Right. So... They believe that their God is all-powerful, all-knowing, loving, merciful and benevolent. Except they're not sure enough to trust him/them with their lives. Ordinary guys in the trenches have more confidence in their comrades, children in parents and spouses in each other. Hm. — Vera Mont

They really want to believe all that, but perhaps even the least critical of us have trouble really convincing ourselves of that for which there can be no solid evidence. That said, there may be some who are wholly convinced and can face death with equanimity, feeling assured of their place in heaven.

Our faith in people is put in place by some solid evidence; they haven't failed us in the past and so on, but with a god who is unknowable there is no past experience to draw upon.

Of course the Church of Rome is Greek, and if the Nazis are Christian, then the Nazis are Greek.

Do I have to point out that this is the doctrine of original sin? Turns out the atheists are Christian too, because there is no escape from history, and there is Grayling, expounding Christian doctrine in his attack on it.

But lovers of freedom might be at least interested in the idea of a personal, individual, liberation from history, through the lovely economic concept of 'redemption': the Idea that though history grinds on, you yourself, or Mr Grayling himself even, can be relieved of the burden of history, and be renewed, because self is history.

@universeness

On the atheism of the Nazis, there seem to be roughly two positions from the capital "A" Atheists here: (a) National Socialism was a religious movement; and (b) National Socialism was not an atheist movement, shown by the fact that it was happy sometimes to use religion to gain and maintain power.

Position (a) can't really be taken seriously, but position (b) (which seems to be where @universeness is coming from) is usually just a defence against those militant theists who claim that atheism is inherently evil. I think (b) is fair enough. The Nazis emerged from a still quite religious milieu, which most of them did not care enough about to give it much thought for or against, thus they were neither religious nor atheist in general, and there was probably a diversity of opinion among Nazis on the issue.

But some leftist atheists during and just after the war came to believe that there was something in the secularized culture of modern Europe that allowed totalitarianism to happen. European antisemitism at the time of the Nazis had become scientific in character (it was pseudo-scientific, of course). It took up the older religious tradition of antisemitism and ran with it in a racialist direction, so it was motivated and justified differently than it had been in previous centuries. So some pessimistic atheist social theorists blamed the very historical evolution of which the loss of religion's social importance was a central feature. From this point of view, it is something in the process of secularization that led to totalitarianism and genocide (the instrumentalization of reason and all that). In other words, religion was being lost, and without anything to take its place, bad things happen.

This seemed to be further supported by the existence of another of the world’s most brutal and totalitarian regimes, one which was atheist and which engaged in the persecution of religion, namely Stalin's government of the Soviet Union.

Me, I certainly wouldn’t say that atheism or secularism necessarily result in totalitarianism. The minimal point I suppose is that society can end up in oppression, war, and violence whether it’s religious or not, and therefore that these evils have other causes. The idea that it's all caused by religion is no better than a conspiracy theory.

Hmm. Things are not the same since you dropped The Guardian for The Spectator.

But some leftist atheists during and just after the war came to believe that there was something in the secularized culture of modern Europe that allowed totalitarianism to happen. European antisemitism at the time of the Nazis had become scientific in character (we now know that it was pseudo-scientific, of course). It took up the older religious tradition of antisemitism and ran with it in a racialist direction, so it was motivated and justified differently than it had been in previous centuries. So some pessimistic atheist social theorists blamed the very historical evolution of which the loss of religion's social importance was a central feature. From this point of view, it is something in the progress of secularization that led to totalitarianism and genocide (the instrumentalization of reason and all that). In other words, religion was being lost, and without anything to take its place, bad things happen. — Jamal

I made a similar point earlier, namely that secularization may in fact have created the space for these events in the 20th century. If religion has been a part of all but one civilization since the beginning of written history, it only seems a fair question to ask what functions it serves in society, and whether you can just cut it out without adverse effects.

I dunno, this whole idea, that religion is bad and that we therefor should just do away with it, seems rather shallow to me.

