Atheist Rock

12 Responses to Atheist Rock

1. Graeme says:

   December 3, 2008 at 9:02 am

   This said all that needed to be said back in 1980:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuir2W3grME
2. A-Bax says:

   December 3, 2008 at 9:05 am

   Not that it’s all that imporatant, but FWIW: I consider myself an agnostic. (An agnostic who actively disbelieves in Abrahamic relgions, the central claims of Buddhism/Hinduism, and just about every other relgion I’ve come across.)

   Why not just go the whole-hog and become an atheist then? Mainly because I’m open to the idea that I could have an experience which would change my mind, or that there’s evidence out there which could contradict the elaborate and compelling edifice of science that we humans have constructed thus far.

   If it’s a question of what you “believe” in your heart of hearts, but shy away from claiming to “know”, then I guess I should be called an atheist (with the important caveat as described above). If it’s a question of what someone *knows*, with the same certainty that I know that the GOP got it’s clock cleaned by the DEMs this time around, I must confess agnosticism.

   Not that it really matters that much in the long run anyway…

   BTW, Bradlaugh: I’ve been intrigued by your embrace of “mysterianism” since you announced it on The Corner. (“New Mysterianism”, if I remember correctly). But I’ve have been unable to find much about it on the web that I could really sink my teeth into. I understand though, that it has to do with consciousness and the seemingly unsolvable philosophical connundrums that arise out of materialist accounts of qualia, etc.

   My question: Is Mysterianism really a religion in the same way that traditional religions are so? Or is it a (minimal) belief in usome unverifiable proposition(s) (due to abstruse philosophical difficulties), as opposed to the kind “supernatural” belief that is so characteristic of most religions?

   Just curious, thanks.
3. Stopped Clock says:

   December 3, 2008 at 9:36 am

   lol. I disagree, that video was hilarious and that guy has a lot of talent, both for being creative and for sounding just like the song he’s building his parody on. I’ve always wanted to write song parodies but I’m terrible at imitation.
4. Bradlaugh says:

   December 3, 2008 at 10:15 am

   Being fundamentally un-intellectual, I’m not the person to come to for dogmatic definitions, but Mysterianism to me (New Mysterianism, whatever — see what I mean?) is the standpoint that says:

   • Unknowns should be tackled:   Given any problem about the world of experience, we should try to solve that problem, and should hope to do so: wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen, in the hortatory sense.

   • Unknowns will always exist:   There will never be a time when we have solved all problems. Name any positive whole number. If I begin counting now, there will come a day when I shall reach your number (though I may need to bequeath the counting task to my descendants …); but there will never come a day when I have counted all numbers.

   • Intractable unknowns may exist:   It is possible that there are problems we cannot solve, understandings we cannot win. Obvious candidates are the origin of the universe, and the nature of experience itself. I don’t know that these are intractable, or that anything else is, and I want to see them vigorously tackled; but they are surely the leading candidates, in the present state of our understanding.

   Our understanding proceeds from the cerebral cortex, which is a one-eighth-inch-thick rind on a lump of meat. We should not hope for too much.

   I like to think of this as a posture of humility. But of course, as any believer will be glad to tell you, humility is foreign to us “scientistic” unbelievers. We wallow in epistemological arrogance.
5. Andrew T. says:

   December 3, 2008 at 10:54 am

   A-Bax: I hear you. I always describe myself as an atheist in the same sense as my disbelief in magic pixies. Sure, I hold open the (obviously remote) possibility that in the future, some evidence might convince me that magic pixies are real. But as of right now, with the limits of human mental capacity and the evidence I have at hand, I’m convinced that they’re not.

   In other words: one need not have absolute knowledge to make categorical “no” statements; all such statements are generally understood — in every context other than religion — to contain the implicit predicate of “Given the limits of human understanding and with the knowledge I have today, I tentatively believe that….”
6. A-Bax says:

   December 3, 2008 at 2:13 pm

   Andrew T: Totally….it’s funny how the word “atheist” just leaves such a bad aftertaste for (many) believers. “Agnostic” just sounds so much softer, even though I bet that many professed agnostics are closer to the viewpoint I’ve described than are genuinely unsure, genuinely on the fence as to whether or not they believe.

