Er, theist: believes in god(s).
Atheist: doesn't believe in god(s).
How can you be neither?
You either do or don't believe. :shrug:
Who come first the theist or the atheist
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Atheist: doesn't believe in god(s).
How can you be neither?
You either do or don't believe. :shrug:
Connections between cultural motifs and dna are all supposition at best and BS at worst.
In fact I think you would have a hard time establishing all that is assumed to be instinctive can be established in terms of dna.
IOW you are simply applying a logical fallacy in order to bolster an atheist argument.
You are certainly not talking about science.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Some people aren't sure. Do you believe in the Higgs boson?
That is a common opinion, but it's not established scholarship. Jung's models are widely taught. In fact they are commonly used to advantage in management and many other disciplines, although medical schools are still bogged down in Freud's teachings.
Psychology is one of the "soft" sciences. For example, experimentation, a key step in the scientific method, is impractical and often illegal. So its hypotheses are always difficult to prove and seldom reach the status of a true scientific theory.
Indeed. Yet many instincts can be assumed to be genetically programmed. An animal that doesn't instinctively run away from an animal of comparable size with both eyes in front of its face will not live long enough to reproduce and its genes will become extinct. Many animals that are poisonous to predators have evolved coloration that makes them easy to identify, and the predators have evolved the instinct not to eat prey of that color.
We can't see any survival advantage in religion so we argue over whether the archetypes that comprise it could be instincts. As I have pointed out previously, at the dawn of the Neolithic Era, humans had to overcome their instinct to live in small clans and fight over a limited food supply. Instead they needed to gather in larger communities, because farming and animal husbandry are not very efficient ways to produce food on a very small scale. If they discovered that the clan in the next valley believed in the same gods, that may have broken the ice and encouraged them to try living together. So religion may in fact have been a survival trait.
Today of course it is just the opposite. The world's dominant religions have degenerated into Abraham's oversimplified monotheism. It does not have a pantheon that outsiders can recognize and which would serve as an ice-breaker. Instead it exaggerates each individual sub-cult's feeling of superiority over all the other sub-cults, and inspires the members to regard themselves as a little bit better than everyone else. This makes it okay to shoot them, hijack their airliners, or (back in my day) use their countries as proxy battlefields in a "Cold War."
You may disagree with my position but that does not make it a fallacy.
The last time I looked, psychology was still categorized as a science.
Um, if you aren't sure then you lack belief, no?
not in biology classes you will notice ...
I know.
What I also know is that hey are not taught in line with current understandings of dna
A tell tale sign of pseudoscience is when someone marries hard science to soft science
hence it becomes the fallacy of generalization - ie some characteristics are genetic therefore all characteristics are genetic
How can a speculation based on a speculation be anything other than a speculation?
Just because they are all science doesn't allow you to cross disciplines via poetic license or whatever
For birds that can fly, such holes are not a problem. Obviously.
Nor is it a problem for humans who can bypass a hole.
You'll need to be more specific.
As observed by whom?
How do you exclude cryptic speciation?
Of course you have encountered theism. You worship Jung, for example, as if he were god. You have not conducted any research of this kind on your own (and Jung's research is rather questionable too), but you believe Jung just like that.
One essential component of theism is the idea that someone or something is regarded as the supreme and such that others should subject themselves to.
That depends entirely on the brand of atheism.
Of course you have such images in your head. They may not be particularly Christian, or Jewish, for example, but there are things and people to whom you assign supreme status and whom you worship, in your own way.
I am not a two-bit (sic) whore, so there.
Seriously, is this what you state above really how simplistic you wish the understanding of theism and atheism is to be??
Then perhaps you are not actually looking at religion.
A conviction that one's own life matters, that everything ultimately make sense is essential for survival, and much more so for thriving.
Religions provide examples of frameworks for the conviction that one's own life matters and that everything ultimately make sense. As such, a religious outlook of some kind is crucial for survival.
I am not a two-bit (sic) whore, so there.
So tell me how it works.
The way I see it one either has a belief (in whatever) or one doesn't.
"Two-bit" as in 'digital; either this or that.'
