Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Atheist "identity"/reply (3)

I think you only have a problem with conflating the labels, not the concepts I'm talking about. I'll try and lay it out a little straighter, I don't think it's so much conflating incompatible ideas so much as evolving one into the other. (note, this is a lot longer than intended and may get bumped off to the blog or an essay)

Firstly, I find atheism to be a somewhat useless label. It conveys little information except that 90% of the world subscribes to an arbitrary belief system involving supernatural superstitions and 10% of the world goes against that. Without religion, atheism ceases to have a meaning. Just like "not playing Jurblung" doesn't have much meaning unless a lot of people play Jurblung - and they don't, I just made that up there and then. So having a word for "people who don't play Jurblung" is pointless, it conveys no information. Atheism does have meaning, but only because religion exists. The trouble is, this "religion" thing becomes something akin to "I know it when I see it" and so the use of the word "atheism" to convey a lot of meaningful information is somewhat reduced. As I've said elsewhere, even people who say "I believe in God" could be counted as atheists (at least, implicitly) if their concept and image of God and religion don't match the rest of the adult population. To say otherwise would be to say that the statement "I believe in God" automatically makes you religious regardless of what you mean by it.

I basically want to get to the bottom of what I mean when I say "I am an atheist" - and this will be what I mean because I'm clarifying my thoughts, someone else may choose to do the same and come up with a different answer, I would encourage this. There's no sense in a bunch of people using the same label for their ideas if their ideas don't match! (And yes, I've done this point to death) The "I am an atheist" statement otherwise just depends on how you define "atheist", and arguing from definitions is, well, boring and doesn't really prove anything.

So I want to identify a way that conveys my actual belief without requiring the context of religion espoused in above I.e., if I was to leave this universe and re-enter an alternate one where religion just plain and simply didn't exist it would still be meaningful.

Imagine I did it the lazy way around, call it the "traditional" way, and said "well, I define an atheist as someone who doesn't believe in any god, including the Abrahamic YHWH(s), Zeus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and every other deity from A to Z (and 0-9, !, ", £, $ or any other character". This is exactly as our article puts it. Well, the problem here is that I'm still "defining" the word atheism rather than communicating what I mean by it, and even worse I'm still doing it in the context of other religions. Now, let's propose something silly for a moment. Suppose someone said "the god I worship is Barack Obama" (told you it would be silly). Well, my definition says that I can't believe in Barack Obama (I don't believe in any god), even though Barack Obama is clearly a real person - he's human shaped, I can see him, hear him, read his words, see him interact with others and potentially interact with him personally. That's absurd, but it's what my "definition", as it stands, demands of me. You could propose that my definition actually means "I don't believe Barack Obama is a god" BUT that's not "lacking a belief in any god A to Z...", it's simply denying that something real can be a god. I'd then have to change my definition to include "the god-like qualities of a real entity" or somthing like that. It's just shifting around categories and fairly ad hoc and is also moving the goalposts somewhat. Mostly, it's very, very messy. It's more caveats, more definitions, and we grow close to "I know it when I see it". I don't think, at a fundamental level, this "Obama is a god" example is any more or less absurd than people discussing whether Buddhists are atheists and how that pertains to an anti-religious stance held by atheists (which is a trope I'm sure we've all seen).

So, let's question why I would deny that Obama is a god, along with denying the existence of supernatural gods too boot. Well, the way I find myself trying to unite these ideas is simply empirical observation: what do I expect from these assertions? If there were supernatural gods, I'd expect prayer to work better than chance, and for miracles to happen, or for booming voices in the sky and evidence of intelligent design like us not biting our own cheeks, being born technically 6 months prematurely and so on. If Obama was a god I'd expect similar supernatural powers - at least lightning bolts from the fingertips but I'd probably settle for less if you persuaded me that they were suitably impressive. Then I'd not so much "believe that Obama was a god" as much "admit that Obama had these powers" - because they matched up with empirical observation. On the other hand, if someone proposed that Obama was a god but displayed only human characteristics then... well, that assertion carries with it no useful information. We may as well say Obama doesn't play Jurblung and call it a remarkable fact.

Here's the real important but difficult to explain bit: I'm not saying that "expectation of empirical observation" is what I mean by "true" (or what one could call "philosophical naturalism"), nor do I suggest that this is my definition of it, or my explanation of it - it's simply that this is what I'm talking about. Of course, "true" "real" "existent" are nice words that I could use, but I can't be sure that everyone agrees that these mean "detectable by observation". So I'm avoiding mental short-cuts like "atheism" and "rationalism" and cutting straight to the chase of what I mean and what I think. I don't mean that this is what "true" means, nor what "real" means, nor what "rational" means, nor what "atheism" means - it is simply an end in itself. Because you may well want to say "real" is something different (and I do pity the sort of people who do pull "but by definition" arguments, as if changing the definition will change my mind), but then we wouldn't be talking about the same thing, would we? So instead of "beliefs should produce empirical expectations" being a definition of some kind, it's a statement that I make that I value as part of my identity of beliefs. I expect my beliefs (simply statements I assert) to produce expectations - end of. If they don't then I don't find a use for them. Not because I define them as not real, but simply because they don't produce expectations. Call it what you like, these are simply the values I wish to endorse.

Now, you might say that this exercise is rather pointless; but is it any less pointless than, say, arguing about the definition of "religion" to prove that "atheism is not a religion"?

All I've done is moved on from using "atheism" as a term. Hopefully this explains the thought process enough to convince you I'm not just conflating incompatible and distinct ideas of "atheism" and "philosophical naturalism" - just that when pushed for what I actually think, I don't need to make such a distinction.