It’s interesting what it comes down to. Religion, according to “rational atheists”, is complete bullshit without any factual basis. It’s all made up by humans. However, when those rational atheists provided a rational, intellectually sound and scientifically based alternative to replace all that religious bullshit, the result was always and without exception an unmitigated disaster. So basically, if you base your life on the life and teachings of Jesus, who is supposed to be an imaginary character like Spongebob, you end up fine. If you base your life on what the rational atheists recommend, you end up being a cynical sociopath who needs to be constantly medicated for depression. And here we have Steph who presents himself as rational, and who actually understands this conundrum, but doesn’t follow it to its logical conclusion, which is that maybe, just maybe, if religious people manage to get their shit together more successfully than atheists, maybe that’s because their brains are more in tune to what the reality actually is, which is that God actually exists and his existence and character make moral demands on those who want to be in tune with him. So yeah, the ideas atheists come up with as substitutes for religion are complete and utter rubbish, they themselves are irrational and crazy, but their basic worldview is the scientific truth and makes so much sense, because whatever.
14 thoughts on “The empirical paradox of atheism”
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You’ve got a spot of prejudice in there. I wonder how many atheists you actually know. Not many by the appearance of things.
It *looks* like a case of the man who says “All homosexuals are promiscuous and can’t hold down a relationship. What? Do I know any gay people? Of course not! I’d have nothing to do with their kind.” and then sees nothing wrong with what he just said.
Look, I get it. Some atheists are arseholes, especially here on the internet where nobody can see anyone’s age and there are many more teenage atheists than teenagers who are of a faith.
Don’t blanket brush. That’s what the edgy teen atheists do.
I know enough people to be perfectly confident in any particular judgment that I make about them. And by the appearance of things, you don’t know whom you’re talking to so you’re actually talking to yourself, trying to teach yourself the much needed lesson.
“Don’t blanket brush”, and then proceeds to do exactly that.
So yeah, atheists are douchebags. Proven.
Oh come on. You’re doing it again.
a) not an atheist
b) You’ve got an entire blog here of your thoughts for me to read, I had a nose. You’re bright but prejudiced and yes, you do blanket brush
I do whatever I feel like doing and if you don’t like it, feel free to pour gasoline onto yourself and light yourself on fire in protest.
Now look who’s being childish.
Jeeeeez…
Douchebag
Banned.
This is actually an interesting, albeit typical form of manipulation, which borrows from scientific methodology in order to sound convincing, “what’s your sample size”, and uses it in a context in which it is perfectly irrelevant, in order to provoke self-doubt in the other party. It’s like answering “people who aren’t careful when crossing roads might end up killed” with “what’s your sample size”, or “being raped sucks” with “how many times were you raped so that you can make such statements”. An alternative version was provided by one douchebag that I knew, who asked people to logically and scientifically defend their dislike of him, for instance, when a girl would tell him that she doesn’t like him, he would say “explain why”, hoping to put the victim on the defensive. That probably works if you’re talking to an insecure person who actually gives a fuck about you and your opinion, but it all amounts to the same “argument”, which is “your life and the experiences that form basis for any of your opinions are insufficient and cannot be trusted, so you have to relativize your position and accept mine, because reasons”.
I don’t need to make a scientific study about x in order to have an opinion about it, and if someone doesn’t like the way I form opinions, tough shit because I don’t care.
What do you think of Molyneux?
When he doesn’t fight against artificially set limits to his thinking, he’s very good.
To clarify, I find his commentaries to be similar to those of Dmitry Orlov, who is also to the point, has a talent of speaking unpopular truths and for the most part what he says looks very much like a final statement that could possibly be had on the subject. The problem is, sometimes I feel the point could be taken a step further, but they don’t make that final step because they don’t like the conclusion. For instance, Orlov understands that America apparently tries to wreck the world, but he doesn’t go to the conclusion that it might be intentional, that they understand that they are collapsing and they are trying to wreck the world so that their collapse would not have the obvious cause of their entire socioeconomic system collapsing because it’s flawed. No, they want the conclusion where the Soviet Union collapsed because its socioeconomic system is flawed, and America won because it’s superior and proceeded to inspire the world until some freak accident happened and threw everyone back into the stone age, where they can look at America for inspiration.
Similarly, Molyneux sees that the atheists almost invariably resort to government dictatorship as a substitute for God, that they are socially dysfunctional, unethical and basically unable to function as complete spiritual beings, that every single idea they came up with as a replacement for religious ideas was a failure of historic proportions, and he notices that Christianity does so much more right than atheism it isn’t even funny, yet he doesn’t make that next step, where he would reconsider his opinion about the factual basis of Christianity, like, maybe it’s not as stupid as I was led to believe, because this degree of correlation between Christian ethics and what actually works in the real world isn’t accidental, because other religions that were clearly a human invention, like Islam, have a problem similar to atheism, which is that they create horrible societies. You don’t even have to conclude that the fact that Christianity works better in the real world is due to the fact that it’s the right religion revealed by the true God, you just need to conclude that it obviously introduces some kind of an ethical compass which makes people want to be better, instead of being arrogant douchebags that atheists invariably prove to be whenever you give them the opportunity to open their mouths. You would expect the atheists to start from the position that they don’t have the answers and you would also expect the Christians to start from the position that they have all the answers, but that’s not how they actually behave in practical situations. In practical situations every atheist behaves as if he personally killed God and now he’s left as the best thing standing in his place. Conversely, a Christian behaves as if God is aware of all his choices and actions and he’s never sure how those will be viewed, and he needs to constantly improve himself and strive towards the higher standards, unattainable as they might seem. So yeah, people who believe their God is the only true God are actually less sure of their position than the atheists, and that might actually be the key, because atheism and islam have that unpleasant quality of making people so sure of their position that they proceed to perform horrible crimes. If anything, the excessive trait of self-examination that is specific to the Western civilization seems to originate from this Christian (more specifically, Catholic) insecurity of salvation.
Whenever someone becomes too sure of his salvation, be it atheists or the American Christians, they immediately start manifesting undesirable moral traits.
“In practical situations every atheist behaves as if he personally killed
God and now he’s left as the best thing standing in his place”.
That is a very good observation, I noticed that also by conversing with them both online and in person. There is this like aura of smugness surrounding them when they act like you described.
Btw, is Molyneux atheist? I heard about him few days ago and saw couple of videos, so I am interested.
He is, but of a very peculiar kind that is more concerned with ethics than anything else, so ethical considerations weigh so heavily in his opinions as to agree with Christians more often than he does with atheists. Basically, he’s the kind of atheist who prefers to hang out with Christians, because they are better people.
Very interesting and I must say, a rare “type” of atheist
Yes. The kind for which atheism seems to be a transitional point, rather than the destination.