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Comment by baconner | Hacker News Reader

>Also, in the realm of morality, everything atheism purports to be true is completely optional.

Well, no. Atheism does not purport anything to be true at all.

It's a lack of belief in one thing. I don't understand why that's so difficult for religious people to understand. Atheism is not a replacement for religion. There is no atheist rulebook, no set of beliefs, nothing.

Atheists can of course have morals but they don't derive from atheism and are not hindered by it either. They're unrelated.

*Edit, expanding...

Your argument presupposes that the only place morals can be derived from is religion where that the rules exist is the entire argument for why you should follow them. God says so, end of discussion.

There are better ways to derive morals based on day to day reality. There are better reasons not to murder than god says so.

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>Your argument presupposes that the only place morals can be derived from is religion ...

not exactly, because:

> where [the rules' existence] is the entire argument for why you should follow them.

also counts for secular law. Religions just suppose a common denominator for justice, and always via authority, in form of personification in priests, juges, elders, oneself and messages via koans, laws and other scripture.

The content of the message may be however debatable, because the argument of authority alone is not sufficient (as netiquette has it), but is not a fallacy that would subvert its message (except that power might corrupt).

>God says so, end of discussion

in context of social order the end of discussion means first of all that there are no further hints, so to speak, and you have to work out the hows and whys yourself.

All this is just life and atheists aren't free of it either. They prescribe to the opposition of a concrete religious ideal or otherwise don't care about it. But socially critical opinions especially can only be derived from social feedback, either way. Even if exclusive authority seems unacceptable, that can be helped by granting everyone some authority, instead of disregarding it for those offenders (ie. that god guy who I here so much about).

Edit: So of course, you are right, atheist do not fundamentally reject fundamentalism (you see, that would be paradox). I was just trying to say, I liked the first part of your comment better.

> It's a lack of belief in one thing.

This is the biggest misconception I see amongst atheists. They think they are rejecting one idea, so-called "God", when in fact they are rejecting 4.7 billion different ideas, without having even understood what 4.6 billion+ of them are. They reject the God of their parents, and then extrapolate to all the others, deeming them all "one idea".

Atheism is a hold-out of the old "single reality" idea. Ironically both atheists and strict religious fundamentalists share that property: the belief in one true way to understand reality, whether it's God or not-God. Rather than a willingness to allow others to define reality on their own terms.

My experience is most atheists are a lot more educated about the wide variety of religious beliefs than the religious who tend to just stick with whatever their parents believe. That's anecdotal but I think it's natural to go find out about other faiths as part of the process of questioning the faith of your parents or society.

There may be 4.6+ billion variants of the idea, but I rejected the root idea, magic.

You can shift the focus from the word "god" to the word "magic" but you are still rejecting a heterogenous mix of ideas of which you've only been exposed to a tiny fraction.

You have supreme belief that your compression of these ideas into the concept "magic" was lossless compression with respect to accurately conserving 6 billion people's core beliefs...

That seems honesty crazy to me. And it resembles an article of faith on your part.

I'm an atheist in a theological sense.

Philosophically I'm agnostic.

You are making the same leap about atheists that you say atheists make about deities.

You're putting a lot of beliefs and faith in my mouth there. I don't have supreme belief in anything. I just think it's extremely unlikely that any faith founded on magic is true and some kind of magic is a common thread in religion. I think it's unlikely true to the point that it's not worth my time except as an interesting cultural phenomenon. There's nothing crazy about that.

Faith and belief are not the same thing.

Oh also... This is not true of aethism either

> the belief in one true way to understand reality

Again, there are no tenants of atheism, no rules, no insistence that there's only one way everyone should define reality. We just don't believe in God and that's the entire thing. Some atheists may think that but I don't and it is not atheism.

We're not in a religion, a club, or anything. I don't get to tell another atheist they're doing it wrong because there's no affiliation between us.

>I don't get to tell another atheist they're doing it wrong because there's no affiliation between us.

With respect to erikpukinskis' statement, I believe you are trying to, though.

not my intent. I might tell another atheist to go read the definition of the word which is very narrow, but i wont tell them that being an atheist means you have to subscribe to any additional beliefs. that's my point.

s/tenants/tenets, I think you mean.

Meanwhile, enjoy this commentary from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the existence of God:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyYS-GzBSIg

Oops. I have been working on a lot of multitenant applications lately.

Also I don't speak so good.

You believe in one true way to understand what God is.

Ha, no I do not. Defining the one true way is the domain of the religious.

Give me some better ways to derive morals and explain to me how, from an atheistic worldview, the acceptance or rejection of those morals is anything other than my own personal choice to accept or reject them?

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