why atheism is cultural cancer

I am getting into Lovecraft's books. Now that is a religion which makes most people feel worse than atheism does. But I dont mind worshipping an insane God.

Also, from what I understand, atheists can have goals, just like religious people have goals. While goals are truly arbitrary, atheists and theists are same in that area.

Of course, atheist is going to miss out on a lot, because religion and magic teach confidence and hope, which is actually crucial for success.

the problem with atheism is, when you take the "I need evidence" claim universally, and when you set a high standard of evidence, you realize that you have no idea what future brings, and then no hope for better either. No hope for good afterlife, no hope for success from an unexpected source.

Asking for evidence for everything is actually a terrible way to lead a life. Belief without evidence and belief with weaker evidence is actually in many cases superior.

Lets say you have no evidence you will live another 10 years. Do you just waste all your savings?

Or you have no evidence your offspring wont be next Hitler, so you dont reproduce?

Belief without evidence is what runs the world, because evidence itself and idea of evidence is circular. Material world is used to prove material world. thats about as circular logic as it gets.

So person who asks for evidence for everything, ends up being unable to produce single belief supported by evidence, as Munchausen trillemma clearly demonstrated.

Even basic laws of logic must be accepted without evidence in order to do reasoning in the first place.

And any evidence requires its own evidence, which creates a true infinite regress.

Even listing of all possible options, which is a 4th type of logic used by Munchausen trillemma itself (there are more than 3 types of reasoning, trilemma isnt exactly true), suffers from problem that it somewhat relies on law of identity to prove itself true. While 4th type of logic can even function without law of identity, and be presented without law of identity, it cannot be applied anywhere without law of identity, because while it doesnt need law of identity to exist, it needs law of identity to be made equal to anything.

My approach to religion was way too evidence-focused at first. In fact I still struggle with that. I was naturally drawn to calvinism because of their high opinion of reason and attempts to tie all doctrines together into neat logical systems. The irony is they end up with severe mental gymnastics to justify their doctrines from both a scripture and common sense perspective, Lutheranism on the other hand just reads scripture and says "ok". A few years ago I would have vomited at the thought of believing something without irrefutable evidence and rigorous logic but now I get it, the stuff that I thought was logical and proven back then wasn't even logical or proven in the first place.

The constructive criticism I have with your approach to religion is that it quite honestly ends up with much the same problem I am pointing out about atheism. You practice 100 religions at the same time that contradict each other, some of them are even just troll religions. So you can't tell anyone "you should believe what I believe" because they would have to believe in two opposite things at once. Your worldview isn't reproducible, it cannot become a cultural norm and thus cannot transform society for the better.If you picked christianity and only christianity you would find things start to "click" that didn't click before and you would actually start operating differently in life, but instead you are acting no different from a nihilist in practice.

Also, even if I was to accept law of identity as true, still nothing could be proved using law of identity without using circular logic.

Because in deduction logic, there is nothing to deduce material world from. there is no way to make deduction which starts from non-material and ends with material as conclusion.

Deductive logic, requires starting premise, created by definition. Definition cannot be proved true.

Using observations to prove observations is circular. Using material world to prove material world is circular. Using evidence to prove evidence is infinite regress.

to put it more simply, even if law of identity is accepted as true, it cannot be used to prove anything material, because each equation which is not true by definition cannot be proved true, and definitions themselves likewise cannot be proved true.

So "material world = exists" is not true by definition, thus there is nothing to deduce such conclusion from.

Even when we apply the listing of options logic:

1. Material world exists
2. Material world doesnt exist

We dont have any way to disprove 2 without relying on material world as evidence, and in such case, the starting premise becomes same as conclusion, that material world exists is proved by material world existing, circular reasoning.

So you can't tell anyone "you should believe what I believe"

Its not possible for most people to believe what I believe.

they can believe part of what I believe.

For example, some can believe in sikhism, some in Norse Gods, some in Satanism...

But to believe in almost everything takes a mind with multiple personalities disorder. Its truly not possible for most people.

