I find its more efficient just to reciprocate in kind.
"Atheism has a Richard Dawkins problem"
- Thread starter Musika
- Start date
Except maybe 100 million people in the world have an idea of Dawkins views on atheism and maybe 1.75 people have an idea of yours.
The fact that you are not in the league of influencing anyone regarding atheism (either for or against or anything in between) on the scale of Dawkins, despite your so-called ignorance of him, proves my point. Your provincial views on what atheism is or how it should be, are so close to zero as to be practically zero. You may imagine there is no "world of atheism", but the "world of atheism" gives zero fucks what you (or I) think to the contrary. The difference between your ideas of atheism and my ideas of atheism us that I am citing sociological phenomena outside my personal beliefs.
Reciprocating with a fool warrants a different approach.
You're not adding anything to the discussion. Awareness of Dawkins says nothing about his influence.
And yet actual atheists seem to agree more with my idea of atheism than with yours. When you get on an airplane, do you go up to the pilot and tell him you know more about flying than he does?
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
You mean a hierarchy.
If one is not aware of Dawkins influence in the world, it's not clear how one could hope to add anything to the discussion.
The irony is that you are presenting a model of atheism (the "valueless, absence of belief, etc) that is identical to Dawkins (and to be fair, et al). . No doubt you interpret this as "great minds think alike, as opposed to giving any due cause to broad sociological machinations arising from living in the digital age.
But in this case, you are not a pilot. You are trying to float a sort of rugged individualistic atheism that defies the experience of someone who was not raised by wild animals.... its kind of like being a "flat earther" of the sociological field.
Ever heard of hierarchies that don't utilize organizational structure?
If one thinks Dawkins has an influence on the world, the the onus is on that one to demonstrate that influence.
Nothing ironic about that. Dawkins and I probably agree on what water is too. That isn't evidence of collusion. If you disagree, though, it suggests that you don't know what you're talking about.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
I give zero fucks whether something said about atheism comes from someone famous.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
What's your point?
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
No. I'd be interested to hear of them though.
That's a really big question, so I'm going to take the cheapest, shortest route for the moment, until I can manage a bigger answer. The first part is to defer to the second question:
(1) Yes.
(2) Looking back to notions of synthesis, you're probably using the wrong word; atheism might, by definition, preclude synthesis. Setting aside that bit of pedantry, though, it's all interactive, reactionary, and recursive:
• Data sample: Sometime in the last quarter-century, I think it was, Seventh-Day Adventists encountered a really bizarre problem. There is a practice called "Bible paraphrase", and as dubious as many might find it, we might have expected SDAs to really have a problem, and, actually, they did, but the point was so egregious that they got caught up discussing the particulars instead of the generally bad idea of rewriting the Bible to make it sound better. In this case, and it's been corrected, I think, because the current version doesn't have it, but there was also a discussion guide I don't have access to, at this time, that might be what I saw years ago. I don't mean to be vague, but that's the thing, you're not actually going to believe me: In Genesis 3, when the Lord reflects on Adam and Eve having consumed Knowledge and now need only consume from the Tree of Life in order to "become like us", this portion of Blanco's Clear Word had the Father explaining to the Son that the Fall from Grace was part of the Plan, and people approximately my age might well remember an old atheistic argument about Christendom being a racket that extorting faith in Christ as price to correct the specific Will of God. Christianists loathed this point, and then one of theirs went and handed it out like candy.
• Data sample: There is a possibility that Jesus, as person or character in a story, knows—i.e., recognizes—something contemporary Sufis are known to suggest they've known since before religion proper existed. To the one, it was a Christianist nutjob who handed me that rusty nail. There are many presuppositions that go into it, but that's the thing about literary criticism and the psychoanalytic meaning of history; those presuppositions can be highlighted, and either reinforced or broken. And there is emotional gratification if one can study enough of the history and pay enough attention to what religious people are actually saying; there is, for instance, actually some emotional reward in trading soteriology for a cosmic joke. No, seriously, if we attend Abramism in its own context, high religion was allegedly dead before it ever emerged in Abramic monotheism.
• Data sample: Judaism tracks itself back to the fifth millennium BCE, and by that framework Abraham's covenant with the Lord is said to have occurred between the twenty-second and twentieth centuries BCE. Shamot (Exodus) itself appears to have been codified to its present form in the sixth century BCE. First Isaiah and two minor prophets of the Old Testament, Micha and Hosea, are placed in the seventh Century BCE, with the record of Amos composed or assembled in the late eighth or early seventh. This might seem obscure compared to the generality of the prior samples, but there is still a general punch line. Because the Sufis, for whatever reason, attach themselves to Islam despite claiming to precede all of it, and before there was Islam there was a shahada, and it comes from the eighth century BCE: "There is no God but God, and Salih is His Prophet." And like I said, the punch line is kind of general; it has something to do with the idea that high religion was dead in the Islamic tradition before there was ever a shahada, and coincidentally that latter coincides with the rise of formal monotheism in the Abramic experience among the Hebrews.
