(I promised this a while ago but got busy. Here it is, a WIP) Atheism the Religion People are offended by my comparison of atheism and religion. How dare I! But the evidence is too compelling. A careful analysis of atheism shows many, if not all of the hallmarks of the religions it has detested. We need to face facts and not hide behind our belief systems. Here I point to several lines of evidence that cumulatively demonstrate that, inadvertently, atheists have become what they hate. Atheism is a religion. When you think of religion, you think of gods. You think of religious buildings. Perhaps holy books. But this is a mistake. These three things are stand-ins, tokens, representations of higher ideals. Holy books are a token of metaphysical truth, reflecting claims about God and reality, and should not be contravened by non-authoritative sources. Religious buildings are communal places, where the likemindedly religious can experience a meeting of minds, and social reinforcement. And God, as Paul Tillich opined, was our object of ultimate concern and ground of being. So we have three features of religion which are conceptual stand-ins: An object of ultimate concern and ground of being, a practice of mind-meeting, and ultimate truth about our ultimate concern and ground of being. The object of ultimate concern and ground of being are two aspects of God folded into one. The former aspect is what we would think of as the identity of the most important thing we value (God), and the latter aspect concerns the nature of reality, given the existence and nature of God. While the latter aspect says given the existence of God, the nature of reality is a certain way (a metaphysical claim, that entails, per some, the existence of a spiritual realm, angels, demons, spirits, etc), the former aspect says there exists something we care the most about. The shocking result is that atheists meets all these criteria. They have an ultimate concern- humanism (or more narrowly, self-determination). They have a metaphysical claim- metaphysical naturalism- which purports to influence their view of the former (usually resulting in self-contradictions and inconsistencies). And they have the practice of mind-meetings (Youtube, internet forums like reddit, facebook groups, etc). The typical rebuttal: Atheism is just the claim that one lacks a belief in God and no more. The atheist here is guilty of equivocation. Appealing to the dictionary definition and ignoring the larger worldview, one that, for instance, lauds science, logic, reason, evidence, freethinking, etc. When we look at the broader worldview, there is no need to fall back on the narrowness of definitions.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 18:00:19 +0000
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