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>The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system. Just as the religious world contains Christians, Jews, Scientolo

>The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system. Just as the religious world contains Christians, Jews, Scientologists, Muslims, Hindus, et cetc" with sometimes radically different ideas, the secular world too has a great many different people with different belief systems. >If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system". Given that axiom, you are right! I'm a fairly militant atheist but I have no problem accepting that I have a belief system, an imperfect one too. I just don't think there is a god.

tonymet 5y ago
> the secular world has many different people agreed and the world would be more navigable if they adopted distinct names, garb & beliefs the way the other religions did. If you think about it, every thanksgiving debate was really a religious debate among people who didn’t clarify their membership.
- franklampard 5y ago
  No?
- kevstermcgee 5y ago
  > agreed and the world would be more navigable if they adopted distinct names, garb & beliefs the way the other religions did. Athiesm is to religion what not collecting stamps is to a hobby. We aren't the ones creating an imagined reality. We're just saying until there's substantive evidence to support the existence of a deity we probably shouldn't assume one exists.
  - throwamon 5y ago
    You imply from your comparison that atheism is [not belonging to a group with a shared belief] and then say "we" [belong to a group with a shared belief], which is clearly self-contradictory. I strongly agree with the first part, but not with the second. There are certainly atheists who wouldn't agree with what "we" (you) are "just saying".
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      We, the people who aren't interested in unicorns, are rarely mentioned on lists of fantasy fandom although we do share the same feelings about a particular element of the fantasy genre.
      - throwamon 5y ago
        I don't see why some see the need to clump people together by what they don't believe in. Atheism isn't about "interest" or "feelings", so your comparison doesn't hold either. Different people arrive at the same conclusions via completely different paths, many not even rationally. It's really arrogant to assume atheists are superior in this regard (and I'm not saying you said that but it's not too hard to infer), and I say that as an atheist myself.
  - tonymet 5y ago
    Atheism believes in many gods
  - mslm 5y ago
    That's not the atheism position, inasmuch as religion isn't just about belief in a God. It's also about all that's implied by that core position, in regards to follow-up beliefs and actions.
  - syshum 5y ago
    The problem with that text book definition of Atheism, or Anti-Theist is that the the label of Atheist has taken an a life of its own, and the majority of people publicly proclaiming themselves to be an "Atheist" do not simply seek "evidence to support the existence of a deity", no instead they adopt the so called Atheism+ movement that incorporates loads of other philosophical and political positions into the label of "Atheist". It has become decidedly Authoritarian Left in its political positioning, so much so that many libertarians that used to proudly use the Atheist Label has stopped referring to themselves as Atheist
  - unishark 5y ago
    > Athiesm is to religion what not collecting stamps is to a hobby. I believe the point of the article and discussion is the particular atheists "collecting stamps" with more ideological ferver than the hobbyists.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    > We aren't the ones creating an imagined reality. One problem I see with this line of thinking is that it's often faux intellectualism, in the sense of not even attempting to define what a deity is in the first place, instead taking the lazy approach of "whatever you think god is doesn't exist". What exactly is a deity in the first place anyways? Bearded guy in the clouds? A lot of christians don't believe in that either. Jesus (i.e. a human)? A certain north korean leader that had similar godlike fame among followers most definitely existed (godhood claims notwithstanding). The holy spirit? Read "spirit" as you read "spirit of the law". Some flavors of pantheism actually argue that the concept of "an omnipotent omnipresent entity that nevertheless grants us free will" can be perfectly explained if said entity is the laws of physics. As we can see, there's a pretty big spectrum ranging anywhere from strawmen to things that do exist. IMHO, proper atheism needs to be able to argue against the entire body of theism, not just narrow set of christian beliefs, and as such it's a belief system that doesn't fit many people. There's agnosticism (basically, "I don't know if god exists because the evidence doesn't convince me"), which is a much easier belief system to actually defend, and which I think describes more accurately the belief system that a lot of self-proclaimed atheists actually subscribe to.
trophycase 5y ago
A religious person making a tautological argument!? I'm shocked!
- deertick1 5y ago
  An atheist denigrating the intellect of a religious person?! I'm shocked. It is a tautological argument in that it is true absolutely. Thats not a bad thing. Any system of belief is fundamentally predicated on faith based axioms. E.g. basically everything one thinks is "religious" to some degree.
  - halfnormalform 5y ago
    No intellect was degraded. It was the behavior. Also your response is merely an insult followed by 5 unsupported statements. Can you try again?
  - trophycase 5y ago
    You're right about that but I prefer axioms with actual explanatory power.
- idiotfinder 5y ago
  found one!
tonymet 5y ago
Atheism is actually polytheistic. The Gods can be identified by answering these questions: “why am I here?”, “who am i?”, “what should I do?”, “what is true?”, “why should I suffer & die?”, “what will happen tomorrow?”, “who matters more: myself or others?”. The deities of the secular religion would be “the self”, your parents, “the government/state and its figureheads“ , money (and the institutions controlling it), the earth / ecology/ the environment , “science” These are deities because they are the object of irrational fear, worship, rituals & sacrifice. To be clear, these gods are also worshiped by formally religious people (christians, muslims etc).
- Boxxed 5y ago
  I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but it's a little bit odd to me that a non-religious person would necessarily have an irrational fear of anything you mentioned. Where, in your world view, is there room for someone who can think critically and make rational decisions? Why must all of these totally reasonable things that make up our world be feared?
  - tonymet 5y ago
    They can also be worshipped / loved. There could be rational worship & love e.g. loving your parents because they care for you and they have direct impact over your wellbeing. Irrational worship/ love is loving and icon or demagogue : extreme example being Kim Jong Il – when he is hurt or sad, everyone is heart broken. Even in the free world we worship these demagogues. When trump is president many panic, some are elated. When the next president comes, the roles reverse some are relieved and some are sad.
- foolinaround 5y ago
