THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that atheists demand people stop believing in, God, the Resurrection, The Virgin Birth, six-day creation, etc. that they don't insist that peoples' day to day experience refutes what they don't like as a possibility. All through the ideological assertion of atheism, whether in scientism, materialism, (also pushed under the aliases for that of "physicalism" or "naturalism" which are the same things with implausible deniability attached) or even of the anti-intellectual, barroom big-mouthed (not in-often inebriated) village atheist and free will denying "free thinker" variety makes appeals and even ultimate arguments based on peoples' experience of life.
It's one of the more blatantly dishonest aspects of that that, as in the materialist atheist insistence that free-will or free-thought is an impossibility due to their ideological reliance on physical causation, they never-the-less insist that THEY are "free-thinkers," they will both insist that personal experience is a valid criterion of deciding those questions when they like the result but reject that same method of making a decision when they don't like the result.
There is no human experience or, in fact, any highly regarded activity of the mind which is prior to, more basic than, more fundamentally real in every possible way to a person than their own experience of the reality and presence of their own consciousness. Any person who had no experience or awareness of their own consciousness as real would have to have one of the most rare if even possible mental defects. Trying to imagine what that might be like is certainly a perilous and almost certainly inaccurate thing because anyone trying to do that would have to have such experiences and be trying to imagine a condition of being they have never experienced. I can only imagine it would have to include total non-communication, total lack of control, more profound non-sentience than I've ever witnessed in someone judged to be profoundly retarded or severely "autistic". But I don't think it's possible for me to even imagine what it would be like.
Yet many philosophers at well regarded universities, scientists in alleged sciences dealing with minds and many others will insist everything from the non-reality of consciousness, to its demotion to insignificant automation of our bodies and lives, to its total unreliability and insignificance (except when they want to insist on its reliability and significance, when it suits them) which leads me to my conclusion that as decadent and degenerate as past epochs of intellectualism may have been, none has sunk to the lows that modernist-materialist-scientistic-atheism has. I think that it accounts for a percentage of the loss of respect that is suffered by academia and, tragically, science, these days. Modernism, as the word most often used today has been an intentional pursuit of decadence pretty much from the late 19th century but it had been set on that road for well over a century before that. That may well have been unintentionally baked into things by the early ideological formation of science, I think Descartes was in many ways responsible for that though he was hardly alone in it. He, of course, would certainly have rejected the decadence of what his ideas descended into, certainly the denial or demotion of individual consciousness which he turned into the key-stone of his method. But his insistence that animals were mindless automatons was part of his legacy too, he certainly must have seen the potential of others demoting human beings to that same status, he was hardly stupid enough to have not considered that possibility coming out of his claims. At any rate, it did.
No, there's another thing no one has to buy, people with PhDs in the sciences who insist on having it both ways when it suits them and that is the status of any scientist, any philosopher, any loud-mouthed barroom atheist who demotes consciousness and the reliability of our minds to discern truth about the external world and, even more so, its internal experience. Nothing they do in proclaiming their ideology would make any sense if they really believed what they claim to. Their actions prove they don't really believe it themselves, certainly not when it comes to their right to get paid to produce their bull shit.
I can't take anyone who entertains the possibility that such deniers of consciousness are right seriously or that we are to pretend we don't know bull shit when we hear it coming from someone who obviously doesn't want it to apply to them. From the Churchlands and Daniel Dennett right down to the former Oxford Chair For The Public Understanding of Science, they're all lying bull shitters whose ideology can't support itself because it can't survive the very existence of the minds that hold that bull shit or those who they are trying to dupe, gull or coerce into agreeing with them. Pretty much the entirety of the "behavioral sciences" fall into that category and the shitty quality of their science proves it.
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