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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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"Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby"
I like "in the same way bald is a hair color"
Evidence based existence is what I believe in personally. Speculation and fantasy can be useful in some parts of life, but for me, imaginary friends are a mental health disorder in anyone claiming they are real.
Imaginary friends are quite common among children, and there are processes in some mental wellness practices that invoke imaginary friends.
One of them is the wise mind in Dialectic Behavior Therapy, in which one taps into their adulting conscience (related to the adult in transactional analysis).
If a patient struggles directly invoking the wise mind, they can invoke a fiction, similar to the Christian tradition of WWJD A patient struggling with a home management problem might imagine asking Albert Einstein for advice, and then imagine how Einstein might respond. (Substitute anyone, including darker archetypes: Satan, Darth Vader, Joan Collins, Barbara Bush...)
Given some people who do believe in spiritual or supernatural elements might get the same effect from talking to God, or channeling spirits, they can get the same benefit even if their beliefs can be inconsistent either with modern science, or with their own ministries (who want their parishioners to go to them for direction).
So, no, regardless of whether or not delusions, misinformation or self-deceptions are involved, imaginary friends are not intrinsically dysfunctional or a sign of mental illness.
You are comparing a mental exercise to a belief in an alternate reality. These are not the same. I don't support making excuses for people that lack fundamental logic skills.
I'm totally with you and I get it, and the previous commenter could have written in a kinder tone, but
I don't think therapists usually encourage their patients to claim they actually got the advice from Einstein or Darth Vader or whomever. And I can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant "adults" rather than "humans" when they said people.
Firstly, mental disorders aren't determined by cognitive positions or even behavior. I get that culture in the 2020s still likes to regard mental illness as something worthy of derision or contempt, but it's kinda like shitting on someone for being blind or deaf, and in the meantime, mental illness has real definitions beyond beliefs you don't like.
In the psychiatric sector, mental illness is defined when a given compulsion causes a living dysfunction. If I secretly believed the moon was made of green cheese, while that might be regarded as a provably counterfactual belief, I could hold it my entire life without it once impeding my life. So as much as you can disagree with religious beliefs, or disparage religious identity, equating it with clinical madness not only is inaccurate and ableist, but conflating religious hate movements with people who suffer from mental illness is also an insult to people suffer from mental illness. By far, those of us with diagnoses are actually trying to manage our madness, and be functional, moral people.
That said, having counterfactual beliefs is super common (let alone an internal model of nature that has few embarrassments -- you'd be hard pressed to find someone with a near-perfect internal model). When we talk about mental illness, the psych sector considers what is typical, and counterfactual beliefs are extremely typical, hence the reason newspapers and news sites still have horoscopes.
In fact, human beings contend with a wide range of cognitive and sensory biases that inform how they perceive the world in ways that do not reflect reality. I am confident even you, personally, struggle to grasp the actual breadth or age of the universe, and our place in it. We all do.
And that said, my own path to naturalism involved some not small existential crises and confrontation with not only my mortality but the infinitesimal breadth of my significance. We are tiny and brief, and I will forgive anyone who is not ready to confront how small and alone we are. (Or for that matter, how deterministic the path we carve through time.)
So, you know, you are free to do what you want, but I'm going to think it's a dick move to shit on people for their illusions, especially in a world like ours in which nature and society both teem with life suffering under parasitism.
When it comes to the fellow whose post you're attempting to reframe, I'm done with him. He'll figure things out in his own time -- or not, but I assume he will gain no useful ground through me. And I do understand that religious ministries -- speaking of parasitism -- manipulate people by the tens of millions to their detriment, causing a lot of preventable suffering. But that's something we have to change at the sociological level, not at the psychological. It's about humans having exploitable biases, not about a given person having a character failing by which they discard rationality.
Logic and reasoning preferably with scientific evidence.
