Essay:Circularity

This popped up on ListenerX's why atheism is bullshit essay. It's actually more like a response to Rational Thinker's why religion is bullshit essay. Needless to say, I find the entire response considerably unenlightening, focusing on sound bite style, assertions and circularity.

In conclusion it's worth remarking what the original responses all mean. Or, as they don't really seem to mean anything, mention at least what the motive behind it could be. In short, it's nothing but denigration. It is the assertion that "I know there's 'more' to the world, because this makes me 'deep'. People who don't believe there is 'more' to the world are shallow and lacking character". Now, what this 'more' is, is actually inconsequential. It doesn't matter. You see it in the argument from beauty and you see it with people who say that they're spiritual but not religious. The why, the what, the hows, and where and what-the-fuck don't matter - all that matters is that this trope leads to some degree of personal superiority: I'm better because I believe. However, this is just a baseless assertion. It is trying to emphasise that someone is somehow better just because they believe in what I'm going to start calling the "Magic More". This would be everything from spirits, to God, to ghosts, to psychic powers; things you'd find in stories rather than reality - dare I suggest it's because people have heard too many stories and can't quite stomach the fact that the world simply isn't that dramatic, running on, as Science of Discworld puts it "on rules, not narrative"? There is no reason given for why believing in the Magic More is good, and this is perhaps what I find most troubling. "Faith" is one particular answer, but this doesn't actually give a reason; faith is simply believe in spite of, and often because of, a lack of real-world consequential evidence. There is still a missing connection between this and its status as a Good Thing. So this is the assertion that as atheists, scientists, rationalists, empiricists and so on, we're somehow... what?... weaker, more confined, less open minded, incomplete, unemotional... I'm not entirely sure. But I'm mostly not sure why this is the case, nor am I sure that it's necessarily a bad thing.

I believe this: Ideas and beliefs should pay their way in empirical observation or be consigned to the scrap heap. I emphatically do not believe this magically makes me an inferior person because of it.