  i found this insightful - that there are also the same set of 'gods' for both the religious and the athiest
- mslm 5y ago
  You're likely going to get poured with downvotes from the large number of atheists that browse this forum, but I commend you for the brave comment. Now let me join you. Effectively, yes, the primary atheist deity is material and worldly pleasure. How that's particularly expressed is of course different per person, but the core is that the atheist follows the deity of their whims.
xelxebar 5y ago
> This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system". Not OP, but I think this is a pretty narrow reading of their statement. Personally, I read it to be more about value and community dynamics. Institutionalized religions often are very explicit about their (supposed) terminal values and arrange social situations to explicitly work toward or reinforce those values. I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems. There is a difference between why we perform and action and the reasons we give for performing the same action [citation needed]. I think OP suggests that religions have structures useful for cognating about the former more sharply than secularism does.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems. You could say that secular groups may have implicit value systems, may even implicitly enforce but because they haven't made these values explicit, they allow to explicate, question and change them - whereas religion is about maintain an explicit and unchanging set of values. So there's more to the not-explicitness of a secular process than "a religion that doesn't say it's a religion".
- lhorie 5y ago
  > I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems. I read it like that as well. I've seen this idea illustrated this way: a kid raised in a religious community gets drilled from an early age about morals as an umbrella abstraction (in the form of allegories from religious texts), so they don't need to be micromanaged about the moral implications of every individual scenario under the sun ("don't run in the supermarket!", "don't push your sister!", "don't yell in the hallway!", etc etc) because they are explicitly exposed to an underlying set of values to govern every scenario. That's is an obviously religious leaning take (I heard it from a jewish person, though I'm not jewish myself), but I think there's a certain grain of truth in the sense that non-religious people don't have a standardized way of talking to kids about morals as an umbrella abstraction on a weekly basis, in a way that church goers do.
slibhb 5y ago
Regardless of whether "everyone is religious," everyone certainly has revelatory beliefs, i.e. beliefs that were not reasoned to. Christian thinkers have spilled a lot of ink attempting to clarify the boundary between reason and revelation whereas, in the secular world, many people do not seem to understand that many of their beliefs (particularly the foundational ones) are revealed.
- tolbish 5y ago
  You are confusing secularism with naturalism.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  As a non-religious person, certainly I understand many of my beliefs come from convention or intuition or whatever non-rational source, sure. But I don't have any meta-belief telling me to hold onto given beliefs-that-seem-implausible-or-unverifiable because I'll be rewarded in the end or because it's a test or whatever. I don't continually change whatever belief I know is arbitrary but that's because consistency has some utility so point remains. Basically, I have no trouble with non-rational beliefs and behaviors. But religious specifically espouses irrationalist beliefs - irrationalism being the exhortation to keep, cultivate and fixate beliefs beyond the rational. Institutions other than religion, various flavors of Stalinism say, promote faith, fixating one's beliefs and so-forth. I'm against those too. But a wide variety of secular belief systems are against the irrationalist approach - some versions of liberal religion try to escape it too but as people observe, these folks are kind of becoming non-religious. Edit: Just generally, "everything not-wholly-rational is a religion" is a slippery argument that's being way-abused in this thread.
  - simonklitj 5y ago
    What is rational? Is not rationality subjective? What you might deem irrational others might deem perfectly rational, and vice-versa, what you might deem rational others might deem quite obviously irrational. Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then? No, we must disregard this as hallucination or a psychological problem. Only what we (and by we I mean the "educated western world") in our pre-determined frame of rationality deem rational can ever be rational, and all that falls outside must naturally be considered irrational irrespective of its potential rationality in relation to other experiences we might call rational. Really (I think), something being rational is a state of mind, a common understanding with our peers. In a church most would agree that their belief is rational, not out of ignorance (though here you might disagree), but out of shared acceptance of a different frame of rationality, essentially accepting other experiences as being able to feed to rationality than those you might accept. I guess the point I'm trying to make (and I might be way off) is that when you say that religiosity espouses irrationalist beliefs, they're irrational to you, within your frame of rationalism. To someone else you're the ignorant one who's fighting tooth and nail. Edit: To those down voting I would love to engage further in conversation about this!
tharkun__ 5y ago
Picking up on the "is there a god" and who believes in it? I have always wondered how many of the high priests or whatever their titles might be in any religion over the millenia (this includes Aztecs and Vikings etc) really just saw religion as another way of holding power (vs. kings or what have you). I.e. "just pretending" to believe and in reality just using it to to wield power and influence over people. Please don't mistake this for saying there aren't very pious people in that group. I do not doubt there are. I just wonder. Just like there are politicians that truly try and improve things and help their constituents and then there are also the ones that really just enjoy having the power and that really couldn't care less until election time rolls around.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
irrational 5y ago
>I just don't think there is a god. This would be agnostic (militant agnostic?), wouldn't it? I think a true atheist would say "I know that there is not a god."
- slim 5y ago
  Agnostics actually don't think the question of "is there a god?" is interesting or can have an answer
- KozmoNau7 5y ago
  Not really. There are "I know that there is not a god" atheists, those are the insufferable unholier-than-thou types like Richard Dawkins, who seem mostly interested in provoking religious people. And there are "there is no falsifiable proof at all to support the existence of a god" atheists, which are the ordinary sensible ones, who don't hate religious people, they just don't share their beliefs.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    Dawkins is actually a weak atheist (agnostic atheist), not a strong atheist. He thinks an interpersonal God is highly improbable, but it's not possible to prove a negative and so he doesn't assert that it doesn't exist.
dang 5y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488136.

