Too Many Extremes in Disbelief

[Trailblazer]

Perhaps if you paid yourself more, you'd feel more like doing the washing? (That never worked for me, but still, something to try ...?)

I don't need any more money so there would have to be another incentive. I just haven't found one yet.

 

[LuisDantas]

I guess I am just not seeing it, @Rival .

I have a hard time understanding what you perceive as "extreme". It feels like you just don't like mild skepticism. Because yes, it is very mild.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Believing that reality is real and the universe orderly is an extreme position - as is the belief in magic. There is no middle ground.
The same goes for rationality. You either are rational in your thinking or you are emotional, you can't be both.

And as neither set of axioms can be proven, no side can be convinced with arguments - especially not those who don't accept rationality.

Well, it is in a sense a battle between 3 positions.
Universal irrationality.
Universal rationality.
A combination of both as none of them are universal.

In other word the law of the excluded middle versus the fallacy of the excluded middle.
In other words as a sort of short dirty version there are 3 kinds of humans (and yes, even that is too simple):
Those who can't do rational as relevant.
Those who think rational works as a postive on everything.
Those who understand that even rational is a limited human behaviour.

 

[danieldemol]

II. 'Paul was xyz.' (A Roman spy, a false Christian, didn't really see Jesus etc.)

What do you mean by Paul didnt really see Jesus?
Do you mean you view it as extreme to think Paul never met Jesus in person?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

What do you mean by Paul didnt really see Jesus?
Do you mean you view it as extreme to think Paul never met Jesus in person?

No, that can be the case, but that has nothing to do with Paul being a false or true Christian.

 

[Rival]

I guess I am just not seeing it, @Rival .

I have a hard time understanding what you perceive as "extreme". It feels like you just don't like mild scepticism. Because yes, it is very mild.

Believing that Jesus didn't exist and that no Christians were martyred are extreme positions. These are fringe positions (and I don't even think the second one exists) among scholars, and yet are widely represented among RF atheists and some others. They are not backed by any meaningful scholarship. This isn't mild scepticism, it's fringe belief.

 

[Rival]

What do you mean by Paul didnt really see Jesus?
Do you mean you view it as extreme to think Paul never met Jesus in person?

Some people here seem to believe Paul was a false Christian bent on distorting Christianity. I haven't a clue why. It's pretty extreme without any evidence.

 

[Heyo]

Believing that Jesus didn't exist and that no Christians were martyred are extreme positions. These are fringe positions (and I don't even think the second one exists) among scholars, and yet are widely represented among RF atheists and some others. They are not backed by any meaningful scholarship. This isn't mild scepticism, it's fringe belief.

Would you include historians within "meaningful scholarship" or do you only accept theologians? Dr, Richard Carrier is a historian who argues for a mythical Jesus. (Personally I'm right in the middle between the historical and mythical debate, I see Jesus as legendary.)
As to no Christians being martyred, the question is what you mean by martyred. No historian I know of denies that Christians have been persecuted and murdered but there is no evidence for Christians being murdered by the Romans for their belief, i.e. given the chance to recant Christianity.

 

[Rival]

Would you include historians within "meaningful scholarship" or do you only accept theologians? Dr, Richard Carrier is a historian who argues for a mythical Jesus. (Personally I'm right in the middle between the historical and mythical debate, I see Jesus as legendary.)
As to no Christians being martyred, the question is what you mean by martyred. No historian I know of denies that Christians have been persecuted and murdered but there is no evidence for Christians being murdered by the Romans for their belief, i.e. given the chance to recant Christianity.

Yes, Carrier is one such scholar who is widely criticised for his arguments and not taken particularly seriously. Jesus mythicism is a fringe position within academia, plus Carrier's seeming disregard for the Gospels as a whole. He's responsible for the bizarre idea of comparing the Homeric literature to the Gospels to find parallels. I can't take him seriously I'm afraid.

I mean I saw a dude on here yesterday arguing that the martyr stories were wholesale Christian fabrications in a crass dismissive comment. He didn't seem to care about particulars.

 

[Debater Slayer]

I've noticed that, among a large cohort of non-Christians and especially atheists on here, many of them take disbelief to what I would consider an extreme. There are many issues so this will likely be a wide-ranging thread.

