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Found a thread riddled with misconceptions and gross generalisations about atheism. Felt like pointing them out.
[THREAD] https://twitter.com/VedicWisdom1/status/1302829312031125506
[THREAD] https://twitter.com/VedicWisdom1/status/1302829312031125506
This is not a bit different from the childish anti-atheist rants that we see from Christians or Muslims. It's riddled with spectacular ignorance about what being an atheist means and what it entails.
He kicks off fabulously with a wrong definition of atheism. (Doomed from the start). To quote him;
"First step of becoming an Atheist is to deny any supernatural entity"
Atheism is a lack of belief in a God/Gods. (a-theos = without God)
"First step of becoming an Atheist is to deny any supernatural entity"
Atheism is a lack of belief in a God/Gods. (a-theos = without God)
An atheist can perfectly believe in supernatural entities because atheism only entails lack of belief in God. Most atheists are rationalists that tend to not believe in most supernatural claims. But there are spiritual atheists too.(Eg: Buddhism and Jainism)
"We haven't observed it so it doesn't exist." This is not the reasoning that an atheist uses to not believe in a God. The correct reason would be- "We have no REASON to believe in something for which there is no evidence." If we are going to believe in things for which there...
...is no evidence, I could believe in anything from unicorns to garden gnomes. A belief should always be justified, most atheists demand pragmatic empirical evidences to justify their beliefs, for which there is none for a God.
He describes that there could be an entity that can't be observed, doesn't interact with matter, doesn't reflect light, doesnt resist movement in a way that it remains completely hidden and unobservable. Let me ask you this, what's the difference between such an...
..entity and an entity that doesn't exist? It's existence is bridged to reality by your imagination. The universe is observed to be completely self contained, there is no evidence for any external sustaining or causal phenomenon, and there is no need to assume one, other than..
... to satisfy your psychological need to believe in a God. I could do the same with any self contained theory, for eg: I could believe that gravity is caused by invisible, immaterial garden gnomes that pull us down. It would add nothing to the explanation that is already..
...satisfied by the existing theory of gravity. Anything extra that doesn't add anything to the explanation, and is not supported by evidence, can be shaved off by Occam's razor (Entities should be multiplied without necessity). This is how the pragmatical method works.
Next the OP suggests that belief in a God even in the absence of one is good, since it provides people with comfort, happiness and helps them escape from sorrows. To give credit where it's due, I partially agree with him. Life is absurd, finding ways to cope with this..
...absurdity is a reasonable thing to do. One should find comfort in the struggle from the struggle itself. But the issue here is that people don't live in bubbles, beliefs will ultimately result in actions and actions have consequences. Therefore, all unjustified beliefs...
...aren't necessarily good. They can result in irrational actions and therefore such ideas always need to be criticised and called out. This is why atheists often end up attacking religions. Religious people are often so far up in their own crap that they fail to recognise...
...the problems within their beliefs, it's the heretics that always fix stuff. Now the OP goes on to make a pathetically generalised statement saying that atheists chase after material possessions. This is yet again a failure to understand what atheism entails and...
...doesn't entail. All atheists are not materialists, Buddhists are atheists by definition since they don't believe in a creator God, yet they are the diametric opposite of what the OP describes. An atheist can be a physicalist, dualist, idealist regarding the soul, an...
...atheist can be a spiritualist or a materialist, an atheist can be a nihilist, hedonist, absurdist, stoicist etc. Because atheism, by definition only entails a lack of belief in God. Everything else are other values and beliefs that may be informed by, but not defined by...
...the category called atheism. Even when it comes to materialists and hedonists, they are unjustly misunderstood. Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure. Anything that gives you pleasure is worth pursuing, but this always brings to mind sex crazed maniacs engaging in...
....pervasive orgies and consuming food like there's no tommorow. This is in fact hedonism, but this isn't only what hedonism stands for. There are higher pleasures worth pursuing, not just the physical ones. The Greek philosopher Epicurus, who was an atomic materialist and...
...a hedonist who pursued freedom from fear and absence of bodily pains, was infact a celibate. He never had sex, and ate a mere loaf of bread daily. He chose learning and spending time with colleagues as higher pleasures. If one is a hedonist and still find himself unhappy,....
....he's doing hedonism wrong, since hedonism is by definition the pursuit of what makes one happy. Hedonism not restricted to material pleasures.
The next ill informed statement from OP is that atheists tend to be immoral and do bad things, as they expect no consequences of an afterlife. Everytime a theist makes this statement, they're unknowingly exposing their worldview. A person who does good things for divine reward...
....or to escape punishment are doing it for their own selfish needs and not out of genuine charity. But the vast majority of humans, including theists and atheists are doing good things because they are empathetic and seek the common good. We are a social species and are...
...genetically predisposed to be altruistic and empathetic. Behaviours that help in social cohesion are actively selected for by natural selection in humans. Theistic morality reduces you to selfish beings, morality defined by reason and empathy are clearly superior.
He ends his thread with a outrageously ignorant statement which is also a lie. None of the major cosmological models that explain the origin of the universe invokes an omnipotent God or a supreme deity in any way. They are all self contained explanations.
God is a non-answer. The very fact that it can be a lazy explanation for anything and everything, even though it's very ill defined shows that it's a placeholder for our ignorance. God is hiding in the ever receding gaps in our understanding of reality.
It's funny how Hindu apologists accuse Indian atheists of being westernised but steal the western apologists talking points against atheism. The irony is sweet. For a guy who throws around the word logic a lot, you could really use some.