Me, I certainly wouldn’t say that atheism or secularism necessarily result in totalitarianism. The minimal point I suppose is that society can end up in oppression, war, and violence whether it’s religious or not, and therefore that these evils have other causes. The idea that it's all caused by religion is no better than a conspiracy theory. — Jamal

There have been totalitarian religious regimes too, yes, so maybe that's not the axis we should be looking on. What I would say is that religions have heavily curated traditions that only change slowly and are therefor typically more a force for stability than the other way around (Although Christianity may be a bit of a special case). As this influence wanes, you supposedly have more of a chance for societies to oscillate into extreme and unpredictable directions, like we have seen in the 20th century. Mao's cultural revolution is maybe the best example of this kind erasure of the past.

There's an old critique of A C Grayling which seems to agree with Un's view of this, its emphasis being that 'militant atheism' in a sense needs religious texts to be rendered literally, to make its literalist critique possible: — mcdoodle

I enjoyed reading the article you linked to. That's the biggest benefit I get from TPF in that I can take such small steps, in improving my knowledge of philosophy, by reading such linked articles. I had not heard of A. C Grayling, but I now, really like him. The one word that I did not read in Mr Ree's review was the word 'socialist.' That's a more important label for me than 'secular' or even 'humanist.' But that in no way dilutes the importance of 'secular' or 'humanist.' Is Mr Grayling a professed socialist?

There's no question that in a world packed with various forms of religious fundamentalism, which can significantly damage a culture and disrupt the world - from Trump's evangelicals, to Modi's Hindu nationalists (and let's not forget Islam) - these ideas are worth resisting, debunking, challenging. Just as the ideas of secular dictators are also worth debunking and challenging. — Tom Storm

Yes, that's a good mission statement. Perhaps even a good contribution to 'general guidelines' for establishing a palatable secular morality that's 'fair and just,' for all stakeholders, and, what I especially like about such statements from 'HUMANS' is that imo, such demonstrates NO IRREFUTABLE NEED for the divine source of moral guidelines/dictates that theists claim, humans need, to escape a 'guaranteed!' return to purely instinct driven, feral behaviour, devoid of any palatable morality.

So I think Mao actually was consistent in his logic to implement the revolution. Tradition and religion are stabilizing and crowd controlling forces. If your are serious about creating a communist society, you do need to get rid of those... hence the cultural revolution.

But then what, is the real question? It's not as if we, once we get rid of tradition, once we get rid of these controlling evil forces, that we magically start living peacefully all together. Something does need to come in its place. And since we erased the past, in the short term, it can only come in the form of some ideological artifice, top-down imposed... and untested, unproven and unrefined in the real world. Is it really a surprise then that these experiments have invariably been worse then what they sought to cure?

This is an example of an atheist dogma, certainly an example of the enforced secularism and not a religious evil. — Hanover

No, It's not, it's yet another example of a human's wish to kill off any competition to their own rise to god status, in the minds of their followers. How many dictators believe and promote a cult of their own personality? EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, past and present imo. Hitler is just one of the modern examples. Alexander the butcher was no different. Hitler manipulated religion, yes, such always does. If the nazis won, then I agree that they would not have tolerated dictates from ANY religious organisation that 'competed' with nazi dictates about how people MUST live and WHO will be allowed to live.
They certainly would have killed any religious leader who dared to challenge their absolute power.
BUT, this is a religious position! All totalitarian, cult of personality, autocratic control level of a large mass of people, are IDENTICAL imo, to the rule of a king or a messiah who claims to have gods sanction, (the so called, divine right of kings) to BE what they/he/she/hesh wants to be, ie, YOUR GOD!
Dead Roman emperors were often raised to god status. We even see a diluted version of this today in the catholic tradition of raising some 'personality,' THEY approved of highly, by declaring them a 'saint.' :rofl:

Excellent point! I defend the right of individuals to hold any religious faith that suits them, and to congregate and commune with like-minded individuals, but when dogma arrogates to itself the right to trespass on the political realm it deserves to be critiqued and resisted, and hopefully, put back in its place. — Janus

As a democratic socialist, I am forced to broadly agree with your quote above but how do you suggest we prevent such horrors and such horrific final solutions as the branch Davidians (Waco Texas), the Jim Jones mass poisoning in Guyana, the heaven's gate mass suicide in 1997, etc, etc? Even this May, I heard in the news about:
Children were targeted as the first to be starved to death in the final days of a Christian doomsday cult in Kenya, according to fresh accounts emerging.

