Hi there,
So this is something of a curiosity to me: atheism adopts the opinion that "there is no god" but basically stops there. Now granted people take all sorts of tangents, pastafarianism for example, and there are many gods to which they object, but fundamentally atheism is not a multivalent approach to belief at all. By multivalent, I mean that it doesn't attempt to construct a belief system that accounts for multiple points of view, people don't say "I believe in the atheist way of life" they just say "I am an atheist". I understand that the latter is simpler, but the fact that the former is not present at all is rather spurious I think.
Atheists could easily adopt the attitude that "there is no God, the Universe cannot be interacted with from the outside, the future is at no point going to revolve around God, the Name of God itself will meet the same fate of entropy as everything else". These are atheist ideas that flesh out the nature of the atheism and give structure to the expectations and understandings of atheism, such that should they get in a debate, for example, they would have such beliefs to negotiate with and through and around. Otherwise you end up just revolving around the one concept that there is no god, which is not healthy.
The fallout from this is that atheists frequently obsess over religion and religious stupidity. In debates they frequently call religious people out for their unthinkingness and their lack of critical perspective, when this is completely unwarranted and unconstructive. If atheists actually had beliefs themselves, then it would be clear when they were thinking about the future, for example and not merely dwelling on the past failings of the human race to live a religion that is pure and unspotted. This actually leads to the idea that atheists are not merely unregenerate, but are objectionable and unkind and therefore ultimately lacking in knowledge, be it of themselves.
Call me crazy, but if atheists actually believed in atheism systematically, it could actually do some benefit. Intellectual rigour doesn't have to revolve around praising a God you can't see, so that your problems are projected onto a future you can deal with; instead, you can have ideas about the future and reasoned arguments about what your attitude will be once you reach that future. To my mind, there is nothing easier than talking about the hope I have in the future, but for atheists it seems as if they are scared of the work that will mean.
To be fair, multivalency opens up the possibility of disagreement. Not everyone will want to dwell on the entropy of the Universe, but that is rather the point. Ultimately, atheists think they "agree" on there being "no God" but if they can't even sustain a handful of beliefs that they agree on as well, how much could their agreement possibly be worth. I'm not saying it would be worth that much more if they did have multivalency, but at least you would know that it was worth something.
Life is too short, not to have believed something that made it possible to be aware of it ending.
So this is something of a curiosity to me: atheism adopts the opinion that "there is no god" but basically stops there. Now granted people take all sorts of tangents, pastafarianism for example, and there are many gods to which they object, but fundamentally atheism is not a multivalent approach to belief at all. By multivalent, I mean that it doesn't attempt to construct a belief system that accounts for multiple points of view, people don't say "I believe in the atheist way of life" they just say "I am an atheist". I understand that the latter is simpler, but the fact that the former is not present at all is rather spurious I think.
Atheists could easily adopt the attitude that "there is no God, the Universe cannot be interacted with from the outside, the future is at no point going to revolve around God, the Name of God itself will meet the same fate of entropy as everything else". These are atheist ideas that flesh out the nature of the atheism and give structure to the expectations and understandings of atheism, such that should they get in a debate, for example, they would have such beliefs to negotiate with and through and around. Otherwise you end up just revolving around the one concept that there is no god, which is not healthy.
The fallout from this is that atheists frequently obsess over religion and religious stupidity. In debates they frequently call religious people out for their unthinkingness and their lack of critical perspective, when this is completely unwarranted and unconstructive. If atheists actually had beliefs themselves, then it would be clear when they were thinking about the future, for example and not merely dwelling on the past failings of the human race to live a religion that is pure and unspotted. This actually leads to the idea that atheists are not merely unregenerate, but are objectionable and unkind and therefore ultimately lacking in knowledge, be it of themselves.
Call me crazy, but if atheists actually believed in atheism systematically, it could actually do some benefit. Intellectual rigour doesn't have to revolve around praising a God you can't see, so that your problems are projected onto a future you can deal with; instead, you can have ideas about the future and reasoned arguments about what your attitude will be once you reach that future. To my mind, there is nothing easier than talking about the hope I have in the future, but for atheists it seems as if they are scared of the work that will mean.
To be fair, multivalency opens up the possibility of disagreement. Not everyone will want to dwell on the entropy of the Universe, but that is rather the point. Ultimately, atheists think they "agree" on there being "no God" but if they can't even sustain a handful of beliefs that they agree on as well, how much could their agreement possibly be worth. I'm not saying it would be worth that much more if they did have multivalency, but at least you would know that it was worth something.
Life is too short, not to have believed something that made it possible to be aware of it ending.
.
