone who gets their theology from some of the loonier aspects of Evangelical Christian culture.
How so?
It seems pretty clear to me that the argument has nothing to do with the concrete manifestation of the believers’ cultish practices, rather than the ontological status of god himself.
In essence: show me a) why you don’t believe in the 999 pagan gods and b) how your reasons for your 99.9 percent disbelief, don’t apply to the god you happen to believe in.
God is the ground of being for everything else. As such, he has all positive qualities. (A positive quality is one that asserts being, rather than privation. Good asserts being; evil is a privation of good. Light asserts being; darkness is a privation of light. Etc.)
If there is a God that lacks some positive quality, he cannot be the ground of being for things that have that quality.
If we assume two gods with all positive qualities, then by Leibnitz’s law of indiscernibles, they are identical (two things with the same properties cannot be distinguished; it is meaningless to say they are different).
He’s not saying he believes there actually are thousands of gods, all living on Mt. Olympus or something. He’s saying that people around the world and through history believe and have believed in thousands of different gods. Yahweh, Dionysus, Isis, Mithras, etc. He doesn’t believe that any of them exist, including whichever one you believe in. Neither do I.
The gist of his argument is not whether one rejects theism, per se. The gist of his argument is that the Christian God is essentially the same as pagan gods and Christians are therefore atheists in that respect (disbelieving in pagan gods). That’s a false equivalence. See http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/04/one-god-further-objection.html for explication. Ackshually, it’s not really even an argument, more of a quip, like “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or “invisible people who live in the sky.”
Next time, try expressing your point in your own words, rather than linking to some city college teacher’s website: “See! This guy refutes your argument, so there!”
What the guy seems to be saying is that the one-god-more argument is a fallacy because I define god wrong: the 999 gods are not real gods, more like superheroes; only the Christian god is real.
I could be wrong, though, the guy writes with all the clarity you’d expect from a ‘philosopher and writer’ employed at a city college. This is what seems to be the nub of his argument:
Your god is “Pure Actuality”, capitalized, is that right, Derpa? Is that your argument? Jehova is Pure Acutality while, say, the creator god Ymir of Norse legends, is derived from the existence of the Christian god?
But very well, let’s assume you succeeded in disproving all the pagan gods. How does that prove that your personal god exists?
His argument doesn’t prove my God exists. For that you would need to consider the Five Proofs. Nor does it imply pagan gods are derivative, except in the sense that everything that exists (if it exists) has its being through Him. His argument simply states the pagan gods are not essentially the same as the Christian God. I use the link because he states the argument much better than I ever could and for the sake of brevity. He writes with the clarity of someone well versed in material with which a layman might be unfamiliar and he is certainly credentialed enough for someone like me, although you may have higher standards.
http://www.edwardfeser.com/articles.html
http://www.edwardfeser.com/books.html
http://www.edwardfeser.com/about.html
So, you have ample evidence other gods don’t exist?
Somewhere in India right now, a bunch of Hindus are saying the same thing – think the same as you about your religion.
Don’t know if you’ve noticed but millions of Muslims believe in their religion so much they will chop our heads off. They think they have the evidence – just like you.
So who’s right then? You can’t all be right doctrinally and logically. What’s more likely then; you’re all correct? Or all wrong?
Christians don’t necessarily believe other gods to be non-existent.
“For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils”
gods (idols or false gods) vs. God. A misreading of scripture, apples and Orange. Christians DO believe in devils, though.
You ought to understand that Zman is not talking about you. “Atheist” in the dictionary means one thing: disbelief in God. “Atheism” as acted and argued on the public stage is a different thing. It means serving as the mildly disreputable intellectual shock troops of the Prog.
There are not a thousand gods. There might be a thousand interpretations about how god works his will in the material world. Many of those interpretations have been disproven by science. But that is different from saying god has been disproven. It merely proves man has a spiritual yearning and imperfectly tries to understand why, and what to to about it.
But that is different from saying god has been disproven.
Neither can it be disproven that Santa Claus exists. So how come you don’t believe in Santa?
There is always one of you in these debates.
That’s because it’s a 1:1 analogy, a slam dunk, a question begging on bended knee.
I could substitute with “Spaghetti Monster”, “Sky Pixie” or “Russell’s Teapot”, the point remain the same and is never being answered: Why is your invisible friend real, while all the others are just make-believe?
Felix, have you ever loved anyone? Show me under a microscope proof of that love. Or does love not exist in your world either? Proof of God is in the very complexity of the universe, which would take a lot of superstition to believe happened at random, and the enduring belief in a higher power by the majority of humans that have ever existed. Why would the Darwinian evolutionary process allow it’s most complex species to organize itself around a falsehood? God has shown enough of himself to allow us to use our free will to believe or not. You and I have chosen differently. That’s the point.
I do not acknowledge that love is a valid metaphor for faith. Love can be explained without need for the metaphysical.
which would take a lot of superstition to believe happened at random.
There’s no randomness involved, the universe evolved according to the laws of nature.
And the fact that some things can’t be explained by science or even grasped by the human mind, does not make your invisible friend-theory one jot more plausible.
Why would the Darwinian evolutionary process allow it’s most complex species to organize itself around a falsehood?
Religion is obsolete science: an attempt to understand the physical world around us, a yearning that seems innate to our species.
We now have superior explanations, explanations that don’t require angry volcano gods to work. That’s why religion is on the retreat: not because people don’t fear hell, or because they’ve lost the yearning for the numinous, but because the religious cosmology is inferior when it comes to explanatory power – intellectually offensive, even.
You and I have chosen differently. That’s the point.
As I described downthread, I haven’t chosen at all, except in the sense that I’ve chosen not to believe in things without evidence. I was never a religionist, and neither were my parents or any of the people I grew up with.
“Love can be explained without need for the metaphysical.” So explain it, in a way that could not include faith.
“There’s no randomness involved, the universe evolved according to the laws of nature.” And how were the laws of nature created? At some point you have to believe in magic to explain the beginning. You just won’t acknowledge the magic you believe in. Lightening striking primordial ooze and boom, magic? Magic space rocks? Magic deep sea vents? Why won’t any of these scientific guesses work in a laboratory?
“Religion is obsolete science: an attempt to understand the physical world around us, a yearning that seems innate to our species.” So evolution created a yearning so strong that most humans revolve their lives around it, yet it is completely false? How does that advance the species?