(b) (which seems to be where universeness is coming from) is usually just a defence against those militant theists who claim that atheism is inherently evil. I think (b) is fair enough. — Jamal

Yes, I would agree that my pushback here IS against the argument from theists/religious groups, that atheism MUST dictate a return to amoral human behaviour.

Me, I certainly wouldn’t say that atheism or secularism necessarily result in totalitarianism. The minimal point I suppose is that society can end up in oppression, war, and violence whether it’s religious or not, and therefore that these evils have other causes. The idea that it's all caused by religion is no better than a conspiracy theory. — Jamal

Yes, that seems quite balanced to me. Even if I am labelled as a 'militant atheist' and that is considered a negative label by some ( I don't consider it negative, but it is probably inaccurate in many ways) I DO NOT claim that all horrors humans face are caused by religion BUT I DO list it in the top 5 of the biggest barriers to human ability to individually 'be all you can be!' whilst we still have the very short lives we do.
COME ON science! We wait impatiently for those extra options that increased longevity and robustness might offer us! AND f*** off theism! stop holding us back!!!!!

We wait impatiently for those extra options that increased longevity and robustness might offer us! AND f*** off theism! stop holding us back!!!!! — universeness

Careful what you wish for. Inasmuch as human thinking progresses through the dying off of people whose thinking has ossified, increased longevity might hold 'us' back.

This seemed to be further supported by the existence of another of the world’s most brutal and totalitarian regimes, one which was atheist and which engaged in the persecution of religion, namely Stalin's government of the Soviet Union. — Jamal

In relation to the op then, can you put your finger on the "dogma" or even the ideology involved here, which could motivate this sort of atheist politicism. Surely the issue is more complex than the "fact/value" distinction of the op. It appears to me like the proper subject matter would be better described as the power/money relation. The relation of fact over value does not seem to have the same motivating force as the relation of power over money. "Value" and "money" are comparable, which would mean that the dogma which motivates such an atheist movement is power based rather than fact based.

It might be useful to consider Plato's description of the evolution/devolution of the state, in "The Republic". He describes a specific order of descent, which corresponds with a distinct attitude of the individual. Each of the successive forms of government, in what he calls the corruption of government, are described in terms of the attitude of an individual. And some form of explanation is provided as to how one gives way to the next. The three principal levels of distinction are the divine (by moral reason), the honourable (power), and the money (material goods, all sorts of chattel and property).

Or you could think that given enough time, that which has ossified or petrified maybe softened.

The USSR, and China are just another two failed attempts to 'get it correct.'
If the people at the time had managed to recognise and kill/stop a personality cult such as Stalin or Mao gaining totalitarian control, their attempt might have succeeded. No point in crying over failed attempts.
WE MUST TRY TRY TRY and then ......... TRY AGAIN! Until we succeed, on a global scale.

BUT, this is a religious position! All totalitarian, cult of personality, autocratic control level of a large mass of people, are IDENTICAL imo, to the rule of a king or a messiah who claims to have gods sanction, (the so called, divine right of kings) to BE what they/he/she/hesh wants to be, ie, YOUR GOD! — universeness

If you can't offer an example of an atheistic leader who is evil even in the hypothetical because definitionaly their exercise of power is "religious" in an essential way, this is all tautological. I'll stop offering counter examples to disprove your argument so that you can tell me there are no married bachelors.

The USSR, and China are just another two failed attempts to 'get it correct.' — universeness

WE MUST TRY TRY TRY and then ......... TRY AGAIN! Until we succeed, on a global scale. — universeness

Let's first focus on eliminating the ongoing repercussions of the last failed attempts before we start rolling out the next five year plan.