   Plus, full-disclosure here, I come from a very Catholic family….to the point where my parents sought out a church which performs the Tridentine Mass, and my sister took her kids out of the local parish’s parochial school since it “wasn’t Catholic enough”. (They found a teeny-tiny school which hews to a more-or-less pre Vatican II sensibility, and that’s where their children go). Growing up, I went to Catholic grammar school, HS, etc. (But not college!)

   My Dad makes this super-important (to him) distinction between atheism and agnosticism, with the explicit stance that atheism requires “as much faith” as theism. (Which is nonsense, of course, as your magic pixies example illustrates.) There have been family rifts which haven’t been very pleasant, and which I won’t bore you guys with here, but suffice it to say that it keeps the peace to describe my stance as agnostic rather than atheist, even if there isn’t much material difference (for me, anyway.)

   Call it a cop-out if you will, call it cowardly, but it took me a long time to fully appreciate how much emotion some people can have invested in their children’s internal religious attitudes (i.e., I thought my parents would come to terms with my irrelgion as I got older – but much to my chagrin they did not), and I found the difference in terms a small price to pay for familial peace.

   Anyway….don’t mean to get all Oprah-ey on you guys. 🙂

   PS – This site is awesome! I’ve barely read The Corner since it went up.
7. matoko_chan says:

   December 4, 2008 at 7:10 am

   Here’s a better anthem for Godless Conservativism.
   Human
8. matoko_chan says:

   December 4, 2008 at 7:29 am

   Fraa Bradlaugh, I have tried to educate you to the beauty of hiphop, but there is an undeniable problem with conservatism.
   It is Lack of Good Musik.
   Did you not witness your party’s standard bearer, Sarah Palin, being dissed time and time again by 80s hairband that refused to let her use their music for her campaign evens?
   Science and technology are cool.
   Libertarian principles are cool, like citizen rights and personal freedom.
   But conservative music is teh sukkage.
   Conservatism has lost a generation of youth, 2:1.
   How do you get them back?
9. matoko_chan says:

   December 4, 2008 at 7:30 am

   Did you not witness your party’s standard bearer, Sarah Palin, being dissed time and time again by 80s hairbands that refused to let her use their music for her campaign events?

   poor typing skillz, sry.
10. RichG says:

    December 4, 2008 at 8:47 am

    A-Bax :
    Call it a cop-out if you will, call it cowardly, but it took me a long time to fully appreciate how much emotion some people can have invested in their children’s internal religious attitudes (i.e., I thought my parents would come to terms with my irrelgion as I got older – but much to my chagrin they did not), and I found the difference in terms a small price to pay for familial peace.

    Your parents believe that you are going to burn in hell. Of course they should be concerned. Whom I find curious are the people who claim to be very religious but show little to no concern the likely eternal damnation of their friends and family. I’m thankful for that, of course, because I have no desire to be “saved,” but still…
11. A-Bax says:

    December 4, 2008 at 10:27 am

    RichG: The “burn in hell” bit is interesting. Besides the *evil* suspects who even the non-religious might hope burn in hell, Judas Iscariot is taken as almost definitive of someone who is likely to be burning in hell. But what’s interesting is how the religious mind can find ways to make exceptions even for someone like Judas, if they are made to feel sympathetic emotions intensely enough.

    When the Mel Gibson movie came out, many Christians were moved. I tried to watch it, but couldn’t get very far (it seemed like torture-porn to me, like those awful Saw movies), so I turned it off. But I remember my father talking about it, and how much it moved him, etc. One of the things he mentioned was the suicide of Judas, and how it was a “double-whammy”, twice-over guaranteeing him a ticket to hell.

    “But then” he mused “we can’t know Judas’ state of mind when he killed himself. He may have been so overwhelmed with guilt and grief that he wasn’t in his right mind.” And explanation followed that a kind of temporary-insanity might mitigate the RC rules which called for a suicide (and betrayer of JC, no less) to go straight to hell.

    Don’t know if this hold up under Canon Law or official theology, but I found it all fascinating. Religious beliefs really are motivated by emotion as much as anything else, perhaps even more so.

    Which makes religion seem all the less mysterious to me, and all the more natural. (And the content of religious claims as kind of all the more understandably false, if that makes any sense.)
12. Tanya says:

    December 4, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    Ooo, “apatheist.” What a great word. I so wanted for you to have made that up just now, but googled it to be sure. And I think that’s actually what I am. Neat.

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