I think that the usual problem with theism/atheism is that there is much confusion on what each mean and how they apply.
The concept "Belief in God" is often presented as a static, monumental, unanalyzable entity/phenomenon, and then one supposedly either has it or doesn't.
I think seeing "Belief in God" on such terms is remiss.
If we analyze "Belief in God," some of the components are:
1. Conviction that one's own life matters.
2. Conviction that one is part of the Universe, and not an alien.
3. Conviction that everything ultimately makes sense.
4. Conviction that all humans (and all living beings), including oneself, are essentially sane and worthy.
5. Whatever we feel, think, say and do is in some way a reflection of how things really are.
In practice, I think having these convictions are what characteristically distinguishes the theist from the atheist.
Do you find such understanding of theism/atheism helpful?
Does it adequately and in detail describe your stance?
For the life of me (and I actually mean for the life of me), I don't know what to do with those standard definitions of theism and atheism.
Well I call myself an atheist because I have no belief in god(s)...
Bull. Shit.
And misrepresentation on your part.
If you want to play that stupid game:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=atheism&searchmode=none
cf
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=theism&searchmode=none
Ergo atheism arose ~100 years before theism.
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My approach is not binary, but more like a varaible switch. If you observe people who believe in God, their reaction is sincere. As such, even if their explanation is not acceptable to science, the reaction is real, so there is something there. What is there?
As an analogy, say you were in ancient times and people believed that the sun moving across the sky was Helios riding his chariot. You disagree with this Helios explanation. Even if you disagree with the Helios explanation, this does not mean the sun is not there. I might disagree with the explanation for that shiny phenomena, but I would still accept the phenomena itself. The scientist inside would try to figure out what this shiny orb was. It may still be useful to hear the various Helios storie,s since there may be observational details about the sun, such as an eclipse, attached to one of those stories. Maybe the chariot was black in Oct 3.
My theory is the modern UFO style aliens are not much different than the mythology of ancients. Both come from the mind and imagination. Neither have definitive proof. My appraoch would be to listen to what people have to say since their details tell something of the underlying phenomena.
As an analogy, say you were in ancient times and people believed that the sun moving across the sky was Helios riding his chariot. You disagree with this Helios explanation. Even if you disagree with the Helios explanation, this does not mean the sun is not there. I might disagree with the explanation for that shiny phenomena, but I would still accept the phenomena itself. The scientist inside would try to figure out what this shiny orb was. It may still be useful to hear the various Helios storie,s since there may be observational details about the sun, such as an eclipse, attached to one of those stories. Maybe the chariot was black in Oct 3.
My theory is the modern UFO style aliens are not much different than the mythology of ancients. Both come from the mind and imagination. Neither have definitive proof. My appraoch would be to listen to what people have to say since their details tell something of the underlying phenomena.
So what?
Are you claiming that non-believers aren't sincere?
No.
And the rest, as usual, is word salad.
I note that you fail (again, as usual) to respond to questions...
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
It all depends on what that word "god" means.
In my case, I don't believe in Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu and similar mythical figures. I believe, with a fairly high degree of confidence, that they don't exist. So I'm a pretty unambiguous atheist when it comes to the deities of theistic religion.
Then there's the philosophical functions that are often equated with God. Do I believe in a first cause? I don't know. An ultimate ontological ground-of-being? Yeah, I probably do. An ultimate goal, purpose or destination of change? No, not really.
There's an experiential aspect. I take the world's contemplative traditions very seriously and think that practices like meditation do reveal things. Unfortunately, I don't really know how to interpret or understand these traditions or what sort of truth lies at the heart of them.
Finally, I just have an intuitive feeling that SOMETHING is happening all around me (and in me as well) that I can't even begin to understand, something associated with the simple brute fact that there is something rather than nothing. The fact that there's such a thing as reality in the first place seems inexplicable and almost miraculous to me sometimes.
I that an intuition of God? I don't know. I'm reasonably certain that the ultimate explanation, if such a thing even makes sense, doesn't have anything even remotely to do with the deities of our earthly religions. But nevertheless, I still sense that something very mysterious and very important might be happening.
Here we go with the semantics again.....
