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Can an atheist believe in the supernatural?
Posted on: February 18, 2010 - 9:09am
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Can an atheist believe in the supernatural?
Can an atheist believe in the supernatural?
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If a troll is ignored, it will usually go away. This one seems very well fed.
I suppose, unfortunately for us (and this goes for atheists in general, in any forum), the trolls' spamming may be read by others and may even be found, as absurd as it is, convincing for lack of contradiction or counterargument.
For this purpose are suited canned replies:
If we copy and paste replies to the trolls, the trolls will be bored, and providing that they are concise, any readers will not fail to be informed that the troll is insane.
Just an idea. What if we developed an "open source" jar of responses to troll arguments like this that could be used everywhere, so any given troll will get the same thing everywhere it goes, and will ultimately tire of the lackluster response and starve.
It would certainly be quite a bit of work writing and indexing all of those entries- and developing a good user interface for them- but it could ultimately cull out quite a number of trolls when they spam repeated arguments. I believe if done in a wiki context over time, the workload would be well distributed.
Thoughts?
That there is a clear consensus on this site by the opposition means absolutely nothing to me. It is obviously biased and no more commentary than that is required. I am not misinterpreting what Sam Harris wrote. Indeed, I have provided you with his detractors (some well-known) in the atheist and skeptic community that share my interpretation. To wit, Harris himself says that his most severe critics of "The End of Faith" comes from atheists because they believe he is betraying the "movement" by promoting spirituality/mysticism and expressing a belief in the fundamental nature of consciousness while giving credibility to psychic phenomena and reincarnation.
"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study." - Alfred North Whitehead
Everyone I have seen you bring this up with thinks you are full of poop on this particular point. I don't know why you insist on pushing something no-one wants.
You are trying to create a factual argument from a semantic one. Some atheists don't like the words he uses and he doesn't like the sterility that some atheists seem to champion.
There is no underlying disagreement about the central ideas. Harris does not believe in God, gods or magic. This is so clear I really don't understand how you can persist in these silly arguments.
I know you are desperate to cling to your point, but this is a bit far. If you won't accept what Harris himself wrote about what Harris himself thinks, then you are in no way able to speculate on what he actually believes using what he said as evidence. This entire ongoing debate with you about the nature of Sam Harris' supposed religion is absurd.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Yea, but most of us are here because we want to pick a fight with theists, and most 'rational' theists don't stick around for more then 100 posts, if that. It is a shock to come here and get your belief pounded on so hard and most people choose to leave rather than confront the kinds of discussions that we create.
I really wish this site had a larger theist audience, but for whatever reason Sapient does not seem to be able to drum that up. So we are stuck with people like this who really aren't more than trolls. If we ignored them the forum would die for lack of anything to fight about.
As to your other point, there are some wiki's already. wiki.ironchariots.org springs to mind or talk.origins...I am sure there are many out there.
*Edit* besides, in reality the theist vs. atheist debate really only boils down to what, a handful of actual ideas? Ontollogy, TAG, Morality, First Cause, Pascal's and Design/complexity. You could sum up the entirety of the debate in a handful of pages.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
The bottom line is that Sam Harris - one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist movement - promotes spirituality (which implies a belief in...well..the SPIRIT) and mysticism (which implies a belief that God and/or the divine reality can be experientially known through the practice of meditation and contemplative prayer). Moreover, he expressed beliefs in psi phenomena (he actually recommended the book entitled "The Conscious Universe" by parapsychologist Dean Radin), reincarnation (a fundamental belief in Buddhism and Hinduism), and xenoglossy (of which "speaking in tongues" is one example). Finally, he holds that physicalism (a.k.a. materialism) is a faith-based metaphysical position and expressed a belief that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality. Can you say "pantheistic idealism?"
"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study." - Alfred North Whitehead
Ok Paisley, that's nice Paisley. *slowly backs away* There's a good Paisley.
--Just smile and nod boys, just smile and nod.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I have made an irrefutable point here. There is no doubt about that. Labeling me a "troll" will not change this fact.
"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study." - Alfred North Whitehead
Irrefutable!!
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I like you mellestad, you seem to be good people.
We could do that. I know some places to get theists; though most of them would be Muslim, with poor English skills, and thoroughly insane. How about it? Want to stir up a Hornet's nest?
Though really, we could also get more argument going around here without theists. RRS is accessible from China, so I could get a few dozen, or hundred Chinese atheists to join and discuss things. This could involve substantial amounts of Chinglish, however.
I could also go to some churches here or something, and pamphlet, and see if some people would join. I'm going to make a *huge* generalization here, but Chinese are more open minded than Westerners; that is, more liable to actually change their stances when confronted with a good argument or evidence. I believe it has something to do with social collectivism vs. individualism- cutting yourself off from other people and not considering their viewpoints is kind of rude in China. I don't know if this applies to Chinese Christians or not, though, as they may be more cult-like/closed off- I haven't met many.
It *would* be interesting to find out.
Maybe we could summarize everything in an eloquent 500 words or so, which could just be posted as a generic response to anything a theist says?
I wanted to add to that, I think being an atheist would make it more unlikely that someone would believe in the supernatural.
If they have analyzed "god" and rejected the idea of it, it makes it so easy to shove off the boat of fairy tales in general.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin