Correlation between AS and religion/atheism or no?

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Play nice. I made a point and so did you. If we can't agree to it, no skin off my bones.


Best Regards,

Jake

One of these assertions is not true.

What I define as a point can be 180 degrees opposite of what your definition of a point is.
Your basing that response upon your subjective view-point. Your view may seem correct and valid to you but that does not mean it is correct or valid to everyone else.
Just because there are disagreements in our points of view, does not mean that a view cannot be correct.

I think alot of Atheist and Theist fell victim to this; Nobody wants to admit that sometimes they are wrong or could be wrong, everyone (Including myself) is so fixated on being right 100% of the time, that, when confronted with a viable, logical argument for an opposing point-of-view, we all turns our heads away and stick our heads in the ground and try to argue the other opponent off the playing field. That's not an debate nor an discussion, it's called ignorance and intolerance. I will be the first to admit that sometimes I do just this, not out of trying to prove my point is correct or to prove a point at all . I'm not here to pick and choose sides. I'm here to learn meaningful and satisfying answers, if Atheism can provide that, more power to it. If it cannot, then I must find a viable alternative. If theism is the alternative, then I must make do with it.

Best Regards,

Jake

Last edited by NAKnight on 06 Jan 2013, 4:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This thread just got strange from the start.

Atheism is a default position? A baby has a tendency to look for its mom, cry when she's away, cry when its hungry, thirsty, or needs a change, and if especially just out of the oven that baby is trying to bring his/her eye sight right side up, trying to interpret three dimensions, and its focused on getting itself mobile enough to crawl and then walk.

Where in that process would it be entertaining any sort of broad metaphysical certitude?

Every point listed here is utter balderdash.
Too much balderdash to comment upon.
But that one point is stunning - about how "plants dont compete".

That is both book stupid AND street stupid.

Just try weeding a few square feet of garden in mid summer some time- and see how much human sweat it takes to rescue plants from the unrelenting cutthroat competition from other plants!

I realize that you're not being stupid with your own stupidity. you're just repeating the creationist party line that youve been feed.

But - whoever is feeding you this stuff- tell them to do a better job of indoctrinating you. Tell them that if they are going to feed you lies- at least feed you more plausible sounding lies than that so you dont look like a total idiot!

Every child who has ever mowed lawn knows that plants compete with each other.
You cant go around saying otherwise because even children will laugh at you!

That's the point. There are no beliefs in much at all, god concepts included.
A child must be indoctrinated into them when their reasoning faculties are not yet fully-formed.

Dawkins describes how early animism survived piggybacking on positive selection for obedience to authority (I'm paraphrasing here:

"The vulnerable child does not know the difference between 'Don't paddle your canoe in the crocodile-infested waters of the Limpopo' (good advice) and 'You must sacrifice a goat to the gods every 6 days or else the rains will fail' (bad, stupid advice, and a waste of goats, besides)."

Last edited by ValentineWiggin on 06 Jan 2013, 9:34 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I want to frame this quote by Beakybird actually.
Seriously, up on my wall, in one of those mod-art "floater" frames.
It's one of those things wherein you wonder how someone jammed so many fallacies and factual errors into such a short block of text. It would take 5 times the space to point out the hilarity.
True art.

This doesn't inherently roll in Dawkin's favor either.

Leaving out the enigma of kids who claim pre-birth memories, most kids aren't theistic unless taught but aren't atheistic either, rather the world is simply so bright and new to them that all of their faculties are engaged in trying to take in what's around them. Every day and moment is an unfolding revelation. Unless they're being taught to believe in something or being told to specifically disbelieve in any form or spirituality, religion, or life hereafter there's rarely if ever a thought toward metaphysical assertions - rather they're borrowing what's given to them.

It is a sight to behold.

LOL. What field of scientific study involves such "enigmas" as these?

Actually, if they're not taught theism, they're atheistic by DEFINITION.
I didn't learn the WORD for such, though, until I was in grade school and found out some of my classmates said their parents talked about a man living in the sky. I just figured I was NORMAL.


What you just described was my childhood, as an atheist- a complete lack of religious indoctrination, with discoveries explained to me in a scientific sense if possible or simply marvelled-at, if not.