Sort of like how you can only get so much evidence for aliens or Bigfoot and you just have to trust the conspiracy theorists about the rest
It is weird the feds admit UAPs are real now. Of course they don't say "it's aliens" but then again we wouldn't yet know, it could or could not be. Maybe China has sufficiently advanced tech that we think shouldn't be possible, maybe they're aliens, maybe extra dimensional, maybe under the water somewhere, but what we do know is that there does appear to be something strange in the neighborhood.
No it isn't. While it's as easy as ever to fake it, the ease of sharing evidence these days makes denying that "weird stuff sometimes happens" much harder than it used to be, and it is such an obvious claim that denying it doesn't serve much purpose.
Usually, when it happens often enough that we can actually investigate rather than just saying "this one time weird fluke in our cameras was weird," it turns out to be "the atmosphere is bendier than most people think" or "wow, what weird things your shadow can do sometimes."
Idk if you have seen the videos released by the navy during covid, but it ain't shadows.
I don't know what it is, but I also don't know what it's not. And neither does the Navy or anyone else. Those videos are still in the "one weird fluke" category (unless the Navy figured it out later and didn't tell anyone).
The thing is that it could be "shadows" or something similar mundane, but it could also be some kind of civilian drone or something combined with a software glitch that made the instrumentation report the numbers wrong. It could be a piece of experimental or otherwise new technology that's actually behaving the way the computer thinks. Nobody knows, and without more evidence of some kind, nobody will.
And sure, it could be aliens. But the prior probability on that one makes it exceedingly unlikely compared to the less exciting and more mundane explanations.
Those FLIR thermal videos from far off naval ships spotting strange objects in the sky that in some cases do things our airships cannot, like submerge in the ocean and maneuver in ways that would physically break our planes, can't be showing conventional shadows, unless you mean something else by "shadows" I guess.
I didn't say it was aliens, but it would honestly be weirder if it was "shadows" on those videos.
I mean, we don't know what they did, only what it looked like they did. If whatever caused the "thing" in the videos wasn't where the sensors thought it was, then it also wasn't doing what it looked like it was.
How about you define your own belief system and let others choose their own words?
Right? Imagine telling someone claiming to be a Christian that "actually, Christian implies you believe (specific idea about Jesus my church goes for and yours doesn't)."
That'd be a good way to get bloodied in a lot of places
The only people who think this are theists. Gnostic atheists and agnostic atheists are both atheists.
Atheism is a lack of belief, not a belief in a lack
What would you call a belief in a lack?
Gnostic atheism, as opposed to agnostic atheism. Atheism as a label doesn't imply one or the other, it's simply a lack of belief in a god.
Atheism runs a long gamut of epistemic positions. Rare are those who hold a fast believe that God doesn't exist (by any definition). The default atheist position is that we don't know and the standards we use to test or hold positions of belief regarding other things we don't know about (from the nature of ball lightning to the possibility of cyptids or -- to cite some common thought experiments -- invisible pink unicorns or fairies at the bottom of the garden) can also be applied to spiritual and supernatural elements like human souls, Hell and God.
This may sound agnostic, and as per other identities, we are each free to choose the identity name we prefer. But what we have established from centuries and centuries of observation stacks pretty heavily against the supernatural assertions of popular religious faiths. We can expect that Jesus didn't likely actually rise from the dead, just as much as we can expect neither Zeus nor Thor nor Adonai command the thunderbolts (rather they seem to hold fast to electrostatic mechanics, and replaceable grounded lightning rods do a lot of heavy lifting redirecting lighting away from the big iron bells in steeples and bell towers... or doing too much damage to Christ the Redeemer in Rio De Janero.
Classical agnosticism comes from a Christian tradition, asserting we don't know which interpretation of scripture is right, or if there's another explanation, but that is part of the test of faith. In the modern day as Dawkins noted in his 2002 Call to Arms TED lecture, agnostic is atheism lite, not willing to admit that God as He is (They are) understood to be by most folk, is not just improbable, but infinitesimally probable based on our knowledge of the mechanics of the physical world...and on the conspicuous silence of the supernatural (We checked! A lot!).