tonymet 5y ago

> the secular world has many different people agreed and the world would be more navigable if they adopted distinct names, garb & beliefs the way the other religions did. If you think about it, every thanksgiving debate was really a religious debate among people who didn’t clarify their membership.

franklampard 5y ago
No?
kevstermcgee 5y ago
> agreed and the world would be more navigable if they adopted distinct names, garb & beliefs the way the other religions did. Athiesm is to religion what not collecting stamps is to a hobby. We aren't the ones creating an imagined reality. We're just saying until there's substantive evidence to support the existence of a deity we probably shouldn't assume one exists.
- throwamon 5y ago
  You imply from your comparison that atheism is [not belonging to a group with a shared belief] and then say "we" [belong to a group with a shared belief], which is clearly self-contradictory. I strongly agree with the first part, but not with the second. There are certainly atheists who wouldn't agree with what "we" (you) are "just saying".
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    We, the people who aren't interested in unicorns, are rarely mentioned on lists of fantasy fandom although we do share the same feelings about a particular element of the fantasy genre.
    - throwamon 5y ago
      I don't see why some see the need to clump people together by what they don't believe in. Atheism isn't about "interest" or "feelings", so your comparison doesn't hold either. Different people arrive at the same conclusions via completely different paths, many not even rationally. It's really arrogant to assume atheists are superior in this regard (and I'm not saying you said that but it's not too hard to infer), and I say that as an atheist myself.
- tonymet 5y ago
  Atheism believes in many gods
- mslm 5y ago
  That's not the atheism position, inasmuch as religion isn't just about belief in a God. It's also about all that's implied by that core position, in regards to follow-up beliefs and actions.
- syshum 5y ago
  The problem with that text book definition of Atheism, or Anti-Theist is that the the label of Atheist has taken an a life of its own, and the majority of people publicly proclaiming themselves to be an "Atheist" do not simply seek "evidence to support the existence of a deity", no instead they adopt the so called Atheism+ movement that incorporates loads of other philosophical and political positions into the label of "Atheist". It has become decidedly Authoritarian Left in its political positioning, so much so that many libertarians that used to proudly use the Atheist Label has stopped referring to themselves as Atheist
- unishark 5y ago
  > Athiesm is to religion what not collecting stamps is to a hobby. I believe the point of the article and discussion is the particular atheists "collecting stamps" with more ideological ferver than the hobbyists.
- lhorie 5y ago
  > We aren't the ones creating an imagined reality. One problem I see with this line of thinking is that it's often faux intellectualism, in the sense of not even attempting to define what a deity is in the first place, instead taking the lazy approach of "whatever you think god is doesn't exist". What exactly is a deity in the first place anyways? Bearded guy in the clouds? A lot of christians don't believe in that either. Jesus (i.e. a human)? A certain north korean leader that had similar godlike fame among followers most definitely existed (godhood claims notwithstanding). The holy spirit? Read "spirit" as you read "spirit of the law". Some flavors of pantheism actually argue that the concept of "an omnipotent omnipresent entity that nevertheless grants us free will" can be perfectly explained if said entity is the laws of physics. As we can see, there's a pretty big spectrum ranging anywhere from strawmen to things that do exist. IMHO, proper atheism needs to be able to argue against the entire body of theism, not just narrow set of christian beliefs, and as such it's a belief system that doesn't fit many people. There's agnosticism (basically, "I don't know if god exists because the evidence doesn't convince me"), which is a much easier belief system to actually defend, and which I think describes more accurately the belief system that a lot of self-proclaimed atheists actually subscribe to.