They're commonly called pre-birth memory or pre-birth experiences and generally viewed as tangential to NDE. I haven't looked, it wouldn't shock me if some of the major NDE researchers haven't started studies in this area as well (NDE's have had huge prospective studies), albeit I'd call it to nascent to constitute any proof until, as you said, enough peer reviewed studies are done. What could cause that? Anything from them somehow grabbing a whole bunch of info inadvertently from TV or radio (I'm not sure with what language skills) to them somehow jumping back in the global subconscious and retrieving things that they weren't educated enough to know aren't supposed to be there. The spiritual/new age people would say its simply remember what they came from, if it lacks Christ obviously a lot of Christians might say it came compliments of the devil. Anyone's guess at this point.


Not really, they'd be a fuzzy sort of agnosticism that comes from a stance of "I haven't thought about it yet", and just like with adults - if they don't doggedly push as hard as they can to keep that stance from the belief that its the only intellectually honest outlook then they'll fall into both theistic and atheist camps. The iconography that would pull them in and lead them to atheistic, theistic, or other general and abstract spiritual outlooks would have more to do with their emotional development, what they've found entrancing or what's tickled their curiosity, what kinds of things have jumped out as beautiful to them, and essentially they'd chase things down from that perspective (which would have no clear bias).

Its problematic to roll such fuzzy or temporary agnosticism into atheism and call it all one thing because it lacks any of the defining characteristics or hallmarks of reasoning one way or another. A child at that age knows as little about reductive materialism (believes in as little might be just as appropriate) as they do about spirits or deities.


That's great but, you're an N of 1 on the topic of childhood cognition which, when taking a whole person into account, means very little. Given different genes, different parents, different natural landscape and topography, but the same lack of religious influence - you really don't have any idea how that child's most intimate first impressions of life would form nor where those impressions would lead him or her. You can assume what you want but, the reason I can't agree that they'd all turn out like you is that there's too many genetic variables, too many order of operation variables, and for all you know if you'd seen a beautiful blue sky and rainbow at exactly the right time or even something as mundane as the right TV commercial or science show before or after another event we could be having a very different conversation as you'd be an avid spiritual seeker instead. Without running off a few hundred clones of yourself under tight surveillance for 10 or 12 years of your life you can't even be sure of what your own development could have been.

You seem to think atheism is active disbelief whereas it actually means a lack of belief.
There are adjectives which further specify what type of atheist one is.
It's no more "problematic" to say children are atheist than to say that they lack belief in fairies, or capitalism, or feminism, or any other idea.


Children aren't naturally-hallucinatory. They have imaginary friends, but these stages pass.
It's presumptuous to think one particular childish imagining would magically-remain post-adulthood whereas all the others fall away.

This is really word salad though. You have anti-theists on one end, agnostics on the other, and anti-theists wanting to hide behind agnostics claiming its all the same when times are bad and then bash agnostics as squishy or airy-fairy when times are good. We have to face the facts that its inappropriate to group anti-theism and agnosticism together, one is a claim of not knowing and the other is an assertion which carries a velocity akin to fundamentalism.

Children who have not been touched by any kind of dogma are most likely to be temporarily agnostic, not anti-theist. Anti-theism, like Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, is a cultural influence.


Since I said nothing about hallucination there's nothing I need to defend on that account.

Emotional orientation and impressions are core to how a person's internal computation because you're dealing with a person's motivational core. I said earlier that two things could happen in different sequences, they could be emotionally evocative symbols or scenery and one could have no effect, the other could incline a child toward an uncanny sense of an overarching theme. Synchronicities would have a similar effect, ie. children aren't classically trained to disregard coincidence.

What I'm getting at - if you want anything like a 100% atheism rate you'd need a highly specified environment. I suppose just beating the heck out of a kid until they give it up could work too but, alas, that's the kind of therapy that a religious extremist would need to resort to.

I've met alot of people with Asperger's that are not the least bit spirititual. I however, have had long periods of agnosticism punctuated by belief. I was raised Methodist and currently I attend an Episcopalian church, though at one time in my life I belonged to an Eastern Orthodox Church. I do believe in God, though I'm sympathetic to atheism, I just have experienced too much to really take materialism and naturalism seriously. Many atheist opinions on this particular forum do not represent my views of God, for sure, nor do they represent those of most religious people I have had contact with.

I'm very much a loner though spiritually, though I do like worship services with other people, socializing is not my strong point at church.