Let's first focus on eliminating the ongoing repercussions of the last failed attempts before we start rolling out the next five year plan. — Hanover

Oh we have many many millions of years, not 5 more years (Hear D. Bowie below).
So how about a 100 year or thousand year or ...... year plan?
We just have to avoid extinction events and causing such ourselves.

If you can't offer an example of an atheistic leader who is evil even in the hypothetical because definitionaly their exercise of power is "religious" in an essential way, this is all tautological. I'll stop offering counter examples to disprove your argument so that you can tell me there are no married bachelors. — Hanover

"either the ball is green, or the ball is not green" is always true, regardless of the colour of the ball.
I don't care about your concern with logical tautologies. In REAL human life, ALL totalitarian dictators past and present are god wannabees, and you holding up an irrelevant shiney from propositional logic, in a futile attempt to dilute from the observed behaviour I am referring to, is part of why I claimed earlier that your theism manifests in you at times, in rather sinister ways.

Oh we have many many millions of years, not 5 more years (Hear D. Bowie below).
So how about a 100 year or thousand year or ...... year plan?
We just have to avoid extinction events and causing such ourselves. — universeness

The reference was to Stalin, hoping to illustrate that these attempts are not benign.

"either the ball is green, or the ball is not green" is always true, regardless of the colour of the ball.
I don't care about your concern with logical tautologies. In REAL human life, ALL totalitarian dictators past and present are god wannabees, and you holding up an irrelevant shiney from propositional logic, in a futile attempt to dilute from the observed behaviour I am referring to, is part of why I claimed earlier that your theism manifests in you at times, in rather sinister ways. — universeness

Yes, logic is just a shiney diversionary tactic. I'll try to avoid it.

In other words, religion was being lost, and without anything to take its place, bad things happen. — Jamal

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has so far possessed, has bled to death under our knife, who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What purifications, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history so far!”

. I'll try to avoid it. — Hanover

No, logic can be abused and used out of context, just as you sometimes do.
Don't avoid it, just employ it correctly/honestly. Perhaps It's your dalliances with theism that is causing the jamming signals! Something for you to logically ponder perhaps, but only if you can gain sufficient control over your own personal primal fears, instead of allowing them to force you to theism.
I accept that this is merely my personal interpretation that you will of course reject.
All addictions are hard to admit to, especially when its only others who are trying to convince you, that a particular one is harming you, when you are convinced, it is one of your most fundamental supports.

Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? — Hanover

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

So yeah, in some ways it hasn't gone very well so far, despite N's optimism.

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has so far possessed, has bled to death under our knife, who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What purifications, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history so far!” — Hanover

FREE AT LAST! Now, we just have to rid ourselves of
1. Money
2. Capitalism
3. Preoccupation with the primal fears we experienced via natural selection.
4. Religion.........theism...........theosophism (if Mr Hanover's last post is correct. I wish it was! as it would mean we can focus on stopping humans like Stalin, Trump, Putin et al, who are wannabee gods on Earth, and we no longer have to worry about what nefarious humans, dressed in religious uniform, tell us that their imagined gods demand of us)
5. Acceptance of or lack of recognition and treatment of mental aberrations in others such as narcissism, cult of celebrity, cult of personality, a need to follow others blindly without question.

The last 3 of my top 5 barriers to humans becoming all they could become are interchangeable in position based on personal experience.

So yeah, in some ways it hasn't gone very well so far, despite N's optimism. — Jamal

In a cosmic calendar scale, we have only been here a few seconds. You honestly don't think we have achieved much in the small time we have been here????
All the books, words, songs of hope for a better human future? Wars in which millions died to free others or bring down/end so called god sanctioned dictates delivered by fake prophets and messiahs. The divine right of Kings sanctioned by gods has at least been replaced with god wanabee humans who cannot convince very many now that 'god is with them and sanctions their rule.'
You seem to accent the negatives more than you accent the positive achievements of humankind.
Are you another pessimist?