Sort of like a file in computer which can contain texts which say opposite things. For most people, working like that is not possible.

My approach to religion was way too evidence-focused at first

the funny thing is that evidence is what led me to religion, but also realizing a complete lack of evidence in everything else.

I didnt start religion because of evidence, but once I did start it, things in my life changed after few years, and I decided to keep practicing religion because it obviously works even in material world. tho over time I learned to care less about material world, because its just temporary illusion, even for atheists.

You build a good case for religion considering the dead end atheism leads one to.

Religion or the belief in a God, is inside all of us. The difference between an atheist and a religious person is that they refuse to believe in God, not that God doesn't exist. Atheists will find some way to prove their version of a higher intelligence's plan of creation, whether it be evolution or space aliens BUT no one will ever believe that we just popped out of nothing by ourselves.

I would say the problem with atheism is that there are no boundaries, no rules to govern by other than what they decide to make up on their own and with their own reasoning. Look at America today, who back then was created on a Judeo-Christian value set. It thrived and boomed. Now as evolution and atheism starts to crowd the population through the social engineering of public schools and higher education, we are dying and becoming more and more divided.

The Jews are the richest and most successful group in America. They are not atheists.

Yes I am a Catholic and well versed in the Bible.

Your #1 is an empty post, declaring that confirned atheists are, themselves, empty of social excellence. Yes, some are, but I know more believers that are empty than I do atheists. I am a solid believer in God, accept Christ as my Savior and Redeemer, and believe in the supremacy of our republic/democracy of the USA. I grew up in LA where I knew many of my friends parents, including UClA professors who were solid atheists, but also solid citizens who cared about community, and even accepted people solidly tied to their religion, but just did not, themselves, accept religion. Two of my best friends are atheists, and I'd rather spend time with them that some zealots I know who claim they are "saved," but treat the confessional like a turnstile. Nope, that's not my brand of repentance, which ought to be a change of heart, not merely an admission of being weak and expect temptation to overrule them.

It appears your church doesn’t have too many friendly people. That is why you are forced to look for friends elsewhere. Birds of a feather flock together.

Speak for yourself Dave.

I was never programmed to be religious or accept the Middle Eastern GOD hypothesis as anything but the fanciful tale that it is.

And it's more that a tad arrogant to assume that people not so indoctrinated, do not have other thoughts, ideas and aspirations that are just as meaningful and valid as those spouted by the likes of the religious automatons that we see hear.

If anything is a "cultural cancer" it is the pseudo-scientific, theistic misinformation that has persisted and is perpetuated in the minds of indoctrinated children for millennia.

Bottom line is though, you will die and decompose and you know that you will...Mortality "is inside all of us" and no amount of theistic hocus pocus is going to change that.

Which isn't to overlook the potential of technology and that which we currently refer to as A.I.

You have not added the benefits of atheism though there appears to be many.

Atheism is often associated with a world view grounded in reason, scientific evidence, and personal autonomy, freeing individuals to focus on earthly life and human centric morality. Key advantages often cited include freedom from religious dogma, the ability to define one’s own moral code, and the motivation to make the most of a single finite life.

fucking bot bot fucker fucking bot

You finally found your life’s occupation. Go pursue it.

very few people genuinely have original ideas

Do you include yourself in that indictment? You did not bother to prove the point in your debate on this subject, so I question the legitimacy.

[if you are an atheist] you have no "team" that can reliably perpetuate those values

I'm acquainted with many atheists who are perfectly at ease and at home with their reliable perpetuation of values which I happen to share, though not sharing their atheism. Do you think all atheists are blithering idiots? Ditto the proof of the point. A mirror may need to be consulted.

Re: your #16,

are you finished with your premature efactulation? Clean-up, pls.

Your Christian values should supersede his perverted obsession as an atheist or your own obsession with Stephen a non practicing Christian consumed by Satan.

I think you’re right about one thing up front. People do want a shared framework and a coherent way to understand the world.

Where I think this post goess off is the idea that religion actually solves that problem, and atheism uniquely fails at it.

