#theism

[emeraldislewitch]

i cannot say it enough: RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP RESEARCH IS WORSHIP

research your ancestors, research your gods, research the land you come from, listen to the stories told by your family, your community, your elders and take notes. research research research.

#ancestor work #ancestor worship #witchcraft #ancestor veneration #ancestral veneration #gods #theism

[daisy-mooon]

A reminder that some of you guys only use LGBT activism to shit on religious people and do exactly no activism whatsoever if you can't use it to be anti-theist. Some of you will have no problems harassing and being racist and homophobic to queer people if they're religious.

#op is a bisexual aroacespec christian and will run you over with a fucking car if you clown in my notes #to the trans person who called me a nazi and said that i would get killed and raped the last time i made this post go fuck urself idgaf #queer discourse #lgbt discourse #theism #religion #religious #queer religion #queer christian #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbt religion #religious discourse #anti anti theism

[atheostic]

It utterly baffles me how so many people seem to be unable to grasp the concept that atheists don't believe in any deities.

#religion #atheism #theism #quora #abrahamic religions #christianity #apologetics #ffs #why is this so hard

[historyandarthijinks]

You're valid for...

Turning to religion

Turning away from religion

Changing religions

Changing religions beliefs

Changing religious dominions/subgroups

Changing religious levels

Becoming non-religious

Not believing in religious at all

Acknowledging cults and the danger of cults, including political and religious cults

Wanting a religious group to pay the consequences of their actions

Escaping a cult

Being victim of a cult

Viewing religion different due to trauma

Participating in religious rituals

Participating in religious holidays

Taking part in cultural holidays that stems from religion

You're Not Valid for...

Pushing your religious beliefs onto others

Telling others that their god(s) are fake to their face

Pushing non-religious beliefs onto others

Believing that religion has no cultural significance

Disrespecting a religious site

Forcing someone to attend a religious ritual

Forcing someone to take part in a religion based holiday

Using religion as an excuse to violate and ignore human rights

Thinking someone outside your religious beliefs are lesser

Being prejudiced and discriminatory in the name of religion or non-religion

Being an asshole

Being awful to people of specific religious or non religious beliefs

#religion #non religious #theism #atheism #antisemitism #ex cult

[philosophybits]

What blindness to talk of atheism! Are there any theists? Did any human mind ever encompass the idea of divinity?

Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas

#philosophy #quotes #Friedrich Schlegel #Ideas #atheism #theism #humanity #divine #ultimate

[greetings-inferiors]

Just found out that the judge that ruled that creationism was religion, not science, and thus couldn’t be taught as an alternative to evolution in school received so many death threats he needed around the clock US Marshall protection for him and his family.

Because remember kids, if someone doesn’t accept your religion of loving everyone, kill them.

#text post #randyposting #religion #atheism #evolution #creationism #theism #Christianity

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"God. For people who are not strong enough to cope with reality."

#reality #denial #sorry not sorry #theism #god belief #religion is a mental illness

[mymagpienest]

#literature #plays #theatre #religion #religious trauma #catholic trauma #art #poetry #poetry quotes #nihilism #theism #philosophy #shame #guilt #catholic guilt #mymagpienest

[satanourunholylord]

Morningstar, I rise for you,

Bring the light of celestial green,

A day or a year to play in peace,

And shine the fair radiance of that rosy hand;

Lay by the little cottage by the sea,

Oh, Star in an early beam,

And Kindle these pale flowers,

Far doth the splendors of thy golden eyes reach,

Lay them on me,

And I shall lay mine on you.

- freeform poetry by @satanourunholylord

(Dedicated to Lucifer)

#religion #satanism #pagan #satanist #satan #theistic satanism #Luciferianism #theistic luciferianism #lucifer #lucifer deity #theism #polytheism #paganism #devil worship #devil worshipper #devil worshipping #satanic art

[pomegranateandhoney]

if there is no G-d, why stay Jewish in practice?

An interesting question I saw in a Facebook group. Some of my favorite responses that resonated for me:

"It's still the mythological language that feels authentic to me, and I still need love it and crave it in a pre-rational part of my self."

"God might not exist but the Jewish people definitely do."

"At no point in my life has believing in g-d felt like a requirement for my Judaism. Judaism has always, for me, been more about philosophy, practice, ritual, justice, community, and action. The concept that any religion doesn't have meaning or value without belief in a deity is really foreign to me and kind of strikes me as a Christianity-derived idea."

"Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn wrote that in contrast to protestantism, which values faith above all, Judaism values practice above all. He suggested being Jewish one needn't be theistic at all."

#jewish #judaism #jumblr #ritual #my personal journey #faith #orthodoxy vs orthopraxy #mitzvot #atheism #theism #theology

[onecornerface]

Almost all arguments for theism are problematically sectarian

Why do atheists and agnostics not find the arguments for theism persuasive? According to some less-charitable theists, this is due to emotional resistance to theism. According to other more-charitable theists, this is due to some nebulous conception of reasonable disagreement, or because God does not reveal his existence to everyone. According to some atheists and agnostics, it is because the arguments for theism are weak. I suggest an explanation which overlaps with some albeit not all of the above.

Many defenses of traditional theism (including positive arguments for theism and rebuttals to arguments for atheism) hinge upon controversial principles in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. These tend to be principles which many atheists and agnostics reject or do not see reason to accept. This makes such defenses of classical theism unpersuasive—even if such arguments are sound *and* atheists & agnostics are reasonable.

In fact, I think this problem applies to nearly every popular argument for theism. They ALL hinge on controversial premises in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics—ALL principles which are disproportionately rejected, or not accepted, by atheists and agnostics. For brief illustration, I will below give several representative examples.

Many versions of the cosmological (or first-cause) argument for theism are successful only if the first-cause needs to be personal (or person-like), which seems to require something in the ballpark of mind-body dualism or libertarian free will, which atheists tend to reject. This is in addition to how the Kalam cosmological argument requires controversial views in philosophy of infinity. However, I am here assuming that such views in philosophy of infinity are true and thus that there must be a temporal first cause. The temporal first cause is shown to be God (in a traditional sense) only if it must be personal rather than nonpersonal. And this requires controversial premises from philosophy of personhood, agency, mind, or free will—which atheists and agnostics tend to reject or not accept. Otherwise, it cannot be shown that the first cause can’t be an impersonal quantum vacuum state or suchlike.

Similarly, many versions of the argument from design (such the fine-tuned universe argument, which is by far the most credible such argument) are successful only if a personal designer is a superior explanation than an impersonal (non-) designer. But a personal designer only has greater explanatory value if we make controversial assumptions in fields such as philosophy of personhood, agency, mind, or free will—which again atheists and agnostics tend to reject or not accept. Notably, my observation here is entirely independent of controversies around multiverse hypotheses. Even if multiverse hypotheses are false, scientifically poor, or philosophically unsound, this gives very little comfort to fine-tuning arguments for theism—unless theism offers superior explanations, via appeal to controversial metaphysical theories, which atheists and agnostics tend not to accept.

Moral arguments for theism overwhelmingly rely on non-naturalist moral realism, which many atheists and agnostics (especially among non-philosophers) reject. If moral naturalism or moral anti-realism or moral weak realism is true or justified (either in general, or to atheists and agnostics), then atheists and agnostics have no reason to see moral arguments as providing any grounds for theism. I leave open the question of whether atheist moral non-naturalists should find theism compelling.

Arguments from consciousness only succeed if some kind of mind-body dualism (or something in this ballpark) is true, which many atheists and agnostics reject.

Some logic-based transcendental arguments for theism succeed only if something in the ballpark of Mathematical-Logical Platonism is true, which many atheists reject. Here I’m inclined to make a disjunction: I’m too unfamiliar with the arguments on this topic, so for now to me it is not clear whether Platonism is true, but *if* Platonism is true then it probably does not require theism.

The problem of divine hiddenness is an argument for atheism which claims (roughly) that God has not revealed his existence to atheists & agnostics, and that the best explanation for this datum is God’s nonexistence. One common theistic response is that God has revealed God’s existence to everyone. However, this response is parasitic on the assumption that at least some of the arguments for theism are persuasive enough that they ought to persuade atheists and agnostics—which I argue they need not do (since they rely on sectarian theories), even if they are sound arguments.

There are a variety of non-evidentialist defenses of theism. Atheists and agnostics tend to either be evidentialists or to hold mild non-evidentialist theories which do not lend significant support to theism, and which likely lend even less support to particular sectarian theistic positions such as the traditional forms of Christianity and Islam. Appealing to non-evidentialist epistemological theories (as a persuasive maneuver, at least) is thus likely to be a non-starter.