trophycase 5y ago

A religious person making a tautological argument!? I'm shocked!

deertick1 5y ago
An atheist denigrating the intellect of a religious person?! I'm shocked. It is a tautological argument in that it is true absolutely. Thats not a bad thing. Any system of belief is fundamentally predicated on faith based axioms. E.g. basically everything one thinks is "religious" to some degree.
- halfnormalform 5y ago
  No intellect was degraded. It was the behavior. Also your response is merely an insult followed by 5 unsupported statements. Can you try again?
- trophycase 5y ago
  You're right about that but I prefer axioms with actual explanatory power.
idiotfinder 5y ago
found one!

tonymet 5y ago

Atheism is actually polytheistic. The Gods can be identified by answering these questions: “why am I here?”, “who am i?”, “what should I do?”, “what is true?”, “why should I suffer & die?”, “what will happen tomorrow?”, “who matters more: myself or others?”. The deities of the secular religion would be “the self”, your parents, “the government/state and its figureheads“ , money (and the institutions controlling it), the earth / ecology/ the environment , “science” These are deities because they are the object of irrational fear, worship, rituals & sacrifice. To be clear, these gods are also worshiped by formally religious people (christians, muslims etc).

Boxxed 5y ago
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but it's a little bit odd to me that a non-religious person would necessarily have an irrational fear of anything you mentioned. Where, in your world view, is there room for someone who can think critically and make rational decisions? Why must all of these totally reasonable things that make up our world be feared?
- tonymet 5y ago
  They can also be worshipped / loved. There could be rational worship & love e.g. loving your parents because they care for you and they have direct impact over your wellbeing. Irrational worship/ love is loving and icon or demagogue : extreme example being Kim Jong Il – when he is hurt or sad, everyone is heart broken. Even in the free world we worship these demagogues. When trump is president many panic, some are elated. When the next president comes, the roles reverse some are relieved and some are sad.
foolinaround 5y ago
i found this insightful - that there are also the same set of 'gods' for both the religious and the athiest
mslm 5y ago
You're likely going to get poured with downvotes from the large number of atheists that browse this forum, but I commend you for the brave comment. Now let me join you. Effectively, yes, the primary atheist deity is material and worldly pleasure. How that's particularly expressed is of course different per person, but the core is that the atheist follows the deity of their whims.

xelxebar 5y ago

> This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system". Not OP, but I think this is a pretty narrow reading of their statement. Personally, I read it to be more about value and community dynamics. Institutionalized religions often are very explicit about their (supposed) terminal values and arrange social situations to explicitly work toward or reinforce those values. I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems. There is a difference between why we perform and action and the reasons we give for performing the same action [citation needed]. I think OP suggests that religions have structures useful for cognating about the former more sharply than secularism does.