Religion doesn’t really give a single “common operating system.” It gives a claimed divine source that still has to be interpreted bg humans. That’s why Christianity alone breaks into hundreds of major traditions and thousands of denominations (World Christian Encyclopedia framework), all drawing from the same text but arriving at different conclusions. Zoom out to global religion and you’re dealing with about 10,000 distinct traditions and untold denominations of those traditions, not one unified system. So disagreement clearly isn’t something atheism introduces.

On the “frankenstein worldview” point, I don’t think that’s a weakness of atheism. I think that’s just an artifact of being human. Even within a religion, you still have to choose a denomination, a hermeneutic, and how to apply it in real life. That’s moral construction, just less visible/recognizable as such.

The claim that atheism leads to nihilism or “no epistemic basis for truth” doesn’t really hold. You can ground truth in evidence, coherence, and predictive success, which is how science operates (Hume; standard philosophy of science). And you can ground values in human well being, harm reduction, reciprocity, and long term stability. Those track with how humans actually function socially. You might claim that those shift overtime and my claim is that the humanist moral perspective allows for that. Whereas the dogmatic religious one does not. Anything that works against the natural flow of a system is cancerous to that system. Religious dogmatism is cancerous to human reason, and humanism is cancerous to religious dogmatism (so I partially accept your title, though you didn say atheism)

That shift gets formalized in the Enlightenment. Think Locke on natural rights and Kant on autonomy. It moves justification away from unjustified domain specific authority and toward reason, evidence, and justification. If anything creates tension with traditional religious frameworks, it’s that shift.

On the social side, the idea that atheism produces apathy or breakdown doesn’t match reality. Many of the least religious countries still show high levels of social trust and stability (Pew Research Center; World Values Survey). That doesn’t prove atheism is superior, but it does undercut the claim that it leads to collapse or is cancerous in the negative way you seem to mean it.

So what you’re pointing at isn’t a flaw unique to atheism. It’s a general human condition. Everyone is interpreting, selecting, and building a framework under constraints. Religion doesn’t remove that, it just externalizes it.

To the point, I’m actively building a moral/ethical framework myself. I track personal ideas, ideas from debates, lectures, and primary sources, analyze them for patterns and contradictions, and refine them into a more coherent system over time. The goal isn’t to invent values arbitrarily, it’s to anchor them in what consistently promotes human well being, stability, and long term viability. That’s something I can actually explain, test, and pass on to my kids as a starting point they can improve on, not just inherit without question.

So I think the real question comes back to you. If religion actually provides a single, coherent system that avoids these problems, how do you account for the scale of internal disagreement within it, the violence and harm born put of it, and what method do you use to decide which interpretation is the correct one without ultimately appealing to the same kinds of reasoning you’re criticizing?

Faux, far too many theists are formatively programmed automatons.

Windowless

Box trapped

Visionless

Yep

That's progress.

The same is like true of atheists and agnostics. All types in every crowd. Utter human nature

Yep, you're probably correct.

So we have concluded something.

And "why atheism is a cultural cancer", is justification for accepting the existence of a fantasy creator without question.

So, therefore it should be reasonable not to accept the existence of a fantasy creator without question.

That's a one-sided approach, because you make no allowance for existence of a real, living God, whereas I make allowance that some are convinced He is not, and do not harass their opinion.

I always make allowances for the existence of a Universal super-intelligence that may have somehow instigated life on this planet.

I also always make allowances for the idea of a GOD principle that is the overriding force behind Universal material evolution.

I also make allowances for the necessity of naive and analogical concepts put forwards a few thousand years ago.

I also make allowances for the nature of our species and it's onboard data processing device, wherein naive and analogical concepts are perpetuated for various reasons.

So...I don't quite run with the old naive Middle Eastern analogy...Please make allowances for this.

Debby Wrote: I am a Catholic and well versed in the Bible.

Do you think those two terms are mutually exclusive?

I so allow

Hmmm.

Which two terms Faux...Please clarify.