“We now have superior explanations, explanations that don’t require angry volcano gods to work.” No, we have limited scientific explanations about how physical things work after they were created. There is no valid scientific explanation for how life came from non-life. The best evolutionists in the world admit they have only guesses as to how and no idea as to why.
No, we have limited scientific explanations about how physical things work after they were created. There is no valid scientific explanation for how life came from non-life. The best evolutionists in the world admit they have only guesses as to how and no idea as to why.
I agree with all that.
But how does that make your invisible friend a better explanation?
As Laplace replied when Louis asked him where God was in his orrery: “It works without that assumption, your majesty.”
“Love can be explained without need for the metaphysical.”
I bet you were a real hit on Valentine’s Day: “Dearest, my love for you is just a chemical reaction with no deeper meaning, that tricks you into bending over and giving me purely physical pleasure in the name of science. I “chemical reaction” you with all my contracting chest muscle.
-Felix
Good one, but I don’t do Valentine Cards, they’re for saps.
But why don’t you explain love, with or without reference to the divine?
“Good one, but I don’t do Valentine Cards, they’re for saps.”
Haha, we finally agree on something. My wife and I go to the card section together, pick out the best cards we can find, exchange and read them, and then put them back. We then kiss and high five each other for saving $15.
“But why don’t you explain love, with or without reference to the divine?”
With the divine, love is a metaphysical experience that allows us to get a small sample of God’s love while we are on earth. This allows us to use our free will to open our hearts and souls to God, which is then filled with his love in the next realm. If you cramp your soul and hate others while on earth, you have used your free will to close your soul to God, and hell is the inability to receive his love.
Love also involves a chemical reaction to encourage reproduction and the raising of future iterations of the species. Yes, there is scientific proof for this physical part of the overall equation, which I believe fits nicely into belief in the divine. Or you can believe the physical aspect is all there is. This is ultimately meaningless because your love dies with you, and thus there was never really a point. That is a sad and cold way to go through life.
At some point you have to believe in magic to explain the beginning.
Not at all. I merely have to accept that there are some things that science cannot explain yet, and may never be able to. Stuffing magic beings into the hole of my ignorance, is not a temptation.
“Where are my car keys?”
“You don’t know? Must be the house elf who took them, then – how else would you explain their absence?”
“I merely have to accept that there are some things that science cannot explain yet, and may never be able to. Stuffing magic beings into the hole of my ignorance, is not a temptation.”
Sometimes in science you cannot see something, but you can intimate its existence by the reaction of everything around it. Humans throughout recorded history have been equipped with intense moral instincts, and have had deep religious experiences that cannot be seen under a microscope, but make no sense from a purely physical perspective. They have then developed systems to try to conceptualize why this happens, and how life came from non-life, and order came from disorder.
I’m sure it’s intellectually satisfying to mock them as believers in elves and flying spaghetti monsters. But to do so, you have to ignore billions of data points of experience, which is not very scientific either. Plus, it can lead to smugness and close mindedness, which is not healthy for anyone. You might think God is for idiots and rubes. But keep your mind open to the possibility. You might be surprised one day.
That’s already been answered.
How can germs be real if humors are not? The argument is quite stupid. The non-existence of some things does not mean no things exist.
How can germs be real if humors are not?
Because germs can be observed with a microscope.
There are an uncountable infinity of wrong answers to the question “What is 2+2.” There is only ONE right answer.
Or,as C. S. Lewis in his book PILGRIM’S REGRESS satirically observed, the inductive method says that “Most stories about the Landlord [God] are wrong, therefore all are wrong.”
Harris only chooses very safe venues for his nonsense. He knows enough to choose those venues wisely, because the wrong one with smart people questioning him would do in his schtick.
I’ve been religiously active my entire life, almost dropping into churches the way a backpacker goes from hostel to hostel in Europe. I see the same problems. I think most denominations are finished, and that in the end this is very good for Christianity. Just as I have no pity for the recent mouse that was declared extinct yesterday in Australia, I have no pity for dying churches. Christianity, on its face, is the most robust belief system ever. It’s only when it attaches itself with time and place that it dies.
The biggest problem I see in Christianity is baby boomers. They’re like Rappaccini’s Daughter for everything they touch, the economy, society, and religion. They can’t resist turning a perfect, quiet, deeply self reflective theology into a social movement. The literally can’t help themselves, as they get up and talk about the fundraiser for Africans. I watch them turn red when I say, “actually our own country is the new mission.” That’s the reality of boomers. They always want to affect some change 10,000 miles away when the horror show is in the same room as them.
They turn the worship to themselves. In their world it’s always 1976, and wow have they dated all of these denominations, currently in free fall. I think it comes down to who will die first, the baby boomers or their churches. Christianity is mostly lost in space these days. There are exceptions to the rule.
J.R.
Proud as I am of my Boomer heritage, you give us entirely too much credit. Apostasy in one form or another has been an oxpecker (love the word) on the Christian Church since its very beginning. Many times some version of an old one reappears periodically.
The Progressive Movement led the attack on Mainline Protestantism from it’s beginning , and certainly since the turn of the last century. See, for example: https://reformed.org/books/chr_and_lib/ [Christianity & Liberalism] The author: https://www.theopedia.com/j-gresham-machen
It is a surprisingly relevant account of the Mainline Churches’ conflict with Liberalism from the early 1920’s.
It is true that the house of Mainline Protestantism fell down in the ’70s & ’80s but the Prog termites had been gnawing away well before the first Boomer took a bragging breath. And a lot of us have no better opinion of the braggarts among us than you appear to have.
You can say that the progressive HIV virus got into Christianity over a hundred years ago, yes. But the full blown AIDS happened under the boomers. Yes, in the 1920s-60’s you had one-off pinko churches that you had to go find, but when the boomers came in those one-offs became the standard. My grandparents were 1920’s and 30’s era Protestants. Even in the 80’s they practiced like 1930’s protestants. Sadly, they had to see the baby boomer hippies take over their mainline church, that they built, with bricks that they paid for, and had to watch these people destroy the whole thing. Even as a child I watched their pain as every meaningful liturgy was turned into some boomer circus show. It was a very sad sight. That church is nearly empty now of course. The same boomer coots shuffle out of it on Sunday, less every year. Also, coastal California was the epicenter of all of this, so I had a front row seat from day one.
J.R.;
Serious question: So why did your believing ancestors cave in to the (as you rightly say) shallow Boomer hippies_? They were *in charge*, after all.
