If Atheists Ruled the World...

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Honestly, any analysis is going to have to take into account the Soviet ideology and the fact that the government came into power via revolutionary means. Not only is the anti-capitalism just very likely prone to failure due to problems in setting a proper economic framework, but Soviet leaders were radical Marxists with an ideology that was prone to promoting state power and centralized control to the point where totalitarianism makes sense as an outcome. (Note: I am not making the claim that their ideology is necessary for any Marxist, or even that it was the "true expression of Marxism", but historically it has been fine to call them Marxists) As well, revolutions, as a general rule, have a good reputation for not tending to be stable, which is likely due to how intensely they disrupt the social fabric and the legal fabric that keeps society together.

Soviets. They were a cult of personality over a single idiot. Making a god of single authority is a concept radically opposed to true atheism.

If you want to know what happens when Christianity rules the world, refer to the medieval ages, which are more aptly named the dark ages.

More so, Atheists are less likely to commit crimes that send them to jail.

http://atheism.about.com/b/2004/12/26/a ... olence.htm

I have seen this before and it is so funny, if misrepresentational of all religious people given that all the people in the video are Christians.

And I would love to see a world with one great culture formed from the best aspects of all cultures, with one government and with state atheism and toleration for theism within reason while inevitably causing its death through education and sociocultural homogenization via education, a unified meritocratic political system, the use of a single, constructed international auxiliary language and population transfer. I know most atheists do not share my views, I know some do share many of my views and I also know that there are theists who are perfectly compatible with this great vision, yet these are indeed my true desires.

Your talk of the Soviets "not being true atheists" falls quite nicely under the No Real Scotsman Fallacy. Lenin was a great humanist and Stalin was a wicked megalomaniac, but they were both atheists as they most certainly did not believe in anything supernatural.

Christianity did not rule the world during the Middle Ages, the earliest part of which is indeed properly known as the Dark Ages for the Western World: Christianity ruled Europe. The Dark Ages of Europe was the Golden Age of Desi Civilization, before the Central Eurasians messed up the Subcontinent. The Dark Ages of Europe were also contemporary with the height of Teotihuacano Civilization, Teotihuacan being the largest city ever to exist in the Precolumbian Americas and one of the largest on Earth. And the Middle Ages in general included the Islamic Golden Age, when the scientific method itself, among many other things, was developed, and the T'ang and Song Dynasties of China, when printing, newspapers, the Bessemer Process and many other things were invented. Christianity only really ruled the world from the capture of the Inka Emperor Atawallpa to World War I, with the Great American Genocide, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Great Australian Genocide, the British Raj and the Opium Wars all taking place within a few centuries.

Atheists have done a lot of stupid things too.

Unfortunately, Stupidity does not discriminate.

I already cited Erasmus & Folly, didn't I?

Tadzio

If atheists ran the world, they would find some other stupid crap to believe in, and I have precedent for it.

Before philosophers of the 12th and 13th Centuries developed the concept that reason is in a different category from beliefs that are handed down by tradition, authority or gut reaction, there was this cult that had developed around Aristotelian philosophy. A man named Averrhoes, who was a very learned man himself, had claimed that Aristotle had discovered "all truth that is accessible to man." If they had won the day without there also being any change in how we look at the discovery of truth, we would still believe that the Sun orbits the Earth.

If you think that sounds crazy, systems of astronomy based on Ptolemy had immense predictive power. The arguments would run, "even if it were the case that the Earth orbits the Sun, such a model would not reflect the positions of the planets relative to the Earth, therefore the heliocentric model is inferior anyway." Those who are determined to defend a belief will find a way.

Religion is ultimately no more harmful on its own than marijuana, and I don't think that doing away with it would ultimately solve the core problem. The root of the problems that prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins are trying to point to is exactly the problem that 12th and 13th Century thinkers like William of Occam were trying to address. Only by addressing the root problem can we begin to address the illness of which religion is usually a harmless symptom if properly contained.

The root of the illness is exactly what William of Occam was trying to address. When people are confronted with a problem for which they have no obvious solution, they often try to invent one. We are not born with a perfect concept of how this inventive process works, though. When we cannot figure out how something works, we often invent explanations that appear to be logical. The problem is that we end up with the same mess that we do with Ptolemy's system: to support our invention, we can end up introducing all manner of new elements that we have no substantial evidence for, and we can miss the truth that would be right there in front of us if we were not so wedded to supporting an erroneous idea.

And the other problems run the gamut from wishful thinking to the idea that social status determines the worth of a given belief. A major human failing is thinking that something must not be true because it is unpleasant to think about. That's what we mean by "wishful thinking": in the case of wishful thinking, you are saying, "I don't want to accept it as true, therefore it must be obvious to everyone that it is false." Another peril is getting social status mixed-up with the worth of someone's ideas: a lot of the best scientists are paupers, actually, and many of them are extremely introverted.

Therefore, I refute the idea that widespread atheism would unto itself remedy all of the problems for which religion is often blamed. Furthermore, religious people often panic when anyone talks about taking away their pipe, so it is ultimately for the best if we focus on the promotion of sound reasoning. It might cause some people to see that religion is really a bunch of wishful thinking, but that's not the important thing really.

the human mind is the source of all bs and only little wisdom.

i just wish we would learn to see it as such.

yadda yadda yadda , getting away of religion may not fix all of our problems. But we can be sure that keeping it will not allow us to fix them.

Trashing religion is likely not sufficient but it is clearly necessary for fixing the world.

Loopholes once again.

My point is exactly that. In medieval ages Europe was complete crap. And Christianity was in the lead. Whole kingdoms wasted their time and men fighting for a stupid city. Science wouldn't advance because dogma caused anyone who denied just a little bit of Aristotle's views to be threatened to death. On top of that, Europe got hit by awful disease and all our records show that the Church did everything in its power to make it worse.

The Muslim world was not much better off, unfortunately they didn't figure things out quickly enough. It was the destruction of dogma in the Renaissance in Europe which fixed the whole darn world. Ever wonder how we improved more in the last 300 years than we did in the previous 700 years?

Last edited by Vexcalibur on 15 Dec 2011, 7:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

there were even large periods where the muslim world was a refuge for european free thinkers,
at that time learning about the world was a very honorable thing for islamic priests and scholars to do.

Bill Delaney, great post. Minor caveat, Aristotle and other greeks new that the earth revolved around the sun and that earth was wrong. Still, I like your metaphor even if I don't agree with it.

Speaking of not agreeing, though, whoever posted about Islam being behind the West in human achievement should a) Stop equating Christianity with "America "or Western culture, at least if you're American enough to hate copyright infringement and other capitalism features... We know all we do of Hellenic culture thanks to the religion you seem to think is for knuckle walking. Concept of zero too, we owe to the sand.

The only thing that stopped the Industrial Revolution from happening centuries before it did was the fact that the Ottoman turks, well after the Golden Age of Islam, forbade all non durka durka Quaran studying. Well, that and the crusades, but that'd be antixian even if it's true.


Whatever. Good on the Turks, right? We got the revolution and the Arab numbers... And got to keep Jebus!

Aristarchus hypothesized that the earth went around the sun. Aristotle taught the the earth was immovable and all the cosmic bodies revolved around the earth.

Learn some science history first, then write second.

ruveyn

Good, interesting post…. Religion is not the problem. People being douchebags is the problem.

If people did not have religion as a conduit for expressing their douchebaggery, they’d invent something else just as bad.

I’d also like to point out, religion’s impact on human society is not totally negative. Religion promotes social solidarity and a common moral/ethical framework. These things knit people together and make human societies stronger and more successful in many ways.

If religion was only bad, religious cultures would always fail and religion would have gone extinct millennia ago.

