I have long felt that atheism does something to people. I have danced around this quite a bit, and likely said roughly what I am about to say, but hopefully not exactly this: the problem with rejecting life at the core of the universe, at the core of experience, is that it makes one feel an object, and feeling like an object causing a dimming of life energy at the core. Clearly, many atheists live interesting and adventurous lives. But it has always seemed to me some spark was missing.
And Cultural Sadeism is about failing to connect with experience at all. It is the head connecting to the head,which is connected to an IDEA of connection, of universal salvation, of universal liberation, freedom, happiness, love and hope, all abstract virtues for people capable of none of them. It is a retrogressive, cultural tautology.
There is more to say about this, but I haven’t figured out what yet.
2 replies on “Belief”
I'd be interested to see your review of this, once it appears in your local library 😉
http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter-Boghossian/dp/1939578094/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Evidently, it's the newest Big Thing in Atheism right now. Interesting, as always, to read the comments on Amazon.
Looks like a good case of "Same Shit, Different Day."
Here is the foundational flaw: A Manual for Creating Atheists offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith–but for talking them out of it.
Atheism is ABSOLUTELY a faith, and at that one that adds patent hypocrisy to a dogmatism every bit as unbending, and every bit as violent–both in historical practice, and current discourse–as that of any historical religion.
Clinically, as a matter of historical fact, Communism–which takes atheism and materialism as initial premises–has accounted for far more deaths per year, than any religion which has ever existed. I would suspect that it killed more people than could be directly attributed to all religions in human history.
Further, atheists ignore ALL empirical data which fails to conform to their materialistic world views. They are not empiricists, they are not "street epistemologists", as one reviewer had it, at all.
All he seems to have done is create a book written for misanthropes, teaching them how to create pattern disrupts for the religious in ways more likely to be successful than their usual arrogant and emotionally disconnected bombast.