We non-hippy Boomers watched this process in amazement. “These guys won WWII and they won’t stand up to stupid, narcissistic punks and mindless girls who both think mostly with their junk_?”, we thought to ourselves. “Gee, maybe the jerks and sluts are right after all. So why miss out on all the fun_?” Shallow thinking, sure, but shallow-yet-confident is the very nature of youth in every age. In other ages the authorities had a deeper self-confidence of their own.
Apparently the authorities running the Mainline Protestant churches had already been pozzed by doubt from a century of elite intellectual attack and the Feminist ‘Religion of Nice’. Does this excuse Boomers’ pushing on the door_? No. But what does it say about the doorkeepers whose duty it was to push back from a superior position of wisdom_?
Machan (cited above) was proved right. Holding confidently to the timeless standards, dare I say fundamentals, is the only way of preserving civilization.
I blame Church-Ladyism. Once the women realized they could use a warped version of Christianity to further their own base desires, it was downhill from there. The “Temperance” movement, Women’s Suffrage, etc. Now women are in the pulpit and acting as ‘Elders’. We’re back to pagan priestesses and vagina worship.
Watching a woman pastor is like watching a woman play football. It just doesn’t go with the biology. Or like a male “flight attendant” (stewardess) or nurse. This is why things used to be classier. Everyone knew their roles. You want a male pastor.
Bad;
Wow_! Sure, ChurchLadyism is a thing, but that there is a tranny straight from hell. Whew, you can smell the sulphur clear through the webz.
I’d go earlier, but I’m unsure. The Great Awakening and the birth of the progressive movement coincide with the formation of the abolitionists.
I haven’t deep dived into that theory, just done surface level research.
I can’t give this enough upvotes. Between “Sponsoring an African Child”, going on “Mission Trips” and more, modern Churchiainity is all about the benevolent goodwhites going down to spread their largess before the downtrodden. My wife dragged me to one of those Christian music concerts – at the intermission, an Early Xer / Late Boomer got up and went on and on guilt tripping people into Sponsoring an African Child and *how good he felt* and *how much the child thanked him* for helping. It was one of the most Satanic things I have seen – making it all about how *he* was the helper, and how *wonderful* he was for all the good he was doing. No humility, just pride, pride, and more pride. “Look at me, the goodwhite, casting my benevolent gaze on the poor.”
We left at that point, and she didn’t argue. So I didn’t have to sit through another hour of self-praise disguised as “worship music”.
I will be going on one of those mission trips in a year and a half or so, to Central America. I have my question for them already formulated: “Where are all the working age men?” I expect some claptrap response about U.S. imperialism from 30 or 40 years ago. I suspect the government people simply steal everything, so the men sneak into the U.S. to work as gardeners or meatcutters and send money back. It is their response to the theft by their uberklasse, and it is the path of least resistance for them. Just like my going to a Mainline church, I will probably learn a bunch of things they don’t want me to notice.
I have a thousand stories on this. You could have a series just on missionary work gone wrong. The missionary who collected thousands to buy egg laying chickens for this village, only to find out on his next trip that the villagers decided to eat the chickens.
Even worse, the African who comes to speak on his U.S junket, and tells everyone that their Sunday service lasts half the day (implying that ours is inferior). Ive said before, “okay, how about cutting the service to under two hours, and then spending at least three or four hours a week digging a sewer line through the village?” Who stares at an open sewer for a thousand years? Okay guys, let’s rent a trencher.
I’ve always taken the attitude that God hates stupid people and yellow fever was his creation too.
Yep, and so many of them wear Tevas. Teva is the official sandal of these people. They’re peppered everywhere and in every denomination. I recently told my pastor that I would sooner burn all of my money in a pile than give it to the mission fund. I earmark my money directly to the general fund to be spent locally.
Locally? Even then, there are no guarantees.
Listen to Bach or Heinrich Biber. They were still writing for the glory of God in the Baroque era and it shows
“That means atheism is done for as well, unless it moves onto Judaism or Progressivism and that will never be allowed.”
Why?
Paragraph 4 + last paragraph. Atheism needs a thriving Christian church to maintain its negative identity. PC forestalls criticism of Judaism, Islam and progressivism.
I went to an atheist event once where they served kosher food, first i thought it must be some sort of practical joke, like a gag, but later i realized the joke was on me, that kosher food was not served ironically, it was for real.
Probably because there were a lot of Jews there. Many, if not most, Jews in this country are secular. They are part of the tribe but no longer believe in the religion.
That’s very true. The secular Jews I have known view the religious Orthodox Jews as wingnuts. I find it funny that secular Jews love blacks, but blacks hate Jews. And Jews don’t like evangelicals, but evangelicals love Jews.
One thing for sure atheists just f’n love science. Except most of them are too dumb to actually understand much about it. For example, take ‘The Universe is a Simulation’ movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
Apparently it does not occur that a simulation requires a processor to run on and code to run it. Where’d all that come from_?
By the time they’re done describing the how’s of ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is seems an awfully lot like the God they deny exists. Best Millennial rebuttal I’ve heard: ‘Cool, so who wrote the code_?’
I agree that the whole “universe is a simulation” concept is rubbish.
Christianity in the USA could learn a thing or two from Islam with regard to the intersection of “public relations” and “pour encourager les autres.”
Rooster;
The Inquisition did nothing wrong. /sarc
Actually, it had a point in that its purpose was, in part, to regulate the prosecution of heretics using Cannon Law and trained jurists instead of howling mobs. And I say this as a Protestant.
” a good example of the perils of negative identity”
For a non-religious example of this, see “Canada”, a once great country that threw away everything they believed in, in order to be “Not The United States!” Of course, being founded by fleeing Tories will do that to you, but this didn’t really get going until the 1960’s. We always think of Canadians as being more liberal, but I personally believe that, had the United States embraced socialized medicine, bilingualism, and gun control, Canada would be a free-enterprise, english talkin’ gun-owners paradise. Being “Not the USA!” has been more important than any principle. See also all those “Give Peace a Change” liberals who became screaming warmongers whenT rump started talking peace with Syria and the Norks.
True enough, but Canada certainly followed our lead in importing the world to its shores, though Canadians appear smart enough to generally allow themselves to overtaken by high IQ Chinese rather than Mexicans.
Or as an Australian once joked about their immigration policy vs the U.S.: You’re creating a foreign underclass while we’re creating a foreign overclass.
