Oh boy.
Okay, so:
There are lots – billions – of religious people who don’t think ‘God is real the way poetry is real’ or ‘God is real the way love is real’, they think that the universe was created by a specific entity with thoughts, intentions, and desires, and which sometimes acts in the world, and which has expectations about our conduct which were communicated through historical prophets. Many of them think you can directly communicate with God through prayer.
There are lots – billions – of religious people who think that humans have immortal souls, which survive the destruction of our bodies and which have an eternal fate of some kind.
Call those type-1s. They have a belief about the supernatural. They think their belief is true, and tells us things.
These are claims about the world. They’re not claims about lenses we can use to see the world; they’re not claims about what makes us empowered and happy to believe; they are statements about what is actually true. If you say to these people ‘oh, you mean you find it fulfilling and empowering to think of yourself as having an immortal soul’, they’ll say “uh, no, I mean that humans have an immortal soul”.
This is true of some religious people on tumblr/participating in this argument, but a lot of religious people on tumblr are a different kind of religious, one which is more common now than it has been historically. They are more likely to agree with claims like “God is how we find ourselves in the world” or “God is whatever you find when you’re looking for God” or “God is love”.
Call this type-2.
There are also, separately, a bunch of people whose attitude about God is “people who have believed in God have gotten something really powerful out of this, or they wouldn’t do it. What is that? Can I inhabit that state and get a good description of what the powerful thing they’re getting out of it is?”
Call these ones type-3.
So now that we’ve described our groups, here are some fights they have!
Atheists: “Okay, it looks like there is no entity with thoughts, intentions and desires that created the world. Also, those historical prophets were recording their own beliefs/interests, they didn’t have any access to what a god thought.”
Religious people-type-1: “We disagree. God exists, and we have a lot of information about what specifically he wants, and he wants this.”/ “We disagree. Souls exist, and…”/ “We disagree. Eight different gods exist, and…”
Religious people-type-2: “You’re treating this like it’s an answerable question, when it isn’t. And then you’re acting like you have the one right answer, you dick.”
Religious people-type-3: “yes, yes, we know, but God is doing something, and that’s really interesting, and you’re missing out on a huge part of the human experience if you’re not trying to inhabit the perspective associated with faith in God”.
Atheist: “…fine, but God doesn’t exist. Like, actually, if you go and check for Jews in Egypt there weren’t any, and this is true for every revealed religion, they make claims that are factually false, and you’re talking about something other than that, but there are still people murdering gays because of that, so I want to talk about that!”
Religious-people-type-1: “You’re equivocating between ‘this belief causes people to behave badly’ and ‘this belief is false’. God exists, and also people do bad things in their mistaken understanding of what God wants. It’s bad that they’re doing the bad things, but we have to find a way to address that other than claiming God doesn’t exist, because as a fact about the world, God exists and cares how we act.”
Religious-people-type-2: “if you’re trying to think about God by checking for archaeological evidence of Jews in Egypt you’re completely misunderstanding how to think about God. God isn’t the sort of thing that even in theory would be disprovable by looking at evidence. And also you are still being a colossal dick. I’m not murdering people over my beliefs, so why do you even care what I believe? My beliefs are mine, they’re private, and they’re a huge part of who I am.”
Religious-people-type-3: “People who are religious are happier; that’s a true fact about religion. People who are religious have tighter-knit communities; that’s a true fact about religion. People who are religious have more kids; that’s a true and important fact about religion which will affect whether the next generation is religious. You’re focusing on the false claims but missing the true ones, and the true ones matter!”
Anyway the current argument on tumblr is unproductive because all of these people are talking at each other without much clarity about what they believe and which people they’re directing their arguments at. And I think a lot of people think that “God isn’t an answerable question” is a concession everyone should be willing to make instead of one specific opinion about religion which you could hold.
This.
When I say I am an atheist, I’m saying something that’s compatible with 2 and 3, but I’m also saying “if you believe 2 or 3, I don’t understand why you consider yourself a theist. That seems weirdly imprecise.”
I can and have gotten a lot out of the kind of Christian practice that goes like “Jesus is this being that is maximally compassionate. He wants you to try to be, knows you will fall short, and doesn’t mind as long as you tried because he’s… well… maximally compassionate. We get together every Sunday and remind one another to try to imitate Mr. Maximally Compassionate as much as we can, and to try to push ourselves to do it more than we usually do and thereby become morally good through practice.”
However, I am uneasy about calling myself “a Christian” because I do not believe Mr. Maximally Compassionate existed. I think he’s a template, used as a reminder to be moralLy good and an inspiration to be more morally good than you currently are.
And an imperfect one at that.
I’m an atheist, someone who used to be type 1, and really don’t understand why type 2′s and types 3′s keep wanting to use the name of the religion that type 1s originally used.
if you say ‘i’m spiritual but not religious/ i’m animist/ whatever’ then fine, but acting like christianity/ islam was never about type 1 stuff, and suggesting it ever was is a strawman from lazy unsophisticated atheists who don’t know what they’re talking about and that’s not an interesting or important question anyway is disingenuous and frankly infuriating as someone who used to be type 1, knows a LOT of type 1s, and tbh thinks type 1 is probably more common than type 2 or 3 at least when it comes to abrahamic religions and maybe even in general, but if it’s not an actual majority is still a HUGELY relevant chunk and not a tiny minority.
Also, i’m someone who cares about the truth. Like, i care about things like ‘people are killing gays because they think god told them to’, but i ALSO care about the truth, and whether or not the actual type 1 claims are true. If there was a religion that had adherents who ALL behaved morally and were super nice and caused no problems, but they also said that ‘you have an imortal soul and dying is not a big deal and some people who die will go to heaven and some will go to hell’ that’s something that i actually care about whether it’s true or not. Whether when i die i go to heaven, hell or oblivion is kind of a big deal to me, i don’t know about you guys.
Yeah, that. I feel like type 2s and 3s want atheists to stop talking about type 1s but I don’t know why that would be required.
Endorsed. I’m even going to go a bit further and state that type 1′s make up the overwhelming (as in, >99%) majority of the religious, and so I’m a little tired of being treated like an unsophisticated /r/atheism philistine for pointing this out and treating it as a baseline in discussions.
It’s usually the type 2′s that are doing this. Type 1′s and I just have a fundamental disagreement about the facts-of-the-world. I think the evidence is clearly on my side, but they don’t… and that’s about as far as most discussions get. They are, at least, usually upfront about the material differences between our positions. Type 3′s, you guys are an odd bunch, and I think you really should call yourselves atheists, but you don’t usually give me grief and so I return the favor. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, you do you.
But it’s the type 2′s who are really condescending toward atheists, which especially bugs me because most of the time their arguments are muddy and confused. They are very slippery and won’t state plainly what they believe, leaving me with no way to actually examine and invalidate their claims, which they then take to mean I’m just a STEM-lord who can be brushed off because I don’t understand Kant or whatever. Hey guys, “communicating badly and then acting smug when you’re misunderstood is not cleverness”.
There’s also type-4: “This is part of my cultural practice. Belief is optional.”
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