I. 'Christian martyr stories are made up.' Why? Yes, there are many apocryphal tales but it is absolutely true that Christians were at times persecuted and put to all kinds of terrible deaths by the Roman state. These figures are exaggerated but why should this mean that the whole idea behind Christian martyrs be questioned?

II. 'Paul was xyz.' (A Roman spy, a false Christian, didn't really see Jesus etc.) Please prove it. Paul probably had more enemies than friends, but the same might be said of Jesus.

III. 'Jesus didn't exist.'

IV. Sources that never seem to be good enough. Yet other histories are not questioned (ex. our best information for Alexander the great comes about 200 years after the fact and almost nothing contemporary survives). Ancient written histories and biographies are full of what modern folks would now consider nonsense and are yet still cited as acceptable histories and especially biographies, yet when one goes to the Gospels all of a sudden it's different, despite the fact that the Gospels are now squarely classed as Greco-Roman biography written in the style of every other such biography (ex. miraculous birth narratives, missing out childhoods, not in chronological order etc.)

The minute something is classed as 'religious' it seems far too many people are willing to write it off as a complete waste of space.

@Augustus @exchemist @RestlessSoul @Brickjectivity

While I agree that some atheists adopt black-and-white thinking concerning the above issues and religion in general, all of these strike me as quite mild compared to some of the common extremes in belief that I have observed whether on RF or elsewhere:

• Support for legal restrictions on others' rights, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, and sometimes support for harsh punishments targeting people who exercise these freedoms.

• Judgmentalism toward people who don't adhere to rigid, traditionalist gender roles and expectations.

• Stating that a horrible fate awaits non-believers, up to and including eternal torture, and that this fate is the work of a just, forgiving deity.

• Supporting preaching and stating that the above beliefs should spread as much as possible—despite the measurable harm they cause to certain groups by fueling persecution thereof and limitation of their legal rights.

If the list in the OP is the extreme of disbelief, I'll take it over the very common forms of extreme in belief that I just listed—but ideally, I'd rather take neither. At least the positions listed in the OP aren't being used in many countries to systematically take away the rights of believers or persecute them.

 

[exchemist]

I agree with you in an idealistic way. The rational among us want to debate issues as detached and objectively as possible.

I never read any of the books by the New Atheists, but have watched debates and discussions as I worked. My take away from their more militant approach is that they were responding to the rise of religious extremism, namely Islamic terrorism and Christian fundamnetalism (that is arguably very strong and influential in the USA). They wanted to fight fire with fire, and their justification was that religious leaders and movements were being allowed to get stronger, and be excused for even their extremist views for the sake of religious freedom. They saw this as a threat to civilization, and while the Taliban and ISIS is understood as a deadly threat many don't consider the fundamentalist Christian as a threat. If we look at climate denial, vaccine denial, rejection of evolution, book banning, condemnation of gays and trans, the influence on republicans that have led to many Supreme Court decisions that are harming women and other citizens, fundamentalism is a real threat. These theists aren't quietly minding their own business praying, and being harrassed by nasty atheists, these movements are deliberately impacting society and law from a religious angle, and they are winning.

I think Dawkins and others have had some benefit in brining awareness, but it seems it has also encouraged the moderates to become more conservative and defiant, and we got Trump and MAGA. This thread illustrates how believers think themselves above reason, and how dare atheists even question what believers hold sacred. Theists can get away with irrational thinking, but atheists who ponder religious ideas critically? That crosses a line. Atheists, critical thinkers, skeptics have a variety of approaches to challenge bielevers, but it is clear that theists are rattled and upset that their status quo is disputed with questions. If believers had answers they would not be so upset.

No doubt many believers mind their own business and pose little threat to civilization, but there is a very strong set of fundamentalist movements that are gaining power and influence, and there needs to be a response.

I had not realised that the Trade Centre attacks were the genesis of New Atheism, but you seem to be absolutely right, according to this rather withering assessment of it, (in the Guardian, amazingly!) : The Four Horsemen review - whatever happened to ‘New Atheism’?