As an aside, I learned of Canadians’ deep antipathy toward Americans (and even deeper desire to not be seen as Americans) when I was traveling around Europe in college. Previously, if I thought of Canadians at all, I saw them as similar to Minnesotans, i.e. boringly nice and capable. But when those friendly Canadian kids hit Europe and found themselves surrounded by people who overtly disliked Americans, it was as though they were freed from their good-guy shackles and could finally say what they always wanted to say: Americans are loud-mouthed assholes (which, admittedly, is true), and we hate living next door to you!
Those Canadians – with their little pussy Canadian flags on their backpacks to show that even though they looked like Americans and talked like Americans, they weren’t Americans – would go off at the drop of a hat about how awful Americans were and how terrible it was to be dominated by their garbage culture. In truth, a lot of their criticisms were valid; however, they sounded like such whiny fags that we couldn’t help but push their buttons out of amusement.
I’ve since spent some time in Canada and around Canadians in the states, discovering, thankfully, that white Canadians and Canada are pretty great. (I could live without the Chinese and Indians in Canada.) But as you said, there remains this resentment/obsession with the States, which, honestly, I don’t get.
Canada is great country – at least for now. Why can’t Canadians just be happy with that?
“Canada certainly followed our lead in importing the world to its shores”
Leave it to the Canadians to copy the most dysfunctional things about America. They also tried, back in the 1970’s, to turn French-Canadians into their own version of Blacks, so that their Cathedral would have their own dysfunctional minority to play with, but, unfortunately for them, the Franco-Canucks were not nearly dysfunctional enough to fulfill the role assigned them.
I genuinely feel sorry for Canada – from the country with possibly the best Army and Air Force of WWII to this, all because of an inferiority complex. As Trump would say, “Sad!”
Orthodox congregations are left alone because the religion is bundled with ethnicity and the atheists fear the appearance of attacking ethnic groups, moreover, it’s difficult for a non-ethnic to infiltrate. The pews are full nearly every service, and the religion permeates yet doesn’t overly regulate daily life.
If you ever seek the equivalent of a triple espresso shot of Christianity, attend an Orthodox church service some time, you will be welcome although congregants may stare a little. There won’t be any guitars, acoustic or electric, but I suspect you’ll find the chanting quite beautiful. It would be helpful to learn a few basic phrases in the lingua fraca, my church Armenian, such as “peace be with you” and the like but this isn’t necessary for attempting to revitalize your Christianity. Try it.
I spent some time in Jerusalem for work, and regularly attended mass at a Catholic chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. As I listened to the masses in French, Spanish, German and Latin, it was very cool to think about the same liturgy being celebrated around the world in different languages each week. It’s too bad this is marred by the homosexual problem in the clergy and a communist pope.
The only guy to venture into this area was Dawkins, but the Prog quickly reminded him who pays his bills.
I don’t know about that. Dawkins was on Al Jazeera, expounding on the falseness and evil of Christianity and Judaism, when he was asked: “how about Islam?”
And Dawkins hemmed and hawed and said that “I don’t know that much about Islam.
I’m from Copenhagen, which arguably is the most atheist city in the world. When I was a child, there were no such things as atheists, because not being superstitious wasn’t an -ism back then.
In my class in school, there was one suspected Christian: his father was a minor church official, and that was enough to deem his son a crazy, although he never confessed his delusion. The only reason he wasn’t bullied, was because he was such a sorry kid to begin with. Apart from a few Jehova’s Witnesses, I didn’t meet an actual Christian until I was seventeen, and didn’t learn the term ‘atheist’ until I high school.
I can confidently state that the poz called “New Atheism” has nothing to do with the genuine article. The idea that not being superstitious is connected to certain political or moral beliefs, would’ve been an insane proposition to me, and when I ponder it, it still is.
So, not believing in God = “not being superstitious”?
Believing in God is being superstitious?
Believing in God is being superstitious?
How is it not?
How do you define superstitious?
Believing in things for which there is zero evidence.
Zero evidence?
Perhaps you mean “evidence I’m willing to accept.” Recall that verbal testimony is evidence in a court of law, even in cases of life and death. There is tons of that sort of evidence regarding Christianity (and the belief in God in general).
One bit of evidence is that the universe is explicable rationally. Apart from a rational source, there is no reason it must be so. Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Teasing that point apart, it involves the belief that reason is truth-telling, and that knowledge about the universe can be obtained by application of reason. These are assumptions that are by no means self-evident, but they are taken for granted because “they work.” Explications of why they work are left by atheists as an “exercise for the reader.” Atheists who struggled with this issue include Stephen Hawking (A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME in the part where he talks about a theory of everything), Charles Darwin (where he talked about the reliability of monkey brains) and H. G. Wells (SKEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT).
I also note a tendency for atheists to talk about the vast mystery and wonder of the universe and how little we know. In the same breath they assert confidently that there is no supernatural. I am not constructing a straw man here — I have seen two instances in media, almost word for word. One was a Sci Fi book by Dan Simmons (PHASES OF GRAVITY: Quote “I believe in the richness and mystery [mystery=what is hidden from our knowledge] of the universe; and I don’t believe in the supernatural.”) The other was the TV show BONES, where the protagonist said roughly the same thing. That protagonist was modeled on a real forensic investigator so I assume it was in character. Also there’s a guy whose name escapes me who has this organization called SCHOOL OF LIFE who, if I recall, does the same sort of thing. Definitely a “have your cake and eat it” kind of thing.
I am so sorry to hear you say that. I can’t change your mind, but it’s still so beneath someone of your intelligence to insult our loving creator like that, just discounting the very source that gives you breath, that gives you a spirit, that gives you life. I realize I sound like a rube to you — I was raised the same way as you, until I came to know better in my 20’s. I was raised by people who were taught that it’s intellectually superior to see religion as a tool for the masses, and that flattering approach is very effective. I’ll note here that both of my parents lost their fathers in WWII. I often wonder if our family’s Christianity would have been kept intact or cultivated if both of my grandfathers had not been killed in WWII but were alive to lead and protect their families, rather than die and leave their children to, in effect, be raised by the secular state (schools, media, government). Specifically in this way, whites — and all their family, heritage, future generations — are killed off by going to war for people who have no regard for them and do not share their Christian culture or values.
it’s still so beneath someone of your intelligence to insult our loving creator like that
I don’t give a fig about your loving (and smiting, let’s not forget that) creator, but I normally hold my punches in regard for His believers, since debating religion leads to… well, look at this thread. No point in trolling people if you can’t move them anyway.
But since our host set the tone for this debate – stating that atheism is a regressive posture only adopted to promote poz – and since there’s a brigade of billygoats goosestepping on my bridge, I think I’m entitled to my five cents.