So a safe differentiation might look like this:
Agnostic: I believe there's a 10% chance Jesus was resurrected by divine miracle.
Atheist: I believe there's a non-zero but insignificant chance Jesus was resurrected by divine miracle
I'm a naturalist, which is to say, I haven't been able to find any evidence for supernatural events, and regard them much the way I would the notion there are invisible pink unicorns that live in Angeles Crest Forest. This is not to say science has figured out everything (we still struggle to make sense of ball lightning, though it's definitely a thing in Missouri) but much of what we figured out points away from all the other common models.
I can speculate there is a God (or a pantheon of gods) but this gets classified with a range of other possibilities, such as the simulation hypothesis, or Azathoth's dream. (We may all be figments of Azathoth's imagination, but if so, Azathoth has provided for a robust dream-scape that is extremely consistent with its physical mechanics, even when we try to break reality.) Any of these could be true, but for sake of day-to-day living, our world appears consistently to behave as material, and nothing else.
What's the real difference(evidence) between Religion and Schizophrenia?
What’s the real difference (evidence) between Religion and Schizophrenia?
This is something of a problematic question, and my first take on it is that it was asked contemptuously, or in bad faith. It's also very easy to infer you imagine schizophrenia as Hollywood insanity, what is used to justify Mrs. Voorhees or Michael Meyers as slasher killers rather than as an actual mental health diagnosis from the DSM. I can't help but wonder if you regard all persons who suffer from mental illness as violent or degenerate or otherwise less of a person than those who are undiagnosed.
So one difference between religion and schizophrenia is this: The psychiatric sector estimates one in three-hundred people worldwide content with schizo-effective disorders. 251 people in three-hundred are associated with an organized religion. As identities and clubs go, religions are way popular.
In fact, there are multiple fields of study about the interaction between religious practice and mental health, including abnormal psychology, or the study of mental illness, so I'm not going to imagine I can infer the meat of your juxtaposition.
Diagnoses are not intended for any other use than to inform treatment for the patient. They are especially not used to deny civil rights to a given person because they received a diagnosis from a medical professional. In order for someone to be committed (in a modern, civilized society) they have to be an imminent danger to themselves or others, which has to be established beyond a diagnosis.
Schizophrenics are statistically less of a danger to themselves or others than the general population. They are represented disproportionately among victims of violence, including officer-involved violence. And schizophrenics can sometimes operate heavy machinery, including firearms, safely and expertly. That doesn't mean they aren't affected by their illness, just that in some cases, it doesn't interfere with their career. Contrast religious people who, as a demographic, are more violent than the general population and are convicted of violent crime more often than the general population, but not by much, since most of the general population is religious.
Irreligious people, like tabletop role-players are just not very violent.
All that said, I don't know what exactly you were trying to ask. I read it something like what's the difference between an orange and a sparrow egg? Well, one's bigger?
No they don't and agnosticism isn't an upgrade, it's just sitting on the fence.
Most athiests are agnostic to some degree and vice versa.
The burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim.
Agnostic atheist: Doesn't believe in any gods, claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable
Gnostic atheist: Doesn't believe in any gods, claims to know no gods exist
Agnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable
Gnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims to know that those god(s) exist
I think all four types of people exist in decent numbers, but personally I, as an agnostic atheist, think either version of agnosticism is the only logically sound position. Gnosticism just feels disingenuous to me. Unfortunately I get the feeling that Christianity in the US is slipping further and further towards gnostic theism, and with that comes very dogmatic and oppressive rhetoric and actions.
As an atheist who would fully accept the existence of a deity if any form of rigorous proof was provided, these boxes are dumb.
Not really dumb and not really so different from how you describe yourself.