This is a new feature of dogmatism that hasn't been mentioned yet: dogmatism as a tendency to protect a belief. Maybe to combine two theories put forward, yours and Wayfarer 's -- dogmatism is a tendency in human beings to protect the regular form of an accepted principle. And dogma is whatever is being protected. — Moliere

I don't have an issue with that. But there is another point to take into account. Some people talk about "hinge" propositions - ideas around which the debate turns, but which are never the focus of debate. I don't understand the ins and outs of this idea. A related idea is that of conceptual or grammatical propositions. Most people are happy to talk about analytic or a priori propositions. These relate to the language in which debate is carried on or to the ideas that frame the debate.

However that may be, for a debate to occur, there needs to be an agreement about what is at issue and what isn't and what counts as evidence or argument. These things are not dogmas merely because they are not at stake. They can be challenged at any time, but that amounts to changing the subject and that's the difference.

My point is that these are also protected, but legitimately. On the other hand, they can be challenged at any time, and to refuse such a challenge would be dogmatic.

Following this a little further, "dogma" used to mean simply doctrine or principle, but it now has a a value built in to it, so it means something like unreasonable resistance to a reasonable challenge (where what is reasonable can itself be open to challenge). That's my basic point. Unfortunately, one person's dogma is another person's evident accepted truth. So I wouldn't necessarily feel upset if someone called me dogmatic. I might just feel that the discussion was over and about to degenerate into abuse.

(We can speculate on religion in the area if the Nazis hadn't lost; I'm guessing (pure conjecture on my part) that there'd have been some moves toward occultism or Germanic paganism of sorts.) — jorndoe

No need to speculate. The Nazi party was very keen on occultism and especially German paganism and actively promoted it. To be fair, paganism is still around; I have a friend who describes himself as a pagan. He is a perfectly decent, liberal, nice guy. There's a good deal of information about this (including about the Nazis) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_paganism

European antisemitism at the time of the Nazis had become scientific in character (it was pseudo-scientific, of course). It took up the older religious tradition of antisemitism and ran with it in a racialist direction, so it was motivated and justified differently than it had been in previous centuries. — Jamal

The Jews were blamed for creating a world order that produced the Communists as well as those Capitalists who crafted the Versailles treaty. They were so effective wielding this invisible power that the only way to defeat it was to wipe out every last one of them. Does that logic work as a 'theism'?

Our faith in people is put in place by some solid evidence; they haven't failed us in the past and so on, but with a god who is unknowable there is no past experience to draw upon. — Janus

My sentiments exactly, except that none of the people and dogs I've learned to trust over the years ever asked me to bomb, burn, stone or chop the heads off anybody else, so I detached from the god, but kept the people and dogs.

You seem to accent the negatives more than you accent the positive achievements of humankind.

Are you another pessimist? — universeness

You ask me this because I attempted to confront the reality of the twentieth century? Why should I be an optimist? Seriously, why? This is a venue for philosophical thinking and discussion, not for atheist proselytizing or rousing the masses into revolutionary fervour.

Optimism is often facile and banal.

The optimist cannot despair, but neither can he know genuine hope, since he disavows the conditions that make it essential. — Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism

The title is where I'm at: hope without optimism.

Or is it the other way around? :chin:

I DO NOT claim that all horrors humans face are caused by religion BUT I DO list it in the top 5 of the biggest barriers to human ability to individually 'be all you can be!' whilst we still have the very short lives we do. — universeness

I realize that you've had a long dialogue about this already. Perhaps you're bored with it. But if I'm right that psychopathic behaviour is part of the human condition, removing religion may reduce the opportunities, but won't cure the problem. Those personalities will just find other ways to wreak havoc on the rest of us. I'm not saying there's nothing we can do about them, just that it's will be a continuous battle. Remember the slogan that freedom is not a place you arrive at and relax. It always needs defending.

Does that logic work as a 'theism'? — Paine

It depends on your god.

I detached from the god, but kept the people and dogs. — Vera Mont

I'm always in favour of people and dogs (and I've nothing against cats, rabbits and horses).

I'm always in favour of people and dogs (and I've nothing against cats, rabbits and horses). — Ludwig V

Dunno that I would trust a rabbit with my life... But horses very often and cats sometimes have saved the lives of their human companions. I hear Jesus scores the odd goal in soccer; a cat couldn't do that.