Respect is a two-way street. To get, you must give.
I realize I sound like a rube to you.
Not at all. I might not be born again, but I’ve met enough Christians not to judge them by their religion.
But you did not answer the question: what differentiates religion from other forms of superstition?
Also, my parents – or any of those around me – didn’t consider religion a tool of capitalism or whatever. They were not intellectuals and they were not political. God was simply not an issue, or at least no more an issue than Allah or Vishnu: interesting folklore perhaps, but nothing to do with politics, ethics or indeed cosmology.
And this attitude was reflected in the role, religion had in Danish mainstream conversation. We had a few Christians in parliament, but Jesus was not a part of their political platform – indeed, had they started spouting scripture, they’d never have been elected.
All this is slowly changing with the influx of Mohammadans: suddenly, we’re supposed to take snake charmers seriously, and the Christian priests have not hesitated to latch onto the imams’ coattails, insinuating themselves back into mainstream conversation.
And before you rejoice, Danish priests are nothing like American ones, they are, in fact, pretty much like the New Atheists Z-Man berates: intent only on pushing the poz and sucking up to Mohammed.
I sometimes speak to Americans considering relocating to Denmark. I advise them to seek church office, as a priest who actually believes in God, would create a sensation in Denmark.
Felix: “And Dawkins hemmed and hawed and said that “I don’t know that much about Islam.” Actually, when he was asked about Islam he said, “The problem with many scriptures, and I think the Koran is no exception, is that you can find a verse that says so & so, and you can find a verse that says the opposite.”
If you say so. I only know about the episode as Douglas Murray related it.
I always thought atheists had to believe and convince themselves that there isn’t a God a lot harder than Christians believe there is one.
But as you say, Churches have been emptying for decades. More and more are turning into museums and in France I have visited a few that now charge an entry fee. Many in Germany have literally sold for 1-Euro just to get them off the books. I know of at least two; one is now a coffee shop and another a book store.
The common argument is “The church is responsible for all the problems in the world.” Which is much like the “all white men are evil” rant. It’s so easy to pick on something, especial when you know it, or they, won’t get upset and react violently. Unlike some people or religions.
One does not have to look hard to find fault with any religion, but Christianity is always the poster child for intolerance, bigotry and hypocrisy. But when you draw a line about what behavior is morally acceptable or not, it makes you an easy target.
Keep in mind the Christian religion teaches “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. Matt 10:14.
Christians are taught to just shake it off and let it go. We’re not weak or cowardly, we simply find no reason to argue for God.
People are walking away from the churches for many good reasons. Lack of faith within the church hierarchy for one. Feminized religion another. The rest is the usual apathy and generally prosperous and safe times to sedate the rest.
I stopped attending mass because of all the un-Christian thoughts I had about being preached to by an ignorant gay pederast
Karl;
Best bit of dialog I’ve heard on the topic: Atheist; ‘I could never go to a church, they’re all full of hypocrites.’ Christian; ‘Come on in, we’ve got room for one more.’
Serious point: Only those with standards can be hypocrites, and the higher the standards the more hypocrites that will be found among those in attendance. NOBODY can measure up to God’s standards. We’re ALL hypocrites that depend on Jesus’ substitutionary atonement. No reason to be defensive about it. Don’t understand the European State Churches’ acceptance of the slander.
I think half of the atheist zeal is the typical liberal smugness that common beliefs are for common people. The other half relates to the consequences of being wrong. If you are a Christian and there is no God, you have wasted time helping others and being uplifted by a fantasy. If you are an atheist and wrong, the consequences are a bit more dire.
Pascal’s wager.
There was an attempt
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Atheism_Plus
Good one, Zman. I never called these folk the “new atheists”, but rather thought of them as “anti-theists”. I also never associated them with the current progressive Left political movement. Food for thought here. I really have never had a problem with atheists or deists. But the new atheists, that’s a whole other story. I have found them to be hostile, ignorant, angry, and childish—with a knowledge of religionous belief on the level of a 5th grader. I simply assume something in their lives turned out badly and they have been rebelling against God (for not preventing such) ever since. Of course, you can’t attack God (he’s omnipotent), so his believers are the obvious next best target.
There is something particularly cruel in such attacks as well. For a great many folk in this declining society, Belief is the only hope they have for a better life ahead. As Epaminondas points out, belief in God is perhaps being disassociated from membership in religious sects. I’d rather believe such than that Belief, itself, is dying out. I hope not.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s son who converted to Christianity maintained that his mother didn’t really disbelieve in God; she was just mad at God.
That’s a wise observation, and Madalyn Murray O’Hair (what a scandal she was, back in the day!) is a perfect example of negative identity.
“Christianity appears to be morphing into a private, bespoke thing in order to survive outside the Progressive orthodoxy.”
It’s going underground just as it did 2000 years ago. Will another Saul of Tarsus be struck blind while hunting Christians down, and change history? I hope so.
The Church went underground in the USSR for seventy years. Now it is roaring back. Evidently there are three new churches opened everyday in Russia. The plan is to have a church within walking distance of every citizen in Moscow within the next few years.
I think this is one of the reasons the Globohomos haaaaate Putin so much. He supports the faith. I don’t know the guy’s soul, but he at least recognizes that the faith is worthwhile to keep society stable.
Indeed. Putin may not be a true believer, but I think much like Trump, he sees value in the institution—at least the reformed institution—of Christian religion. Which is my thought as well. Neither Trump nor Putin would seem to have much use for Islam and that makes sense as well since Islam has no concept of separation of church and state.
I used to know a military intel guy. He showed us pics of Putin having his kids baptized by an Orthodox priest when he was still in the KGB. I saw the pics sometime in the early 1990s when Yeltsin was president.
During Mao’s Great Leap Forward Believers would memorize chapters of the Bible for use in their underground churches. That’s probably happening again today. Also probably something us believers should do here. Just pick a chapter.
You state: “That means atheism is done for as well, unless it moves onto Judaism or Progressivism and that will never be allowed.” and yet every atheist I’ve ever known was a “progressive”. Some so progressive they are down right regressive.
One guy is a gay, anti Christian, white hating leftist with a crush on Spartacus Booker. The only way he can get more progressive is to have his junk chopped off and call himself “She”.
Hmmmm. Dunno if I agree with all that but it does have ring of truth to it.