There are some quite telling points in it. For instance:-
"New Atheism’s arguments were never very sophisticated or historically informed. You will find in this conversation no acknowledgment of the progress made by medieval Islamic civilisation in medicine and mathematics – which is why, among other things, we have the word “algebra”. The Horsemen assume that religion has always been an impediment to science, dismissing famous religious scientists – such as Georges Lemaître, the Catholic priest who first proposed the big bang hypothesis, not to mention Isaac Newton et al – as inexplicable outliers. At one point Harris complains about a leading geneticist who is also a Christian. This guy seems to think, Harris spits incredulously, “that on Sunday you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give yourself to Jesus because you’re in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist”. Harris offers no reason why he can’t, except that the combination is incompatible with his own narrow-mindedness."

It's interesting that Dennett, the only philosopher among them, apparently took a more nuanced view of religion than the other Horsemen.

I found this comment about Dawkins's subsequent trajectory rather amusing:-
"Dawkins became a leading social-media troll, with tweets such as this from last summer: “Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu Akhbar.’ Or is that just my cultural upbringing?” In his introduction, Dawkins quotes some scriptural interpretation and asks: “Are professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing?”, which suggests he has a bright future ahead of him leaving pointless online comments below newspaper articles."

But I suppose in fairness these guys are getting seriously old now, so perhaps this kind of thing is only to be expected.

Obviously you are right, too, about the regressive anti-intellectualism of redneck Bible Belt Christianity in the USA, which has been cultivated assiduously by the Right. But I have the strong feeling that attacking people's foundational cultural beliefs, in the way the New Atheists encouraged, is partly what has given rise to this backlash. (By the way, talking up an adversarial relationship between religion and science, as Dawkins has done, strikes me as not only damaging and wrong, but historically and culturally ignorant.)

I don't agree, however that this thread illustrates any attempt to put religion beyond critical scrutiny. @Rival 's initial point was just that some people (not you, obviously) seem to feel a rather irrational need to deny that there may be anything at all behind the stories and scriptures that underpin religions, instead of treating them as a historian or an anthropologist would, i.e. sure, stories created by people with obvious motives, but very likely with some bits of historical foundation to them. For instance it seems quite likely there may have been a charismatic man in Palestine, perhaps one of the Essenes, who may have been called Jesus of Nazareth and whose preaching may have founded what has become Christianity. Yet some on this forum hotly deny that even this much could be possible - which is rather curious.

 

[RestlessSoul]

This God is supposed to be all-powerful, meaning that it could easily create a world and universe without physical or psychic pain, and all-loving, despite the fact that it did not do that. It also is supposed to have “revealed” itself by means of “inspiring” men to the writing of scripture, which renders the intelligent and rational men it has created no objective evidence of its existence, and yet refuses to reveal itself in a more objective manner, so that it’s rational creations might believe when so many events in life would make them tend towards unbelief, and so be “saved” or “redeemed” by said believing. All of this leads me to believe that either this supposedly just God has reduced its plan of salvation to an absurd and unjust game of irrational belief, or the God is simply an unjust player of games. How are we to make sense of all of this, other than to think that this God is, indeed, the creation of men who could not keep a paradigm with so many moving parts straight?

That’s an extremely circular argument, don’t you think? Anthropomorphise God, judge Him by human standards, find Him unreasonable. It’s an exercise in absurdity, which can only lead to an absurd conclusion.

 

[Debater Slayer]

But I have the strong feeling that attacking people's foundational cultural beliefs, in the way the New Atheists encouraged, is partly what has given rise to this backlash. (By the way, talking up an adversarial relationship between religion and science, as Dawkins has done, strikes me as not only damaging and wrong, but historically and culturally ignorant.)

I think this is an especially great point. I remember having a discussion with a conservative Muslim about evolution several years ago where I asked him why he believed evolution was irreconcilable with a belief in a creator deity. He said, "Dawkins has repeatedly said this, and he understands evolution better than most people in the world."

That comment gave me pause because, at that moment, it dawned on me that Dawkins' approach could be quite damaging and alienating some people from believing they could reconcile their religious beliefs with science. Many people are never going to stop being religious, nor do they need to. So when a prominent biologist tells them that the only way to accept science is to stop taking their religion seriously, what is the expected result?

