From: "Alan"
Subject: Re: Atheism, another religion or is delusion universal?

The trap most intellectuals fall into, and Atheism is an intellectual approach, is a conceited pride and superiority over those who are perhaps bound by faith and tradition. ... I also believe Atheism exalts human intellect and consciousness above religion, but I do not accept that an Atheist is at a greater advantage to the Theist.

Atheism is an absence of belief in gods, not a philosophy or an "intellectual approach" to anything. It is entirely possible for a person to be an atheist through means other than intellectual investigation into religions and gods - although that means is, to be fair, rather common among self-professed atheists in the West. Nevertheless, the fact that atheism is not a philosophy, approach, or metaphysical position remains important because is emphasizes the fact that it isn't possible to make assumptions about atheists - assumptions like those Alan here insists on repeating.

Atheists do not necessarily "exalt human intellect and consciousness above religion." Some do, some don't - those who are themselves religious are, for obvious reasons, very unlikely to fall into Alan's narrowly circumscribed category. Note how Alan insists on capitalizing "atheism" as if it were some sort of philosophical school. We don't even normally capitalize empiricism, existentialism, or humanism - and those are philosophical movements.

It is curious, though, that Alan would imply that "those who are ... bound by faith and tradition" aren't intellectual. I wonder why that is? Could it be an implicit admission that religious faith isn't always very intellectual in nature - or perhaps that Alan's own faith is itself not very intellectual? I wonder if Alan considers himself to be one who is "bound by faith and tradition," and whether those bonds are responsible for his inability to understand atheism or reason very coherently.

The problem of contention and conflict is not exclusively a phenomenon of religious belief and practice, a world without religion will not produce a world without war.

For once, Alan actually writes something that is true: the absence of religion would not result in a world without war because war itself is not exclusively a result of religion. I have written exactly that more than once.

We should, however, add a couple of important points to this. First, Alan's statement is an implicit acknowledgment that war is, at least sometimes, a "phenomenon of religious belief and practice." We must give Alan credit for this because there are religionists out there who continue to insist that no "true" religion (or at least no true form of their religion) could ever been a cause for war and suffering. That's a perfect example of the No True Scotsman fallacy, of course, but it doesn't stop most people from doing it.

Second, while it is true that religion is not the only cause of war, we must acknowledge that it is an especially pernicious cause of war. By this I don't mean that the worst wars are religious but, rather, that religion is the most difficult sort of cause to resolve. People who disagree enough over religious matters to go to war are harder to reconcile than people who disagree over territory. Why? Because the transcendental demands of religion are much more absolute and uncompromising that the mundane demands of most political, philosophical, or other ideological belief systems.

When a conviction turns violent, that conviction must either overcome and destroy its opponent, or it must be compromised - there is no other way for peace to be achieved. A religious conviction is harder to compromise because when a person is convinced that they are doing God's Will, what argument cans sway them? A political conviction that one is doing something necessary for the protection of one's country, however, can often be more amenable to arguments.

Atheism without ethics is nihilism, in other words nothing!

This is a curious statement - it seems to assume, for some strange reason, that atheism is normally without ethics. I, however, have never met an atheist without ethics. It's been my experience that many religionists assume that atheists aren't ethical and have no reason to be ethical, but I'm positive that this belief cannot be the result of actual and persistent experiences with atheists who have acted unethically.

No, it seems more likely that these people have read somewhere that morality can only come from religion and theism and then concluded, absent any actual data, that people without religion or theism are therefore unethical. The sad part of all of this is the fact that these people probably know more than one atheist without realizing it and have never had a problem with the atheist's ethics. One really has to wonder about the sincerity of so-called Christians who are so ready to judge an entire class of people based solely on supposition like that.

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