• Data sample: There is a possibility that Jesus, as person or character in a story, knows—i.e., recognizes—something contemporary Sufis are known to suggest they've known since before religion proper existed. To the one, it was a Christianist nutjob who handed me that rusty nail. There are many presuppositions that go into it, but that's the thing about literary criticism and the psychoanalytic meaning of history; those presuppositions can be highlighted, and either reinforced or broken. And there is emotional gratification if one can study enough of the history and pay enough attention to what religious people are actually saying; there is, for instance, actually some emotional reward in trading soteriology for a cosmic joke. No, seriously, if we attend Abramism in its own context, high religion was allegedly dead before it ever emerged in Abramic monotheism.
• Data sample: Judaism tracks itself back to the fifth millennium BCE, and by that framework Abraham's covenant with the Lord is said to have occurred between the twenty-second and twentieth centuries BCE. Shamot (Exodus) itself appears to have been codified to its present form in the sixth century BCE. First Isaiah and two minor prophets of the Old Testament, Micha and Hosea, are placed in the seventh Century BCE, with the record of Amos composed or assembled in the late eighth or early seventh. This might seem obscure compared to the generality of the prior samples, but there is still a general punch line. Because the Sufis, for whatever reason, attach themselves to Islam despite claiming to precede all of it, and before there was Islam there was a shahada, and it comes from the eighth century BCE: "There is no God but God, and Salih is His Prophet." And like I said, the punch line is kind of general; it has something to do with the idea that high religion was dead in the Islamic tradition before there was ever a shahada, and coincidentally that latter coincides with the rise of formal monotheism in the Abramic experience among the Hebrews.
Atheism is as atheism does, which is precisely nothing. As a political argument, though, it is indeed bound to its reactionary nature pretty much until it can exterminate all irrationality everywhere in human thought. It's one thing to slay gods; anthropomorphization of everything in Nature to become one simple idea with very human, very relatable tendencies is not going to stop anytime soon. As an evolutionary outcome, we humans have not selected away from these creative and comparative faculties. Nor have we abandoned our curiosity. Questions that defy language often have answers that defy sense.
Some choose vendetta, or if not that some aspect of keeping up with the Joneses, as an atheistic reaction. For the ostensibly rational, keeping up with the Joneses of the lowest common denominators of institutional political religion is something of a roll into the gutter.
Forcing the theistic political discourse to change by leaving it nowhere to go is probably the most obvious manner of transforming the atheistic reaction; by changing the presentation of the theism it addresses, atheistic argument, being bound to react thereunto, will similarly change. Well, you know, unless those advocates don't, and, I don't know, maybe just insist everybody repeat yesterday's caricature, which was also the same as the day before, and the day preceding that.
You imbibing what he writes being one, him having distributed something like a 100 million books over the last 15 years is another.
If you want to think you and your ideas exist independent of contemporary society, the onus is on you to prove you were raised by wild animals or something.
Yeah, because ideas on water are constantly developing on various contemporary sociological fronts .....
That there is organizational structure in atheism. Someone authors 100 million books. Someone speaks in a micophone. Someone cleans shit off porcelain. And someone speaks about it on the internet in an echo chamber.
If its any consolation, I'm pretty sure every person who wears a mullet also feels they are somehow defying dominant social trends.
An overview regarding what went into the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge (apparently twice a week for thirty years) ....
https://www.blogtyrant.com/the-man-who-sold-the-brooklyn-bridge-twice-a-week-for-30-years/
Over time you notice some common themes:
…they exploit a person’s need to feel part of a group…
…they falsely use exclusivity and scarcity…
…they find knowledge-gaps and then pretend they can help you…
…if that fails, they use intimidation or force…
*But the results are always the same.
*(Added stress, mine)
Given your credit transactions begin at a point so close to being a sociological zero as to be practically zero, it becomes less an issue of what you give but more what you take.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
If someone wasn't religious 20 years ago or has never been religious...would you concede that they weren't influenced by Dawkins?
If someone passes air downwind of you, do you fail to notice?
Or is there something about continuums that deliver effects despite spatial and temporal diversions?
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
If you tilt at windmills does that mean that they are out to get you?
Can that person prove a negative?
(Actually, this one is very nearly within the realm of possibility; it just requires being under enough of a proverbial rock for the last thirty-two years that one might identify as an atheist yet never suffer even the slightest whiff of his influence.)