joe_the_user 5y ago
I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems. You could say that secular groups may have implicit value systems, may even implicitly enforce but because they haven't made these values explicit, they allow to explicate, question and change them - whereas religion is about maintain an explicit and unchanging set of values. So there's more to the not-explicitness of a secular process than "a religion that doesn't say it's a religion".
lhorie 5y ago
> I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems. I read it like that as well. I've seen this idea illustrated this way: a kid raised in a religious community gets drilled from an early age about morals as an umbrella abstraction (in the form of allegories from religious texts), so they don't need to be micromanaged about the moral implications of every individual scenario under the sun ("don't run in the supermarket!", "don't push your sister!", "don't yell in the hallway!", etc etc) because they are explicitly exposed to an underlying set of values to govern every scenario. That's is an obviously religious leaning take (I heard it from a jewish person, though I'm not jewish myself), but I think there's a certain grain of truth in the sense that non-religious people don't have a standardized way of talking to kids about morals as an umbrella abstraction on a weekly basis, in a way that church goers do.

slibhb 5y ago

Regardless of whether "everyone is religious," everyone certainly has revelatory beliefs, i.e. beliefs that were not reasoned to. Christian thinkers have spilled a lot of ink attempting to clarify the boundary between reason and revelation whereas, in the secular world, many people do not seem to understand that many of their beliefs (particularly the foundational ones) are revealed.

tolbish 5y ago
You are confusing secularism with naturalism.
joe_the_user 5y ago
As a non-religious person, certainly I understand many of my beliefs come from convention or intuition or whatever non-rational source, sure. But I don't have any meta-belief telling me to hold onto given beliefs-that-seem-implausible-or-unverifiable because I'll be rewarded in the end or because it's a test or whatever. I don't continually change whatever belief I know is arbitrary but that's because consistency has some utility so point remains. Basically, I have no trouble with non-rational beliefs and behaviors. But religious specifically espouses irrationalist beliefs - irrationalism being the exhortation to keep, cultivate and fixate beliefs beyond the rational. Institutions other than religion, various flavors of Stalinism say, promote faith, fixating one's beliefs and so-forth. I'm against those too. But a wide variety of secular belief systems are against the irrationalist approach - some versions of liberal religion try to escape it too but as people observe, these folks are kind of becoming non-religious. Edit: Just generally, "everything not-wholly-rational is a religion" is a slippery argument that's being way-abused in this thread.
- simonklitj 5y ago
  What is rational? Is not rationality subjective? What you might deem irrational others might deem perfectly rational, and vice-versa, what you might deem rational others might deem quite obviously irrational. Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then? No, we must disregard this as hallucination or a psychological problem. Only what we (and by we I mean the "educated western world") in our pre-determined frame of rationality deem rational can ever be rational, and all that falls outside must naturally be considered irrational irrespective of its potential rationality in relation to other experiences we might call rational. Really (I think), something being rational is a state of mind, a common understanding with our peers. In a church most would agree that their belief is rational, not out of ignorance (though here you might disagree), but out of shared acceptance of a different frame of rationality, essentially accepting other experiences as being able to feed to rationality than those you might accept. I guess the point I'm trying to make (and I might be way off) is that when you say that religiosity espouses irrationalist beliefs, they're irrational to you, within your frame of rationalism. To someone else you're the ignorant one who's fighting tooth and nail. Edit: To those down voting I would love to engage further in conversation about this!

tharkun__ 5y ago

Picking up on the "is there a god" and who believes in it? I have always wondered how many of the high priests or whatever their titles might be in any religion over the millenia (this includes Aztecs and Vikings etc) really just saw religion as another way of holding power (vs. kings or what have you). I.e. "just pretending" to believe and in reality just using it to to wield power and influence over people. Please don't mistake this for saying there aren't very pious people in that group. I do not doubt there are. I just wonder. Just like there are politicians that truly try and improve things and help their constituents and then there are also the ones that really just enjoy having the power and that really couldn't care less until election time rolls around.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

irrational 5y ago

>I just don't think there is a god. This would be agnostic (militant agnostic?), wouldn't it? I think a true atheist would say "I know that there is not a god."

slim 5y ago
Agnostics actually don't think the question of "is there a god?" is interesting or can have an answer
KozmoNau7 5y ago
Not really. There are "I know that there is not a god" atheists, those are the insufferable unholier-than-thou types like Richard Dawkins, who seem mostly interested in provoking religious people. And there are "there is no falsifiable proof at all to support the existence of a god" atheists, which are the ordinary sensible ones, who don't hate religious people, they just don't share their beliefs.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Dawkins is actually a weak atheist (agnostic atheist), not a strong atheist. He thinks an interpersonal God is highly improbable, but it's not possible to prove a negative and so he doesn't assert that it doesn't exist.

dang 5y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488136.