What was the negative part? I was just asking that Alex clarify what he meant by how Atheists fall on the right side of the fence on social issues for "the wrong reasons". Is that focusing on something negative? I think it's a perfectly fair question.
Nevermind, bishop, I was simply commenting on what I perceived to be a lack of balance, but I understand that you were coming
yourself from a perception of lack of balance, so it's cool. Yes, it's a perfectly fair question. But perhaps, if you want an answer, you ought to PM Alex to make sure he's aware of this thread and especially your OP.
Are you a theist? If so, and if you're comfortable with it, can you describe your personal position?
Gosh, how many words do I get? I'll try to keep it brief. I accept the evidence in the testimony of those who have experienced NDEs and other visionary type experiences (not just in the modern age but throughout history, and throughout all cultures), which all points towards a supremely good spiritual force/being, which I think it's reasonable to refer to as "God". Personally, my spiritual experiences have almost uniformly been with the
wicked, and not with the good, so I have come to this in a slightly different way, via an inference: given that (as I have experienced it) spiritual evil exists, and given too that we are not all utterly beholden to it, it is most likely that a
protective spiritual force for
good exists, and is supreme in a personal God. It's not a perfect deductive inference, but it is at least reasonable and compatible with the (positive) spiritual experiences of others, so I go with it.
The main problem for me is the problem of evil. I have never seen a theodicy that seems plausible to me, and so I am drawn to dualism: that God is the supreme good and creative force, but that He (apologies to those who are uncomfortable with gendered, particularly masculine, language for God, it simply is more comfortable for me) is
not responsible for, and nor can He summarily dismiss, evil, which
intrudes into His creation. Sometimes I toy with the idea of the One deliberately splitting into a duality of good/evil for evolutionary purposes, but I'm not entirely satisfied with that idea because the costs seem to outweigh the benefits.
OK, hopefully that's enough without rabbiting on for too long.
Really? And the proponents are somehow immune to doing this?
The difference to me is that whereas the proponents have the evidence on their side (NDEs with veridical perceptions, Ganzfeld and other psi experiments, etc etc etc), the materialists are in denial of the evidence.
It's to be expected that you will think this way, though. It's a well-worn thought-pattern known as "attribution bias" (
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias).
One way to demonstrate creativity may be to show that you can break free of cognitive biases and errors.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
Thanks, Linda. I don't have the patience to read through those links right now, but I get the gist of them. In any case, I defend my "attribution". I noted that the narratives being spun aren't for the benefit of humanity, and that might be seen as implying malevolent intent, and I do not shy away from that - I unapologetically recognise the existence of spiritual evil in this world, an evil which impinges on human decision making, and I am not shy to suggest that certain aggressively-promoted worldviews might very well be fostered by immaterial forces - forces which would be very happy for humanity to descend into spiritual ignorance. I am not, however, saying that this is necessarily conscious, wilful, welcome or even recognised on the part of the humans involved, although in certain cases it very well may be.
@
Arouet,
I don't think it would be productive to respond in detail to your post. As I wrote in my last post, my position doesn't hinge on whether or not I've correctly understood the definition of "disbelief", and I'm open to the possibility that I haven't. I'll simply sum up with this and leave it there:
If Mike Smith has never had a thought about metaphysics in his life, and one day thinks to himself, "Hmm, now that I think about it, I'm not really sure about this whole 'God' idea", and looks up "atheist" in the dictionary, and sees "lack of belief", and decides, "Well, you know what, maybe I'm an atheist?", and when I ask him says, "Yeah, I think I'm an atheist because I lack a belief in God", then I don't think there's any game-playing involved. I think he's using an overly broad definition of "atheist", and I will tell him so, but he's not being manipulative, he's just going with what he knows.
On the other hand, if Mary Sue is constantly promoting atheism online, advocating for it in forum and blog posts, decrying organised religion and willing for "an age of reason" where the church is irrelevant and we recognise that what is often known as spirituality is in fact "woo", and then, when asked in what sense she is an atheist, replies, "Oh, simply that I lack belief in God", and when asked how she defends her atheism, replies that she has no need to defend it, because the burden of proof lies with theists,
then I think there is a game being played; a manipulation, and
that is what I take exception to, which is basically the point I've been trying to make from the start of my involvement in this thread, even if we've gotten distracted into other sub-issues.
And of course there are all sorts of people and motivations in between Mike and Mary, I'm simply giving the more extreme examples to give you a sense of what I mean by "game-playing".