Sir Anthony Hopkins: I couldn’t be an atheist

Life.

 

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And your atheism isn't helping you with that?

 

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It doesn't pay bills.
But, then again, I doubt that theism, in and of itself, does either.

 

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Then what use is atheism, if it doesn't help you sleep at night and doesn't pay the bills?

(Leaving aside the possible uses of theism or lack thereof.)

 

Of what use is any stance that doesn't do the above?
Should we confine ourselves to simply earning money and not thinking about anything else?
Are you telling me that theists never lay awake at night wondering how they're going to make ends meet?

 

I agree with that pretty emphatically. History verifies it.

Yes. Religion typically symbolizes a culture's highest values. So this-worldly leaders and would-be leaders have often tried to justify their own agendas by appealing to religious principles. More recently in the secular West, wars have been justified by appeals to economic justice, human rights and things like that. Maybe it's less overtly religious than it used to be, but it's still a similar appeal to higher principle.

As you've witnessed, atheists HATE it when people say that.

I don't entirely agree with it myself. Part of the problem here is that just like the word 'God', the word 'religion' doesn't really have a clear and distinct definition. Different people mean different things when they use the word. It's kind of a family-resemblance deal.

But yeah, there is something to be said for your idea. Atheism does share some characteristics in common with religion. It's obviously a closely-related family of points-of-view about religious matters. It often makes ontological assertions about the reality of the transcendental objects of religious faith. And like fundamentalist religion, militant atheism is often accompanied by evangelism, by over-wrought emotional passion, by scientistic faith, by self-righteousness and by willful-ignorance about the religious traditions that they attack and dismiss.

 

Atheists are half way there, lol. That is if we can go so far as to say that the universe and the natural laws are invariant. I can see some common ground between the invariance of religions and nature. Atheists are half way there if the steps are 1) the God of any given religion, 2) Atheism, and 3) God is nature.

 

Not much.

Oh, but earning money involves so much more than just earning money!


Mark Nepo (a fancy new-age poet) says:

I disagree with him on that bolded part, even if it is a popular opinion.

I believe that human beings who have "drowned" cannot still go to work, nor can they "fall from the sky" and still fold laundry.
I don't believe it is possible for humans to become zombies - and go on living. Perhaps they can do that for a while, but not for long.

I suppose they might.

 

Then laying awake at night would seem to be nothing to do theism/ atheism.

 

LoRaan:

I also would like to know: what beliefs are involved in atheism? I'm particularly intrigued to know what set of beliefs are involved.

 

It has to do with something.

 

Or lots of somethings...
Did I pay that bill?
Have I got enough to pay the bill that's coming next week?
I've left the washing out, is it going to rain?
Should I have really said that to his face?
Why doesn't he/ she like me?
Where did I put that book?
If I cube the result will that give me a better match?
Etc.

 

Sure. And one's life philosophy should be such that it can accomodate for any and all stress, without negative consequences.
Lying awake at night is a sign that one doesn't yet have such a philosophy.

 

Hmm, unless one's philosophy is "it's bed time, bugger everything I'm not going to think about anything BUT sleep" (and one has the additional capability to stick to that), I'm not entirely convinced.
Life just throws up afterthoughts, usually at the least opportune time.

 

Which is why it behooves to have a philosophy (and a practice) to deal with them.

 

I don't think that atheism and theism have a whole lot to do with science. (That despite the fact that atheism loves to wrap itself in science's flag.) Both are making assertions about the existence or non-existence of purported transcendental beings. And those transcendent beings are outside the scope of natural science, simply by definition.

If 'atheism' means a flat categorical denial of the existence of "God" (whatever that word means), I pretty much agree with you.

Of course, it's possible to be an atheist in a weaker sense. I would include myself in that category.

I'm basically an agnostic in epistemological terms. In other words, I don't have knowledge of transcendental things. My knowledge is restricted to this natural universe that I find myself in. I'll even go further, and make the stronger statement that I don't believe that any other human being has access to transcendental knowledge either.

So, having said that, I don't believe in any of the deities of the world's religions. I don't believe in Yahweh, in Allah, or in Vishnu.

