If the Creation Museum carnival hasn’t got you completely carnivaled out yet, it’s also time for the Carnival of the Godless #67. Maybe if we started serving Hurricanes in a 44 oz. cup and tossing bead necklaces around, we could get through it all. And where’s the marching atheist jazz band when you need ’em?
The WaPo has roused some ire with its defense of fundamentalist agnostics/humanists against us bold, militant freethinkers. Revere addresses the distinction between militant and non-militant atheists and Ophelia covers the same beat. Can’t we all just get along and agree that the weak-kneed apatheist accommodationists need a good kick in the pants? And I also agree that the Vichy Humanist Chaplain at Harvard, whatever his name is (I’ve forgotten already), should be ignored.
As I see it, the problem with ‘accommodationist’ lines of thought is that they’re relying on a more basic and primitive method than rationality: associational thinking. It’s what most of politics is predicated upon, too.
Put simply, instead of consciously and explicitly applying operations to statements and generating conclusions, ‘conclusions’ are formed as the result of implicit, unconscious mental links or associations. It’s how dogs and cats think, what’s responsible for the generation of superstitions, and is why people are more likely to buy something priced as $19.99 than the same thing priced at $20.00. It’s “feeling” your way to an end state that you then put into practice, instead of higher-order thought as we know it. The denotations of words and terms are mostly untouched by associational thought – it’s the connotations that are important.
It’s how marketing and religion works, too. Check out the rhetoric of people like Ham or Popoff – they’re always appealing to the lower levels of thought, never to reason. It’s why arguments that make no rational sense – on the level of definitions and denotations – are often successful at persuading people, since their effectiveness is on the connotational, associational level.
Forget the mirror test – the examination for consciousness that needs to be applied to humans is whether they can rise above association to the level of logic.
“Fundamentalist agnostics”? Ha, that’s a good one!
Actually, I think it’s kind of amusing that the atheist community is big and vibrant enough to have its own internal debate raging over strategy. And really it’s to be expected — if you get a bunch of freethinkers and skeptics together, there’s no way they’re all going to all pick the same leader and fall in lockstep unison behind him…
C.L. Hanson, completely agreed. I see no reason whatsoever for evolutionist free-thinkers/agnostics/skeptics/atheists/heathens or whatever we choose to call ourselves to bash each other. Heck, has everybody already forgotten that South Park episode where the United Atheist Alliance, Alliance Atheists and the Allied Atheists Allegiance wage war on each other? Better watch ourselves, lest we look as silly as the pious. Frame ’em or nuke ’em, to each his own.
“Fundamentalist agnostic” isn’t entirely oxymoronic. Such an agnostic denies all possibility of revealed truth. This is usually caricatured as, “I don’t know, and you don’t either.”
I certainly don’t think there’s any such as thing as revealed truth. Direct knowledge of metaphysical, spiritual, or supernatural truths (i.e, gnosis) is impossible, and anyone who claims otherwise is delusional or lying. I say this because I don’t think metaphysical, spiritual, or supernatural truths exist. I think looking for the answers to those questions is a colossal waste of time. But technically, by denying any possibility of revealed truth, I could accurately be described as a fundamentalist agnostic.
Unfortunately, almost no one uses the word “agnostic” in this restricted historical sense, so I tend to avoid describing myself as an agnostic.
*scream*
ITS!
Sorry, I can’t help it.
HP: actually, I use it in that restricted sense (something I think should be done more often, btw). I usually label myself a theological aheist but epistemological agnostic. Guess that would make my position pretty much the same as yours.
The article linked to quotes from Mencken:
It’s logic like this that must be broken to make any serious advancement. It is society and the children themselves that must deal with the cumulative and lasting effects of every parent’s indoctrination of their children.
Somehow I don’t think MLE will be quite as enthusiastic for societal control of what children are taught as soon as his children are taught something he doesn’t want them to learn about.
“Caricatured”? Like you, I see this as an entirely reasonable statement. Hey, even the Book of Mormon agrees:
That makes you an apatheist, I suppose. So…
No.
The combination, BTW, is called apathetic agnostic: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Welcome to the club!
“Caricatured”? Like you, I see this as an entirely reasonable statement. Hey, even the Book of Mormon agrees:
That makes you an apatheist, I suppose. So…
No.
The combination, BTW, is called apathetic agnostic: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Welcome to the club!