The faith has survived moslems, communists, fascists, Romans, and every brand of human depravity thrown at it for the last 2000 years. I strongly suspect that it thrives today mostly under the radar. You can put a froot or an angry vagina in the pulpit – but then the faithful leave. They have to go somewhere so they form up again in smaller, more informal groups where the progs cannot push their agenda without starting an actual war.
The remaining churches are getting smarter to. Degenerates and progs are not openly discriminated against; but they aren’t welcomed or given a voice either. Without a platform or an excuse to activate the SJW tribe, they lose interest.
I think also that people are wising up. The wrecked families, the derelict men, their shrieking women… the left is chock full of other demographics that depend on their hosts to survive too…
Who knows. I arrived late to the faith from atheism, and I can tell you from personal experience that those guys don’t have all the answers either, and they tell themselves all manner of lies too.
You’re not wrong about the smaller groupings. Talk to some legit tradcons sometime, they’ll hook you up with some contacts to local private Christian societies and study groups if ask in good faith.
I agree with this post. Just because Christianity is on the decline in the West does not mean it is a dead religion. Sometimes God causes spiritual awakening in certain parts of the world while at the same time withdrawing His hand from a culture in another part of the world to let them reap what they sow. I just read an article the other day that there are over 60 million Christians in China, despite severe persecution from their government. Maybe severe persecution is coming here eventually but that might be what the remaining Christians in this country need to wake them up from their spiritual apostasy.
It’s hard to believe that a three year ministry 2000 years ago could today have billions of believers if it wasn’t real. In the entirety of human history, has there ever been a hoax anywhere near this strong and enduring?
Islam is pretty popular too
There is a lot of cowardice among atheists for attacking a target whose central tenets are loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek. They are pretty quiet when it comes to the religion that believes in killing infidels. I have a coworker who is a loud and proud atheist/environmentalist. That’s the other thing about atheists. If you meet one, you will know about their beliefs within five minutes. He drives a gas guzzling SUV and refuses to acknowledge the religious fervor he has for progressivism. I always tell him I don’t want to hear anything about his beliefs until he rides a bike to work and publicly criticizes Islam.
100% This, you stole my post. 🙂
Atheists, progs, leftards, etc. tend to be cowardly by nature. Go ask some limp noodle armed soy manlet atheist to walk up to the first Muslim he sees and tell them Allah doesn’t exist. LOL… right.
But these same people will aggressively get in the face of some middle aged or geriatric white person with no problem. That is the defacto definition of cowardice. No chance of blowback or consequences and they are ‘all in’.
On a similar note. Atheism itself is a fanatical religion. It is interesting how obtuse and myopic these people are not to be self aware enough to perceive this. They have rituals and rights and beliefs that must be adhered to strictly like any of the canonical religions.
They are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN beyond the shadow of any doubt or question that there is no God, Creator, Prime Mover, whatever. Based on what? Faith. A complete lack of evidence as the matter state prior the Big Bang is unknowable.
So even if you want to take the hardline position of only evidence based reality we can go back to the moment of inception. The entirety of the universe could fit on a pinhead. The question thus becomes– Who Created the Pinhead? Any speculation past that is faith based. Full stop.
Atheism is not a religion. The definition of the word is clear: no belief in gods. That’s all it is. I am an atheist. Not only that but a “geriatric white person” to use your term. (I like “old white man” better.) Never in my life have I ever seen or even heard of an atheist “get in the face” of someone to argue religion. You seem to be describing a Leftist who actually practices the Religion of Progressivism, not a generic “atheist”. Atheists come in all political persuasions. They are just people who could not make themselves believe in the invisible super-people. And most of them keep it to to themselves in public, to maintain the peace.
“They are just people who could not make themselves believe in the invisible super-people.” Thank you for proving his point.
I’ll chime in. There are atheists out there who don’t fit the definition of the fanatics everyone likes to complain about. You wouldn’t know it though as they generally keep it to themselves unless asked. Also because these loudmouth atheists grab all the attention, a lot of young atheists tend to take after them because they don’t know any better. Once they get older and realize how pointless it is they stop making such a big deal about it.
I object to you calling that Huwyte Tribal Elder a “geriatric white person.” Cultural colonialist!
When you say “no belief in gods” do you mean that as an uncertain or certain statement? That is, something you think is true but can’t prove, or something you know with every fiber of your being and brain is as true as simple arithmetic? Are you a weak, middle or strong atheist?
I’m also an atheist, and I’m perfectly aware that a lot of self-described atheists show all the worst features of religious belief. They’re dogmatic, self-satisfied, and look down on others who don’t share their (un)belief.
Probably the most annoying things about Atheists is that so many of them are intellectually dishonest. Like Libertarians or communists they’re are always “Tap Dancing” and playing the “No True Scotsman” game. Make a generalization about them, and they’ll respond “Hey, I’ve never met anyone like that”. Talk about specific Atheists and they’ll respond “Hey, that’s just one or two people – that’s meaningless”. And it goes on and on.
I’m an atheist, and your characterizations are absurd. I’m 6’1″, 225, and spent six years as a Marine Corps sniper. At 55, I can still bench 315, squat 475, and I regularly backpack two weeks at a time with 80-90 lbs on my back. Come visit me in Montana and I’ll give you a taste. I am also as hardcore dissident right as you will ever meet.
Atheism is not a religion. It is simply the absence of belief in claims for which there is no empirical evidence.
Frankly, considering the shared concern readers of this blog have for the existential crisis whites now face, I am surprised at the defense of organized religion and specifically Christianity. Much of the guilt that whites have had heaped upon their psyche regarding POC has its genesis in church teachings. My lack of religious moral constraints keeps my thinking clear. If and when action becomes necessary, I will have no unnecessary moral distractions. I will be capable of doing what must be done.
Christian churches have been prime movers in the immigration racket and are culpable for much of the mass third world immigration into our country.
I haven’t seen any defenses of organized religion in this thread so far. Please point out where I am wrong about this. Also, in your statement you pretty much make clear that much of your belief system is based on opposition to organized Christianity. Read the original post up top. You have just spent a rant making Zman’s point.
Really? Post your picture. Give us some proof. You’d amazed at how many men are 6/4 on the internet. No one is ever 5/4. In fact, every man on the internet seems to be over 6 feet and good looking.
At the top of Huckleberry Lookout in Glacier National Park with my daughter, S&W 500 for Grizzly defense.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/D69o4p3E6cnmTcnv5
Boom. Well said cobber.