And the fact that I don't believe in X (fill in the variable with the deity of your choice) just kind of implies that I'm going to proceed in life on the assumption that X doesn't exist. So unlike the Sciforums atheists who are trying very hard to finesse this point, I'll happily say that for people who aren't totally ignorant of the question, their lack of belief in X does seem to naturally imply that they also have some degree of disbelief in X's ontological existence.

And I'll agree with you that there's inevitably going to be a strong element of faith in that. (Using 'faith' as a synonym for 'trust' or 'confidence'.) It's a working assumption we might say, a hypothesis, and it might conceivably be mistaken.

Nevertheless, I think that it's a rational position to take. Whatever transcendent realities (if any) stand beyond this physical universe and may arguably explain and account for it, I think that I can say with quite a bit of confidence that they aren't likely to correspond very closely to the Yahweh of Hebrew mythology, the Allah of the Quran, the Krishna of the Gita, or any of the cosmic Buddhas and Boddhisattvas. I'm not convinced that these kind of mythological figures have any existent referrents at all. So in other words, I can say that I don't believe that any of these figures literally exist, ontologically speaking, as anything other than figures from mythology.

But obviously I don't absolutely know that for a fact. There's no way that I could.

 

Sometimes. Perhaps there is a feud in some village in Africa, and one party accuses the other of witchcraft. It wasn't superstitious belief that caused the violence. However, you could point to other religiously motivated crimes such as the Jim Jones cult suicide and say that the belief was directly responsible for the mass death. Certainly, it was religion that divided Jews from all the Europeans that every so often tried to kill them.

But having a set of beliefs is not what defines a religion. Scientific belief is based on empirical evidence. Religious belief is based on faith.

I agree with you that atheists cannot disprove every conception of God, but atheism is the default position, since it is aligned with scientific naturalism. With the failure of theists to show reliable evidence, atheism prevails. You are incorrect that anecdotal evidence becomes more compelling if it cannot be disproved. There are an infinite number of premises that cannot be disproved.

This is basically an elaborate "god of the gaps" argument, which says that we cannot know anything if we don't know everything. Obviously we do know many things without having to know everything, that's how science works, by building on previous knowledge.

 

Someone is an atheist if they answer no to the question 'Do you believe in a god or gods?'. That is NOT the same as answering yes to 'Do you believe there are no gods or god'.

If there is insufficient evidence to believe something exists then you disbelieve the claim by default. It is the rational position, else you'd believe EVERYTHING. Bigfoot, Santa, Allah, Jesus, Buddha, pixies who steal my socks, everything.

Thus it takes less belief to be an atheist if the atheistic stance you take is the lack of a belief in a deity, rather than actively believing there is no deity.

None of that needs to be done to justifiably say "There is insufficient evidence to believe a god or gods exist therefore I don't believe such claims".

Then you admit that atheism, the lack of believing the claims of god or gods, is a justified position. End of story.

Funny how we have anecdotal evidence of contradictory gods. Thus such evidence can be dismissed.

No, anyone who claims otherwise should just know what atheism means. You aren't such a person.

 

Some of you guys have “if’s”, “maybe’s”, and “could be’s”, but these are just unsubstantiated pronouncements, too, for nothing shows that they could be.

And this is even compounding the situation after the unshown declarations of ‘God’, an obviously unethical stance of stating an unknown as truth and fact.

Then it is thought that God and His realm must be non-visible and undetectable, another unfounded position, for this has not been shown to be possible.

Then there is the testimony of human mammals via there internal states uninformed by any externals on every superstition known to human kind, many of them contradictory. These can never show anything concrete. The states of being are internally blind to the neurological states beneath.

Then we still have “maybe this” and “maybe that”, which are still doomed since there is still no showing that they can even actually be a “maybe”.

So, then, take by reason of “faith’? ‘Faith’ means an ‘unknown’ and so there can be no faith ‘by reason’. You fell for the trick of a word shortcut not actually having any substance.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other explanations for what goes on that even involve what is actually known of existence. Imagine that! No, you don’t have to imagine it, as it can be shown.

 

Not to mention what so wonderful about sleeping extremely sound at night safe in the knowledge Xenu is keeping the Intergalactic Federation of blah blah, Blah, at bay?

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