While religion isn't the root of the "Us and them" mentality, dogma, authoritarianism, self-righteousness, douchebaggery, anti-intellectualism, etc. it is definitely one of the worst manifestations of these things.

Christianity and humanism have both influenced each other, and humanism can be credited with making "Thou shalt not murder" apply to non-Christians as well, so religion isn't necessary for all those benefits at all.

Unfortunately, people are hardwired for antipathy toward the "different other." Luckily the definition of "different other" seems to be fairly plastic, so things aren't hopeless.




I agree. Religion is not necessary, but I think something like religion is...

That being the case, and humans being human, I'm afraid most of the bad side effects* would eventually manifest.



*listed in your first post.

Sorry, Ruveyn, almost the entirity of my post was transformed beyond recognition, without my consent or seeming method to the madness (with "madness" being the only word that springs forth to describe the abomination that I am ashamed to acknowledge as stemming originally from me) of its construction. I'd apologise/explain more, but there's no need since:

a) The post was only nominally about the works of Aristotle, and despite the way my stupid Droid RAZR converted it, its still pretty clear, I think, that the point was that all of Greek and Roman culture would have vanished from history were it not for the Arabs and Muslims.

b) Hellenic Culture gave us more than people commonly think. That would include, as I went to great lengths about in the original pre-madness, the works of, say, Hero of Alexandria (whose steam engine could well have ushered in an Industrial Revolution) to (more germane to your assertion of my ignorance than it is to my argument as a whole, but its important no matter how little your comment had any reflection in reality) the works of the Pythagoreans.

c) I was speaking of Aristotle's knowledge of the shape of the planet than their orbits around earth, and his failure to understand this is more common knowledge than your correction was accurate, which I'd quantify as: "fairly so."

d) Speaking of your correction, which, again, was about a tangential and completely misunderstood the point of what I was saying... though almost anybody with an interest in this subject would, obviously, agree that Aristarchus' is credited with being the first Hellenic Dude (yes) to posit heliocentrism, I think it is important to point out that his surviving work, On the Magnitudes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, doesn't exist any more NOR DID IT EVEN BEFORE THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA FELL.

e) That last bit was in all caps because the place was a callback to Hero's birthplace, which for some reason made me go "Eureka!"

f) I mention THAT last bit only to point out that Aristotle, just as a random example, is credited with screaming Eureka because of a breakthrough regarding gold and its buyoyancy in water (which in turn helped him come up with a way to stop gold fraud, which is important in any feudalistic society). Do I need point out to you that Athens wasn't feudal, it was a small city state functioning on good days as a quasi-Republic? Actually, no I don't, because that s**t doesn't mater and is getting us on a tangential useless even if it was part of my central corpus AND

g) Speaking of which, not to be redundant, but I'd say the Pythagoreans should more correctly get credit for positing the first incorrect way to model the solar system. This has nothing to do with your comment, or not much. Mostly, I just like the Pythagorans for getting both it and atomic theory right, just, you know, incorrectly.




Islamic culture sure was helpful! All we know about Hellenic culture plus all our numbers plus an awesome library ALL FREE all we needed to do was go through a Dark Age and do the whole Crusdades thing. I just hate that the Ottoman Empire turned to what we would in modernity call "Getting rid of all culture whatsoever and starting to use inconvinient numerals" as a response to the whole "Crusades thing," but, then again, if they hadn't overreacted so grossly, then Christians wouldn't be able to so grossly mistate Islams' impact on world culture up until now.

It was Archimedes who is said to have run through the streets of Syracusa yelling Eureka.

Archimedes postulated the laws of buoyancy (he got it right). Aristotle's physics was a train wreck. It varied from wrong to not even wrong. Archimedes was the greatest mathematician of ancient times and his works still hold up today. Aristotle lead a path away from proper physical science which delayed the development of inertial physics by at least a thousand years.

ruveyn