Hate Mail

The current culture of atheism.  Perhaps we could call it "academic atheism" only I have more respect for academics than that.  Anyway, the current culture of atheism is decadent in the extreme, not only lacking internal consistency or even coherence but not being able to have internal coherence.

I dealt with only one aspect of that yesterday, the atheists' every which way assertions about the mind.- depending on the merely temporary advantage in argument gained among those who don't think deeply.   Or, more accurately, their various dogmas concerning human minds.

Some atheists will, when dealing with cosmology, assert that human observation and human actions have everything from an effect on subatomic particles (pretty well demonstrated) to being able to make new universes pop into existence quite unintentionally in the course of their functioning. In short, they will insist on the mind being able to, apart from known physical causation, have an effect at a distance, not only on photons of light but having the, literally, God-like ability to create universes.  Since that last claim is that those universes are not accessible from our universe, that has to stand as the ultimate claim of an effect at a distance (of more than the greatest distance if such a thing makes sense) and a far greater  effect than any researcher into psychokinesis ever demonstrated in a published experiment.  Yet one can never have a rigorous enough demonstration, resulting in staggeringly large probabilistic results satisfying the most widely accepted of scientific standards to be admitted and the other - published with no experimental data at all - will get you serious consideration in science of the highest repute.  And even total belief in mid-brow atheist culture.

But, when it suits different atheist arguments, the very same atheists will deny that the mind is more than the result of the physics and chemistry of the brain in which said mind is merely imagined to be thinking.  In the really hard cases they will insist that the mind is an illusion that doesn't really exist and can't so much as make a choice free of the physical components of their brain sloshing around and recombining in heads.  So, there we have it, human minds are everything from the agents of the creation of universes, even unintentionally,,  to human minds not being anything at all worth considering, of mere epiphenomena of mere physical causation unable to make up even so much as their own minds.

Those two ideas quite often exist in the same atheist mind at the same time, to be pulled out as required to assert the reality of atheism.  They have certainly existed side by side in the incoherence of current atheist culture.

Considering that all of that facile manipulation of words in service to ideology is done nowhere but in human minds, for them to debunk those minds is the absolute ultimate of human ideological decadence.  The "brain only" hard cases should stand, for all time, as the ultimate icons of intellectual decadence because such they are. Yet most of those you hear about by name have drawn or do draw a nice salary from a university or college to spout such idiocy.

Everywhere I've looked, closely, at the claims of ideological atheists, I've seen total and obvious hypocrisy, the most obvious insistence on people believing mutually exclusive claims, outright lying about what their opponents have said and done and more.   That is certainly the case of many of those who work in science and, even more so the social-sciences and the parascientific junk of such innovations  as "neurophilosophy"*.  Until bothering to fact check their claims and thinking critically of their claims, I never believed that level of dishonesty was a result of atheism  And that dishonesty extends from those individual claims to ideological atheism as a whole.  The ideology rests on those same foundations of dishonesty.  

I have mentioned before that I can tell you exactly where that debunking started, for me, by reading atheists, online, who claimed that science had disproved the idea of free-thought and free-will.  I believe that was in 2005. Originally my look into that was because the results of that belief for democracy were catastrophic and I believe that belief has, actually, had an effect in both damaging American liberalism and weakening the foundations of democracy.  My look into other claims of atheists followed on that and led me to look seriously at the sources of that discrediting of human minds, which led to me looking into Darwinism and finding that the current cultural assertions about him and his theory among atheists is full of blatant lies which his own words refute.  Much of the discrediting of minds is founded in an ideological assertion of and an attributing of quasi-magical powers of explanation to natural selection.  And, especially in the English speaking world, the beliefs in that parascientific assertion of natural selection - much of it from the social, so-called sciences - is the common faith among atheists and even some who aren't atheists.

Everywhere I've looked into the assertions of atheists, in science, in history, especially at the assertions made in popular media, the whole thing is a huge and decadent lie.  Current atheism depends on the ignorance of its converts and rank and file and a lack of internal criticsm as much as Trumpian-fascism does.  I see no hope for the revival of a real and durable liberalism from people who buy into that stuff.  It is far more likely to produce the mock-liberalism that sometimes goes with that, but which is really the libertarianism of contented white-collar folk.  Without that revival of a real liberalism which begins in a belief that people have a right to be seen AND TREATED as something higher than an object, even such objecs as lumbering robots or computers made with meat having the same status as inanimate objects.

My study of atheism as both an abstract ideology and as applied in human history has led me to believe, strongly, that egalitarian democracy requires a majority of people with the power to determine the nature of government who believe in both an absolute moral law and that people have a status given by God that requires they be treated as far more than objects.   I don't trust the otiose contentment of tenured university faculty to be enough to have that effect in the wider human population.  And lots of tenured university faculty are fascists or lean in that direction.  Materialism inevitably leads that way.

*  I think the right word could almost be "stagnations" if you can use the word as a plural.  There needs to be a better word for this kind of junk that attains some fashion in the social and behavioral alleged sciences but which has no internal integrity and which will, sooner or later, fall into that enormous boneyard of discontinued scientific and academic ideas.  I'd propose Paul and Patrica Churchland as the poster couple for that kind of thing, only there are so many candidates for that position it's hard to choose who are the most deserving of the,..... um.... "honor".

Update:  Um... Well, to start with I know you and you can't remember your one lie to the next so you not being able to remember eleven years ago isn't a shock. I'm not even sure you were there.  It wasn't as facile as your typical jabber so it wouldn't have benefited by your participation.  I could tell you exactly who said it, it wouldn't mean the slightest thing since that era of comment threads is long lost in the fall of Haloscan.  Even when I'm able to point out exactly where something was said it doesn't make any difference to atheists, nothing that doesn't fit in with their pre-conceived ideological assertions is ever recognized by them.  They're ever so much more like religious fundamentalists than they'd ever want anyone to notice.  Only I have.

I really am grateful for that aspect of neo-atheism.  If they hadn't been such clearly counterproductive assholes I doubt I'd ever have gone to the bother of fact checking them and learned that it was a load of crap.  I might have gone to my grave not realizing how shoddy and sleazy it is.