I think on commonsense ethics and on nearly all secular ethical views, it is pretty clear that when we can prevent horrific evils, then we should. Hence, the fact that God does not prevent horrific evils provides a powerful piece of commonsensical and secular-theoretical ethical evidence that God (as construed as perfectly good & all-powerful) does not exist. Theistic attempts to explain away the problem of evil may be successful—but *only* when assuming highly sectarian ethical principles, which nearly all atheists and agnostics see as wildly implausible. A very good person wouldn’t allow children to starve to death if he or she can easily prevent it. If you think God would do so, then either you think God has a really good reason to allow children to starve (which is a highly revisionist ethical theory), OR you think God is very good despite not needing a reason to allow children to starve (which is also a highly revisionist ethical theory). (Alternatively, God may be morally imperfect or not all-powerful—these nonstandard versions of theism are not targeted by the argument.)

A big final question: Are arguments for atheism, and/or responses to arguments for theism, also highly sectarian? I think less so, but arguing for this claim is beyond the scope of this post.

#theism #atheism #apologetics

[mister-rad-boy]

Honestly the way that some trans people/TRAs talk about gender is so similar to Jehovah’s witnesses. Acting like people “discovering their genders” is some sort of spiritual awakening and that always bugged me about the whole movement even before I peaked. People trying to spread the good word of gender identity and acting like it was this big solution to their problems. It’s what led me away from religion and what ultimately caused me to peak on gender ideology.

#gender critical #trans rights activism #jehovah’s witnesses #religion critical #religiously critical #theism #atheism #radfems do touch #i said a thing

[thebardostate]

Where Does Consciousness Come From?

(This is Part 2 of a three part series on consciousness. Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.

A 25 year bet was settled last week when two rival scientific explanations for consciousness - Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) - both failed to discover any neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) in the human brain. Neuroscientist Cristof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers agreed that neuroscience can't yet explain how our brains produce consciousness.

I say "yet" because it is an article of faith among the disciples of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett that consciousness (if it exists at all) will eventually be shown to be a mere illusion or "epiphenomenon" generated by biochemical activity in our brains. They argue that the mind is only what the brain does, so consciousness ceases when the brain dies. They dismiss as pseudoscientific "woo" fantasy any notion that consciousness might survive the physical death of the brain.

(source: @myjetpack)

Materialist neo-Darwinism appears to enjoy broad support across the physical and biological sciences, in medicine, and from science popularizers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan. It can fairly be called the orthodox scientific view.

And yet, we see from the results of the wager that the origins of consciousness remain an open question. It is considered one of the greatest unsolved problems in science. Thus far, scientific orthodoxy has gotten us exactly...nowhere.

What is it Like to be a Bat?

Enter Thomas Nagel, a marquee name in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In 1974 Nagel published the widely influential essay "What is it Like to be a Bat?" in which he argued that there's a lot more to being a bat than just hanging around upside down in the dark. Bats perceive their world thru echo location. Nothing in human experience prepares us for what that must be like: bats don't "see" their homes because they're in pitch darkness, nor do they "feel" their way along in the dark because they're flying thru the air. We can speculate, but we humans don't have a clue what it feels like to be a bat. And yet, science knows a great deal about bat brains.

In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos Nagel argues that the materialist neo-Darwinist conception of reality is almost certainly false, with far-reaching implications for evolution and quantum physics. He is incredulous at the just-so story that Dawkins, Dennett, et. al. are expecting us to swallow:

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naive response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

However, Nagel is no sock puppet for religion, as some of his materialist critics have insinuated. In fact, he is an atheist:

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them. I believe that these two radically opposed conceptions cannot exhaust the possibilities.

Back to the Drawing Board

So if consciousness doesn't come from the brain, then where does it come from?

In Nagel's estimation it's high time science started looking for alternative explanations instead of continuing to double down on materialist neo-Darwinism, which by now has had ample time to put up or shut up (Karl Popper called these breezy we'll-solve-it-someday assurances "promissory materialism".) Nagel critiques the three basic approaches that materialists have pursued thus far:

Treat consciousness as a black box, and infer what might lurk inside the box by carefully observing its behavior from the outside. This is the behaviorist approach, whose sterility was so evident by the late 1960s that it sparked the cognitive revolution in psychology.

Systematically trace all mental events to physical counterparts "somewhere" in the brain. This is the approach that GWT and IIT take, using medical techniques like functional MRI to observe the brain as we carry out various activities. One of the problems with this approach is brain plasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself (e.g., after a stroke); plasticity makes it difficult to pin down exactly where in the brain mental events occur (to say nothing about how the brain pulls off the plasticity trick in the first place.) Another problem is that mental activities can interact and overlap, such as when we drive a car and talk on the phone at the same time. Sometimes we can multitask, and sometimes we can't. Where do those complex interactions play out in the brain? What about things produced by the brain itself but not experienced by the senses like imagination, the placebo effect and hallucinations? And finally, there is a world of difference between images from fMRI and the actual, subjective, first-person experiences we have when performing those tasks. They're just not the same. I'll have much more to say about this approach to consciousness research in Part 3 of this series.