 

[Nimos]

The minute something is classed as 'religious' it seems far too many people are willing to write it off as a complete waste of space.

In order to get a correct image of this one has to make a distinction about what one talks about.
There is a huge difference between religious claims and the history of religion and these can't simply be mixed together as if they are the same.

For instance, Paul having lived and travelled the world as the bible claim is one thing, but him having encountered Jesus is another because it comes with a lot of other claims attached to it.

Just because we have texts claiming these things doesn't make them true, because we have lots of religious texts from all over the world that are claiming remarkable things, yet they are being written off, not only by atheists but even more so by religious people.

For some reason, there seems to be an acceptance that these other religions are purely made up, yet these bigger ones are definitely different and way more likely to be true, despite making similar amazing claims.

It is not uncalled for by atheists to question claims made by any religion.

 

[exchemist]

I think this is an especially great point. I remember having a discussion with a conservative Muslim about evolution several years ago where I asked him why he believed evolution was irreconcilable with a belief in a creator deity. He said, "Dawkins has repeatedly said this, and he understands evolution better than most people in the world."

That comment gave me pause because, at that moment, it dawned on me that Dawkins' approach could be quite damaging and alienating some people from believing they can reconcile their religious beliefs with science. Many people are never going to stop being religious, nor do they need to. So when a prominent biologist tells them that the only way to accept science is to stop taking their religion seriously, what is the expected result?

Exactly. It creates a needless and destructive polarisation and even worse, as you point out, by forcing a (false) demand to choose on people, it risks that they will choose against science!

 

[Debater Slayer]

Exactly. It creates a needless and destructive polarisation and even worse, as you point out, by forcing a (false) demand to choose on people, it risks that they will choose against science!

I think it stems from some people's desire to denigrate religion instead of focusing on promoting reasonable, empathetic values regardless of others' religion or lack thereof. I see the root of that problem as the same root of a subset of the positions listed in the OP (e.g., the denial of the scholarly consensus about the historical Jesus and the dismissal of the significant cultural and scholarly contributions that religions have inspired): an ideological focus on depicting religion as an irredeemable force for evil even if that means alienating many moderates and creating further polarization.

 

[Rival]

I think some folks are overcomplicating this thread.


1) Do you believe Christians were put to death by Rome? (for any reason)

2) Do you believe Paul was a Christian and was intent on spreading what he believed is the Gospel?

3) Do you believe Jesus existed? (in any form)

4. Do you believe, as scholarship argues, that the Gospels are Greco-Roman biography in the tradition of other Greco-Roman biographers?


If you answered yes to at least 3 of these questions, you're not the problem. I have come across RFians who would answer no to all of them.

 

[Ella S.]

I've noticed that, among a large cohort of non-Christians and especially atheists on here, many of them take disbelief to what I would consider an extreme. There are many issues so this will likely be a wide-ranging thread.

I. 'Christian martyr stories are made up.' Why? Yes, there are many apocryphal tales but it is absolutely true that Christians were at times persecuted and put to all kinds of terrible deaths by the Roman state. These figures are exaggerated but why should this mean that the whole idea behind Christian martyrs be questioned?

I agree.

II. 'Paul was xyz.' (A Roman spy, a false Christian, didn't really see Jesus etc.) Please prove it. Paul probably had more enemies than friends, but the same might be said of Jesus.

Paul admits in the texts we have that he only ever met Christ in a vision after Christians were already talking about his death. One of the major points regarding Paul is that he was a later convert to Christianity after persecuting those who believed in the resurrection. So, yeah, I'd say that's him not really seeing Jesus, especially when he explicitly states in the texts he wrote that he disagreed with the few people that might have seen a historical Jesus (names James and Peter.)

III. 'Jesus didn't exist.'

The Jesus that Christians believe in, who was God incarnate, conducted miracles, and was resurrected from the dead certainly didn't exist. If you want to insist that there is some grain of truth to the mythical Jesus, feel free, but Jesus as he's popularly understood is a mythical character that didn't exist.

