[ExI] No gods, no meaning?

[Jason Resch]

On Thursday, April 23, 2020, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Dammit, done it again!
>
> Reposted, with correct Subject line :(
>
>
>
> On 23/04/2020 00:18, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 3:51 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On 22/04/2020 18:39, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>> > agnosticism is a lack of belief in gods.  Atheism is a belief in the
>> > lack of gods.
>>
>> This is patently false. Agnosticism has nothing at all to say about
>> belief, it's about knowledge (from the greek, 'Gnosis', meaning
>> knowledge). Agnosticism is the position that you don't/can't know.
>>
>
> And thus, a lack of belief.
>
>
> Not necessarily.
> Many religious people will freely admit they have no definite knowledge
> about their particular god, but still choose to believe in it. I know
> that's a logically contradictory position, but belief knows no logic. In
> fact it rejects logic.
>
>
>
>
>> Atheism, in it's most common form, is the lack of belief in gods. Some
>> people define a 'strong', or 'hard' form of atheism that is an assertion
>> that no gods exist, but that is a minority view.
>>
>> These things are easy to look up.
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
>
> "Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence
> of deities.  Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any
> deities exist.  In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the
> position that there are no deities."
>
> I guess both meanings are in use.
>
>
> Yes. And one is overwhelmingly more common than the other.
>
> When I say I'm an atheist, I don't want people to assume I subscribe to a
> minority interpretation of the term (mainly because, to me, it's not so
> much the non-existence of gods that is the important thing, but the not
> believing in things ('believing' as in accepting things as true without a
> shred of evidence, and even in the face of contradictory evidence).
>
> The narrowest sense is the one that needs qualification, not the broadest
> one. This is true of job titles and many other things, not just world-views.
>
>
They're also definitions of God held by different religions or different
believers which are scientifically consistent.

For example, God as the creator (consistent with the simulation
hypothesis), or God as the "world soul" -- the collection of all conscious
brings (consistent with open individualism), or God as Truth/Reality
(consistent with mathematical realism).

It's easy to forget that there's any different religions and God's out
there, as well as varying levels sophistications of belief, even within
those religions.

There's no reason I see that religious ideas cannot be extended and grow
together with advances in scientific understanding. To assume otherwise and
say religious ideas must stagnate perverts and restricts not only religion
but science as well.

Jason
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