Over the years I have run across a few of these types. Once I know they’re pushing “environmentalism” – yet drive a big SUV , or rail incessantly about Christians but remain mute about Islam …… it’s a perfect opportunity to just tear them apart.
It’s why I like watching Jordan Peterson debate progressives on Youboob – I watch him because it’s like job training.
If you can’t make them cry – you can at least make a proggie look foolish enough to shut them the hell up. There’s a couple of progressive idiots at my job that simply will not talk to me any more.
So the technique works………….
On paper, one would expect the left to begin musing about “restricting religion to consenting adults” as is the current practice in China. But if applied neutrally this would mean a ban on circumcision of minors, and we know where that goes. So the left must use other methods, mostly the use of corporate power, to force Christians to closet themselves. What they have been very good at doing is using the mainline denominations to subvert the old sexual ethic. Few are willing to label mainline Prots and James Martin S.J. as “apostates” or “heretics”.
In the week preceding the Covington Dreyfus affair we saw a hatefest from the left called “Expose Christian Schools”. The power of this should not be minimized, as a future Dem administration will push to revoke the tax-exempt status of any “discriminatory” institution, and make any discriminatory statement in public subject to civil damages.
Environment plays a role. Religion (including the dominant Christian variety that arose on the European Continent) is an effective tool for passing ancient wisdom between generations. It’s persistence over many centuries is proof that this cultural trait helps it’s tribe to survive and thrive in the time of civilization. The decline of religious practices is occurring because wisdom transfer is no longer a necessary survival mechanism in this time of post-scarcity affluence. We are at a very odd breakpoint in evolution.
It is generally accepted that belief and language co-evolved. In my view, it is a mistake to think of belief as the narrow subset that is official religion. Belief is a much stronger and more complex set of traits that can be summarized as a willingness to believe in a purpose to the universe. The practical application is, as you point out, really useful as a carrier of information. I’ve often called religion the gasoline of civilization. It packs a tremendous amount of usable energy per volume and is stable if handled properly.
The modeling suggests that complex language use preceded enhanced cognitive reasoning (which enables abstract belief and likely is tied to the bicameral attribute of brain physiology). It is likely that initial language use directly enhanced basic survival, e.g. threat warning and danger avoidance, food acquisition, environmental coping mechanisms, etc. In addition, paleoanthropological studies (brain cavity analysis) suggest that significant cognition capability came along as much as tens of thousands of years after complex language use began.
That sounds like a terrible model. There would be no need for complex language without complex ideas. Language is just a representation of thought. A better model is one where language and abstract thinking co-evolved. Belief is the ultimate in abstract thought. To accept something as real or even possible, without evidence is a big leap. To think it means you need a grammar to express it. If you can express it, you can pass it on, setting off a reaction like the old room full of mouse traps and ping pong balls gag.
This dynamic of cognitive traits co-evolving would also explain the rapid evolution of intelligence.
I think we might be engaged in a semantic misunderstanding. Mental habits are not beliefs per se, but rather more like reflex reactions. Many species can teach their young to adopt constructive behaviors, and some have large enough vocabularies to allow sophisticated interactions with humans. Adopting new survival skills (via language or mimicry) is directly beneficial in a world of hardship and existential threat; whereas abstract thinking likely has no immediate benefit or other species would have paralleled our evolution. Cave art didn’t appear until about 40,000 years ago.
See Lev Vygotsky
A belief in God and a belief in a specific religion are two entirely different things. Nowadays being specific in your avowed choice of church means that you must override current knowledge of the universe in order to sustain the faith. By abandoning dogma many of us don’t need “faith” to assure ourselves of the existence of the supernatural. You’re not going to pin us down. We just believe God exists. Now quit bothering us.
“Spirituality”, “religion”, and “faith” are all different things to which atheists did a piss-poor job reconciling them.
Then this argument does not apply to you whatsoever, what are you complaining about? Agnostic (and/or Deist) is a thing ya know- a VERY different thing than atheist. Relax…
Not really. Atheist means “does not believe in gods”. It does not mean you know there are no gods. Nobody can know that; you can’t prove a negative. Agnostic means you “have no knowledge” of any gods. Seems like that’s pretty much the same as “does not believe”. A Deist, on the other hand, believes in a creator god.
It’s a fallacy that you can’t prove a negative.
No it isn’t.
Let’s use an easy example.
As far as we know there are no living dinosaurs, birds don’t count here, on Earth .
However its not possible to examine a fraction of the areas in which they could live and in fact there are traditions that they do exist such as Nessie and Moloke Mbembe
So we can’t prove it.
There are a lot of things that we believe that can’t be proven.
Now as to the original thoughts on Atheism, my opinion here its complicated
The militant in your face atheism seems to be fading away and frankly no one will miss it . A passive “don’t know, don’t care.” atheism seems to be growing all over the developed world , the less developed world is getting a bit less religious I’d guess as well as they develop
However the only groups with ultra high birth rates and strong retention in the US are highly religious so its probable over the long haul , the US will be a very very religious country
Assuming that its not destroyed by a civil war or subsumed by Democratic immigration policy , the most fertile groups will be Amish, Orthodox Jews and a smattering of others, mostly Christian
This will change the US into something we won’t recognize in any way other than it being White not that we’ll be around for it.
My general guess is that European nations will decline in population but will not be devoured by Islam or foreign invasion
Assuming this is the case, they’ll be the tech hub of the world along with China and the US will be a very backwards theocracy
How far back we go I do not know, if resources or breakthroughs aren’t there it could a little or it could a lot.
One of the big reasons atheists don’t reproduce is that the don’t know don’t care attitude seeps into other areas of life.
I must “Override current knowledge of the universe”, to believe in a specific religion, must I? Sure about that?
Ok. What is your specific religion?
Christianity?
Fine. We’ll assume Derpa is the spokesman for Hoyos. Since we now know that the universe is older than 6,000 years, that pretty much blows out the Genesis genealogy script. It gets much worse. Without original sin, there is no reason for Jesus to show up. But original sin is based on the Garden of Eden story, which is based on the concept of the Earth being the center of God’s creation. That notion was disrupted by Kepler and his fellow heretics like Copernicus and Galileo who used telescopes and other things to bring us a picture of our universe that has NOTHING to do with biblical stories. I am merely scratching the surface here. The point I’m getting at is simply this: you don’t need some weird Desert Dogma to believe in God. Trust me. It isn’t necessary. Peace.