IV. Sources that never seem to be good enough. Yet other histories are not questioned (ex. our best information for Alexander the great comes about 200 years after the fact and almost nothing contemporary survives). Ancient written histories and biographies are full of what modern folks would now consider nonsense and are yet still cited as acceptable histories and especially biographies, yet when one goes to the Gospels all of a sudden it's different, despite the fact that the Gospels are now squarely classed as Greco-Roman biography written in the style of every other such biography (ex. miraculous birth narratives, missing out childhoods, not in chronological order etc.)

This is an incredibly dishonest false equivalency.

Yes, ancient biographies often had mythical elements, but if you think we have the same level of evidence for Jesus as we do Alexander the Great then, quite frankly, you're very confused. Alexander the Great was a major political figure who shaped entire nations, renamed cities, and left his name on everything as he went. There is quite a bit of archaeological and historical evidence for his existence and his activities.

Likewise, even if biographies of deified emperors were filled with mythical elements, we knew those emperors existed because of lineages, coinage, and, yes, contemporary sources.

When it comes to Jesus, we pretty much only have the mythical accounts and the Jamesian reference. All other references are, at the very least, still the subject of academic debate. When all we have to account for the existence of someone is a collection of myths then, yes, that calls into doubt whether they really existed and how much we can actually say about them if they did, since the sources we have are unreliable due to the inclusion of falsified mythical elements.

Whether there was some rabbi who inspired the mythical Jesus or not, the Jesus we're left with is still a mythical figure. Julius Caesar is not. That's the difference and it's an important one.

The minute something is classed as 'religious' it seems far too many people are willing to write it off as a complete waste of space.

Religious claims have an extremely high error rate when investigated. Any new religious claims that arise, therefore, have an extremely low prior probability of being true.

Remaining skeptical of religious claims is the only logical approach.

It always amazes me how non-Christians still fall into mindless Christian apologism like this. I can only imagine your post is a Golden Mean Fallacy where you think, in order to be rational, you must be impartial between positions that are demonstrably wrong and the "extreme" of writing falsehood off completely. Sometimes claims are simply false.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

While I agree that some atheists adopt black-and-white thinking concerning the above issues and religion in general, all of these strike me as quite mild compared to some of the common extremes in belief that I have observed whether on RF or elsewhere:

• Support for legal restrictions on others' rights, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, and sometimes support for harsh punishments targeting people who exercise these freedoms.
• Judgmentalism toward people who don't adhere to rigid, traditionalist gender roles and expectations.
• Stating that a horrible fate awaits non-believers, up to and including eternal torture, and that this fate is the work of a just, forgiving deity.
• Supporting preaching and stating that the above beliefs should spread as much as possible—despite the measurable harm they cause to certain groups by fueling persecution thereof and limitation of their legal rights.

If the list in the OP is the extreme of disbelief, I'll take it over the very common forms of extreme in belief that I just listed—but ideally, I'd rather take neither. At least the positions listed in the OP aren't being used in many countries to systematically take away the rights of believers or persecute them.

Yeah.
But as an example of one poster here, the claim that only beliefs with (objective, rational) evidence is relevant, can end the same place as any other in effect dogmatic, fundamentilistic claim.
Now in practice there are more of the relgious kind and a lot of us who understand evidence also undertand its limits, but you can find a few posters, who claim evidence as per the standard philsophical version, but don't really understand its limits.

Regards

 

[Ella S.]

I think it stems from some people's desire to denigrate religion instead of focusing on promoting reasonable, empathetic values regardless of others' religion or lack thereof. I see the root of that problem as the same root of a subset of the positions listed in the OP (e.g., the denial of the scholarly consensus about the historical Jesus and the dismissal of the significant cultural and scholarly contributions that religions have inspired): an ideological focus on depicting religion as an irredeemable force for evil even if that means alienating many moderates and creating further polarization.

I think falsehoods should be disproven, regardless of who that alienates, and the far-reaching consequences of misinformation should not be underestimated.

Religion is one of the largest sources of misinformation and outright disinformation in the world. It's made itself the enemy of truth. We shouldn't compromise with it by looking the other way and letting it get away with perpetuating misinformation and ignorance.

So, yes, I do have an ideological focus on attacking the evil of religion, even if that means alienating those who don't actually care about what's true or not. Those people were never going to be my allies to begin with. I'm not compromising my own integrity for the sake of people that intentionally antagonize reason and evidence. That's an unreasonable expectation.