I identify as an agnostic atheist. I don’t think it is possible to prove a deity exists, but I’m fully open to the prospect of being wrong and as with anything else in science, should new evidence/data somehow come along and prove that there is some kind of deity/creator/what have you, I would look at it and potentially change my mind.
Sounds like straight up atheism to me...
It’s agnostic atheism. I don’t believe one exists, but I also admit I don’t know for sure.
If there is a range of theories about the world say 1 billion different statements and 10 had a very good chance of being true, 100 a reasonable chance and 999,999,890 had a mathematically insignificant of being true say the same probability as my butt-hole being the living embodiment of the universe's creator, Santa being real, or the Easter bunny being the representative of Satan on earth it would be awfully silly if we talked about a tiny segment of those 999,999,890 as if they might be real only because they are particularly popular.
I don't describe myself as agnostic towards divine buttholism or Santa I say reasonably that they aren't true because that is how we describe things without meaningful probability of being true. Similarly there is no reasonable probability in my understanding of the universe having a creator so I confidently describe myself as an atheist.
It's just a bit of a pointless distinction. No atheist could claim they know for sure.
Eh disagree but whatevs.
Gnostic atheism is only unsound if you insist we make absolute statements like 2 != 1 instead of speaking in absolutes as shorthand for probabilities that tend towards insignificance which is literally how people think and communicate outside of math. Attempts to approach philosophy like math are generally nonsense because our understand is far too underdeveloped for that to be anything but cargo cult antics.
I disagree with the person you are replying to using the word "upgrade", but also with your characterization of agnosticism as "just sitting on the fence". It's a coherent belief in its own right, not simply a refusal to choose between other options.
Now that you mention it, I'm not entirely convinced it is a fully coherent belief in its own right, more of a lack of wanting to enter the debate or a subcategory of atheism.
Shall we try it with unicorns? Unicorn believer says they saw a unicorn.
Atheist viewpoint would say something along the lines of "To persuade me they exist I'd need to see one in the flesh or at the very least a full anatomical breakdown of how their magical properties work with corroboration from other unicorn enthusiasts."
The agnostic standpoint is what exactly? "We can't know whether unicorns exist or not so there's no point discussing it."?
As someone who leans agnostic, I would say this is a strawman argument. Unicorns and religions/gods are not related.
How does one "lean" agnostic?
It's not a strawman argument, I'll let you pick any imaginary creature you please.
I would say "there's no point in arguing about it if neither of you can prove your position. If it is unprovable then I don't care if unicorns exist or not. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. It doesn't affect me. I won't waste mental bandwidth thinking about it or discussing it further."
Mind if I take some of your income to fund my unicorn sanctuary instead of improving tangible public services?
You're already taking some to find out if japanese quail become more promiscuous under the influence of cocaine, this wouldn't be too different tbh.
Here's another way to look at it, then. By popular definition, an agnostic person believes that there is no ontological proof for the existence or non-existence of God, or the divine. The agnostic person is thereby operating within the conceptual framework of religion. (A lot of agnostics in the Western world are agnostic specifically about the existence of the particular God of Abrahamic religions.)
On the other hand, atheists are simply not concerned with or do not recognize divinity, as a concept. In a way, it's like how nobody holds an affirmative belief that Spiderman does not exist as a real human, because superheroes are categorically fictional, and it's not even ontologically possible.
Umm, I'm Spider-Man agnostic, actually. There's still time for 2099 to prove canonical.
The statement that god doesn't exist can be best described as dismissal of a class of theories asserted without evidence and thus dismissed without any. People don't exhaustively examine the universe they examine enough of it to make theories and draw increasingly strong conclusions. Pretending there is no difference between asserting for no reason something is true AGAINST mountains of actual evidence like asserting your particular religions deity is real and drawing strong theories based on reasonable analysis is disingenuous. You didn't examine every chimney to conclude santa isn't real and I didn't examine every iota of the natural world to conclude it doesn't have a creator. .