Oh, I see, you take everything in the Bible literally, i.e., the words at face value without regard for context, parable, simile and metaphor? Not gonna fudge about “literally” or ” literalistically. “
Without sin, Christianity folds its tent. To get to sin, you start with Adam and Eve. If that works for you, fine. Many of us are looking for something else. You can interpret the Bible from now to infinity and will always have someone who disagrees with you. Fundamentalists believe every word, others believe whatever they want. Have at it.
Pretty much every kind of society folds its tent without sin, original or not. Even the atheists realize this. That’s why they want to make religion a sin.
The ones I know are angry people who will not even go into a church. They can’t be bothered to enjoy the expressions of beauty in a cathedral because of their all-consuming hate/fear of expressions of faith.
I’m pretty sure young earth creationism is a minor subset of Christianity. Catholics haven’t subscribed to it. I don’t know where there’s anything in the Bible about the earth being the center of the universe. As far as I know Kepler never found the center of the universe.
The better question is what current knowledge (not theory or speculation) of the universe must one override?
(and my captcha contained “666” in it – no kidding)
He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me.
Everything goes back to Jesus of Nazareth and His Resurrection. If you deny that He the Resurrection, then He was a fraud and evil, and you throw away all of the culture Mr. Z is promoting. It would all be based on a lie. If you believe it, then who is the “you” he is talking about in this passage from Luke? The Church, the Roman Catholic Church, teaches it is the bishops.
One could believe in God and hate Him
I think new atheism is just the original version of punching right. I grew up in an atheist household. Everyone talked about how terrible generic religion was but it was really always about Christianity. I noticed that when I was pretty young that they were just hitting that thing they knew and they didn’t know it very well. And it’s actually one of the reasons I wish Christopher Hitchens had lived because shortly before he died he realized that Islam was way worse than Christianity. That would have been kind of fun to watch
I have Catholic friends who maintain there is no God. In discussing things with them, you quickly discover they have no knowledge of anything other that the Christianity they are rebelling against. When I point out that plenty of Hindu mystics find their arguments amusing and childish, they start sputtering. They gain no traction against religious beliefs outside their consciousness. These people seem to be baying at the moon.
Another problem I see is at atheism has been associated with higher IQ. I was definitely told this in my family and I see it in the culture at large so now people think they’re smart just for saying they don’t believe in God. They don’t bother with any critical thinking, any learning at all, they just think they turn into a genius by saying there is no God. And alternatively anyone that believes in God can be dismissed out of hand because obviously they’re an idiot. This is the phrase I heard growing up. Anyone that believes in God is either stupid or delusional. Seriously that’s what I was told most of my young life
It also carries some assumptions such as “religion is for low IQ people” which is clearly insane and that high IQ = wise choices. High IQ is also associated with alcoholism, for example.
We do not have a phrase “Good Genius”. It is “Evil Genius”. I’m good with good over genius.
If your friends maintain there is no God, then they cannot be professing Catholics, right? Or is that inference meant to be understood by the discerning reader?
I am thinking of three people in particular. No further inferences.
I’ve met quite a few priests that I suspected deep down were atheists.
He only started to criticize Islam when he no longer cared about his career because he knew his time was running out. Atheists love Islam, for the most part. Atheists are only comfortable killing Christians when they have total power, islamists are willing to do it even when they have the disadvantage. The extreme, focused, and ultimately self-destructive and irrational hatred that the rabbit atheists have towards Christians seems to have an almost Supernatural element to it.
I’m talking about the really nasty atheists of course not just the regular atheist that lives down the street.
People who don’t believe that rabbits exist are scary.
An atheist could not “love Islam” as a religion because belief in Islam means a belief in a literal god and atheists do not believe in gods. In fact, Islamists execute people for atheism.
Gary, you are caught between what your theory predicts should happen and what actually happens. Wouldn’t you agree that many atheists gleefully attack Christianity yet are strangely reticent about criticizing Islam?
My annoying progressive and proudly atheist sister demonstrated this. She was smugly insulting Christians for their stupidity and I asked her if her criticisms did not equally apply to Muslims. Her shocked, blank look showed that my question had literally never crossed her mind. To this day, she would never criticize Islam, because its adherents are not white.
I’m not Gary but I’d have to strongly disagree with your point about letting other religions off the hook. Dawkins has been a very vocal opponent of Islam from the beginning. And in The God Delusion he devoted quite a bit of space to pointing out that the Jewish religion doesn’t apply the same standards of behavior for how Jews treat non Jews as opposed to how they treat each other.
When Dawkins has attacked Judiasm or Islam -he’s gotten massive blow back from the Left. And… he shuts up and goes back to attacking Christianity. He does the same thing on almost every left-wing issue. Sometimes he’ll make an Un-Pc remark about genetics or whatever, only to retreat and apologize. Look at his absurd behavior over the Rebbeca Watson incident. He’s Brave Sir Robin.
This is from four years before he died. He was paying attention to the realities of Islam
https://www.city-journal.org/html/facing-islamist-menace-12993.html
What is it they used to say? “If you’re a Christian, you’re already an atheist with respect to countless gods; we just believe in one god fewer than you do.” They had lots of zingers against religion in general, but spent an inordinate amount of time talking about just how downright mean the God of the Old Testament is. But if anything, they didn’t focus on Christianity exclusively enough to maintain their prominence. Hitchens was the most vocal against Islam, but the others had to maintain some semblance of intellectual honesty and consistency, which was too much to allow them to continue into the woke world of 2019. Islam is now too entrenched in the coalition of the fringes; not so much in the United States, but the whole discourse needs crossover appeal in the elite European left, which is too far Islamized to tolerate it. The woke had no qualms in forgetting about them. I’ve got about a dozen friends who used to follow Hitchens religiously (p.i.) but who now think the hijab is a symbol of female empowerment. The left nurtures a market for intellectual opposition to its enemies as long as the intellectual argument doesn’t also present a case against its friends. So now the left is back to hating Christians based exclusively on feels, not reals.
This seriously weirds me out. Why does atheist = hates religion? I grew up in an atheist household in Central Europe where nobody ever talked about religion. Just not interested. Something that happens with grandmas in old villages, not in the city.
Who and how changed the meaning of the word “atheism” to someone who hates religion as opposed to someone who simply does not participate in it?
My household did not deny God’s existence. Basically that kind of debate is way too intellectual. They did not care about such philosophical stuff. For them religion was practice, going to the church vs. not going. A social practice. Urban people did not go anymore, so they didn’t. My father was not stupid but uninterested in abstract questions like God or even much of morality beyond basic honest dealing and not screwing people over.