I like to ask why would an atheist meditate?
For the reason he or she does anything else - the need or desire for a perceived or expected benefit of some sort.
do most atheists have a similar or common view on this?
I wouldn't know.
I call my private, inner life of thought contemplation. I do it every day. I do it before I post here, typically while walking in circles around the island in the center of my kitchen near where my laptop sits (Kant is said to have done the same while walking through the streets of Königsberg) thinking about what I want to say and how I want to say it.
We have been down this ultra-materialist, super-science road before, and it led us into one of the most inhumane and horrific eras in human history.
Secular humanism transformed the world. It had to wait for religious ideologies to be subdued enough to switch over to Enlightenment values such as empiricism over superstition, and the modern, liberal, democratic state with guaranteed personal rights over despotic monarchies.
Nazi German was a failure of Christianity, the dominant religion, to prevent people from being monsters. If Christianity met their needs, their fate might have been better, like that of the major secular states in the West.
Christianity, which when unbridled brings us atrocities like inquisitions, is the decadent ideology, not secular humanism. Look at the American Christians rallying around their decadent president. Christianity couldn't prevent that, either.
Frankl: “If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
And that is a tired old straw man, a reductionist fally. Nobody but the religious is making the argument that we believe that man is nothing but [fill in the blank].
Is Christianity true? Are we really born spiritually infected with sin and worthy of eternal punishment without worshiping an unseen god? I have no reason to believe that, and consider it a destructive concept.
Frankl: "I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment;
Auschwitz was about the people of one religion, Christianity, trying to exterminate another in what they called a final solution. Secular humanists don''t do such things to other people.
Frankl: "I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”- Viktor Frankl
And I'm absolutely convinced that he is wrong. So what, Viktor?
I'm certainly nor presuming that what can be determined via the scientific method is the sum of all truth. What I HAVE said is that THUS FAR the scientific method is BY FAR the best method we've come across for determining what is in truth real.
I define truth as the quality that facts possess, facts being linguistic strings (sentences and paragraphs) that accurately map some portion of reality. Nothing can be called truth that does not derive from empiricism. I assume that you would agree that even if there are truths that cannot be experienced empirically to be discovered or tested , they cannot be called true without that, meaning that the ideas are useless.
What do you think of this? :
"
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. No matter what answer you give, literally nothing changes. No decision you will ever make in your entire lifetime can ever be influenced by the answer to this question. If nothing changes even in principle with respect to some proposition being true or false, then the distinction between them just vanishes.
"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.
"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.
"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.
"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything." - anonymous Internet source
As the only thing science can determine is which of our invented theories of physical functionality appears to work under a very specific set of test conditions.
Religion can't do even that.
What more do you need to know? What other information can you use apart from the expected outcomes for actions you might take.?
the fact that we know so little about even the physical nature of existence is pretty strong evidence that there is a great deal about 'reality' that science is unable to detect, test, or even speculate about.
Point? If science can't answer the question, nothing can.
And religion is nothing but speculation, albeit stated as fact.
"Supernature" has nothing to do with anything. We wouldn't even be able to recognize it if we experienced it. It's just a concept created by the limitations of the human intellect.
Supernatural is a word used to pretend that things that don't exist are tucked away somewhere where they can't be experienced by any means. That is also the description of the nonexistent - things that cannot even in principle be detected or experienced.
so many of us have grown wary, and weary, or this atheistic 'scientism'.
I'm tired of religion. It's useless except to people who haven't learned to cope without it, a condition created by religion itself. It's a self-licking ice cream cone - "
a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself" Like cigarettes, it satisfies a need, but a need that it is responsible for.
Science has made our lives better. It lights up our homes at night, has put men on the moon and brought them home, and has conquered polio and small pox. Science makes our lives longer (80 is the new 60), healthier, more functional (eyeglasses were a great invention), more comfortable, more efficient (especially in communication and transportation), easier, and more interesting, as with this activity we're participating in now involving computers, fiberoptic and electric cables, radio communication, and satellites.
Religion's accomplishments? Inquisitions, crusades, religious wars, religious genocides, making the lives of homosexuals and atheists more difficult and dangerous, preventing life-saving stem cell research, fighting science in general, etc,
The Protestants hate the Catholics, The Sunni fight with the Shia. The Muslims hate the Christians, Jews, and Hindus, who hate them back. And on and on.
Notice the absence of secular humanists in that religious food fight. Follow their lead - tolerance.
I mentioned eye-glasses. Sure, it's great that people with needs that can only be met with religions have those needs met by it, but that is not an envious position to be in. Better to have those needs met without religion if possible, just as it's great that eyeglasses are available for people that can't see well without them, but isn't it better to not need them in the first place - to have clear vision without help?
And yes, I understand that to the faithful, praising religion is good and kind and holy, while pointing out its failures is militant atheism.