Deny that there is any such thing as consciousness - this is eliminative materialism aka illusionism, whose most prominent proponent is Dennett. But if we buy into this, why should we stop at questioning our own consciousness? Why don't we just deny that anything exists at all, and go full-on nihilist atheist? Philosopher Galen Strawson called illusionism "the silliest claim ever made" while philosopher John Searle called it an "intellectual pathology." (Plus which, when you get down into the weeds of eliminative materialism, you find that it's just reheated behaviorism anyway.)

Nagel believes these materialist accounts are all incomplete because each in its own way fails to explain the familiar first-person experience of being alive and conscious. But even setting that aside, he points out a further problem for the neo-Darwinists.

Why Did Consciousness Evolve?

In its own way, materialist Neo-Darwinism is a "theory of everything" in so far as biology goes. As such, it must be able to explain why consciousness evolved in the first place.

It's quite plausible that natural selection could have produced organisms that adapt and reproduce without being conscious. We can imagine robot-like zombies that carry out a series of evolved instructions and reproduce without ever having experiencing first-person subjective consciousness, like little automatons. And yet, we are conscious. Why? What evolutionary purpose could first-person awareness have served?

A standard materialist explanation is that consciousness emerged as a byproduct of evolution (a "spandrel" as Steven Jay Gould called it) rather like junk DNA. If we are not satisfied with the just-so story that the mental comes as a free bonus to the physical, then we will have to look for our answers elsewhere.

Opening the Window on Consciousness

We landed in this situation because science has sought to explain nature entirely in physical terms, without invoking theism. It has been spectacularly successful - particularly in the physical sciences - but the cost has been excluding consciousness along with the gods. Eventually this exclusion was bound to be challenged. We cannot have a complete picture of the world without understanding our own consciousness that makes that picture possible. If consciousness isn't generated by the brain, the implications for evolution and quantum physics will be far-reaching. (Nagel, 2012)

In the concluding part of this series we'll take a fresh look at the medical evidence for certain so-called 'paranormal' phenomena. These have been systematically excluded from mainstream scientific consideration because, if they proved true, they would undercut materialist explanations of consciousness. What do medical anomalies like Near-Death Experiences and Terminal Lucidity imply about the nature of consciousness?

#consciousness #philosophy #materialism and its discontents #cognitive science #philosophy of mind #global workspace theory #integrated information theory #artificial consciousness #neuronal correlates of consciousness #richard dawkins #thomas nagel #daniel dennett #spiritual atheism #atheist #atheism #agnosticism #agnostic #theism #mind and cosmos #mind body problem #what is it like to be a bat? #brain #consciousness series

[atheostic]

Question for Theist Jews, Christians, and Muslims

When you die, which version of you goes to the afterlife?

5-year-old you? 30-year-old you? Elderly you? You before you had brain damage that changed your personality? You after the brain damage? You before Alzheimer's changed your personality? You after Alzheimer's changed your personality?

Why that version?

#questions for theists #christianity #judaism #islam #abrahamic religions #life and death #the afterlife #just wondering #quick question #i'm just curious #questions for christians #questions for muslims #out of curiosity #theism

[philosophybits]

And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

#philosophy #quotes #Fyodor Dostoyevsky #The Brothers Karamazov #god #necessity #theism #humanity

[infinitysisters]

“People are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as a man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior.

The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images-of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed.

It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters –when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out! ” we cry, “it’s alive.”

And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back–I would have done so myself if I could–and proceed no further with Christianity.

An “impersonal God” -well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads –better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap –best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband-that is quite another matter.

There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search for God”!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?”

- C.S. Lewis, Miracles

#c s lewis #god #pantheism #theism #practical theology #god is alive #relationship as religion #the real thing #beyond mere mental assent #beyond mere doctrine #seek him #He is realer than you are #spiritual growth #spirit is more solid than matter #expand your soul #open your mind #faith #reality and truth are much much larger than our knowledge #Christianity #miracles #it’s alive #oh nooo #get out of your coffin #don’t stay dead #invitation to become alive #Pinocchio becomes a real being #playing seek and hide