Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

A truly heretical idea is probably defined by how much of a shock it is to you if you hear it for the first time. Ideas like "the scientific method is wrong" or "people should not be treated as equals" are heretical in the sense that they go against the orthodoxy, but they are not new ideas, and we have solid responses to them. In a sense, they are part of the orthodoxy's FAQ. They are accounted for in the orthodoxy, and don't present any real challenge to it. Those kinds of ideas aren't really heretical, they're actually kind of bland and non-threatening, philosophically. At the very least, not challenging.

In order to find a heretical idea, you'd really have to find something shocking. Not just distasteful, unfashionable, or rude, but alien and disturbing. Something that must be destroyed (or at least reckoned with) in order for you to avoid losing a lot of sleep, or having a major crisis of identity. By definition, those are not ideas you and I can sit here and list off.

Sure, it’s easy to not be shocked by something you’ve heard before, but there are plenty of people who haven’t heard plenty of things before (cf. “today’s lucky 10,000”), so many people must still be regularly encountering ideas that seem heretical to them.

I wish more people made this distinction. Despite endless debates over "cancel culture" I can't think of a single shocking idea that's come out of it, it's just endlessly recycling old ideas.

Not all novel things are "shocking." But all the edgey rubbish people think will get them unjustly cancelled are not novel at all. As you say "they are part of the orthodoxy's FAQ." Which evidently a lot of people do not read.

These ideas can be disturbing, or alien. But they can also be just unexpected.

I have always been fascinated by ideas that are heretical but also likely to be true. Unfortunately, like you say, they’re hard to find and therefore a lot of them I feel like I’ve “discovered” myself.

Can anyone recommend places to discover more of these (books, forums, or thought patterns)?

I don't understand the distinction this comment is making. Can somebody give examples to show why it's useful? If it's not something you can list off, examples of past heresies and non-heresies would be OK.

Some people seem unable to conceive of a human existence not ultimately founded on a religious belief system. They can accept the idea of people having different religious beliefs (that is, the heretics doomed to Hell) but the idea of people who don't have a religion at all apparently throws a massive error, which leads to them uttering such nonsense as the insistence that atheism is a religion, and their utter inability to separate the concepts of "not believing in their god" from "believing their god doesn't exist" in their minds.

The more advanced cases are the ones who insist, as an apparent matter of dogmatic faith, that people who claim to not have a religion are Satanists who will rape and murder for lack of an explicit Commandment telling them not to.

When people say that atheism is a religion, at least the ones I know mean something like this:

First, atheism answers at least some of the same questions as religions answer, though it gives different answers and in different terms.

Second, atheism isn't provable by scientific means. Some believe it more firmly than they have evidence for.

Third, at least some atheists seem to hold their atheism in a religious way; that is, with a religious fervor and intensity. Some even seem to be "evangelists", determined to spread the "good news" of atheism.

That's what (at least some) people mean when they call atheism a religion. They don't literally mean that atheists believe in some god; they mean that people hold atheism in a religious way.

> they mean that people hold atheism in a religious way

And how many atheists actually do that? I think what GP meant was more about people who just somehow can't imagine being religionless (and "the more advanced cases" paragraph hints it very strongly), not about people who point out that some atheists hold their atheism religiously.

Anyway, your points seem wrong to me. After Wikipedia - "Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities." Absence of belief does not answer any questions by itself, and considering its provability doesn't even make sense at all. What you said may make sense for the less broad definition ("In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities"), but that's not what "atheism" usually means without any further qualifiers.

For me, atheism is a natural consequence of realizing that I have no more reason to believe in existence of any particular god than any other fictitious being - and even if I did assume that a god exists, I would still have a hard time choosing which god is it, as there are many contesters and none of them has any obvious advantage when it comes to believability. There are many believable reasons why religions exist, but none of them implies that any religion is actually true (to the contrary, the history of some well-known religions seems to make it pretty clear that they were products of human culture).

the post that is parent to yours explained someone else's psychological and epistemological understanding of atheists, and you answered as "nuh-uh!!"

Take off your engineer hat for a minute and read it again with your anthropologist hat on. I think you may come away with a better understanding of some people.

And yes, in other discussions, part of that may be an explanation of why some theists cannot fathom that atheists do not believe in a god. much of this is definitional. What atheists call "no god," some thesist call "a god of their own definition."

And these two just continue to talk past each other. Perhaps they want it that way, they don't need to think on uncomfortable things, then.

> What atheists call "no god," some thesist call "a god of their own definition."

And that's wrong, just on a basic level, and it's part of those theists being incapable of understanding a worldview without theism. They can't understand my philosophy, so they're compelled to shove me into a box they can understand, and then refuse to listen when I tell them their worldview is making them comprehensively misinterpret what I'm saying.

(And, no, a person can't dictate someone else's own philosophy to them. No matter how condescending that dictation is.)

Do you recognize that you're doing exactly the same thing in reverse?

The thing is, you can stomp your foot and throw a fit all you want about others not using your definitions that flow from your worldview, but it doesn't change reality. You're approaching epistemological and psychological differences as though they're a battle of authority. You can claim authority over a lot of things, even legal authority, but you cannot force someone to "understand differently."

This is what I mean by theists and atheists talking past each other. They each employ a form of ethnocentrism that frames every conversation as an argument. They do NOT want to understand each other. They want to WIN.

It's not about "definitions", nor about "winning". It doesn't even matter which meaning of the word "atheism" will we use. When someone seriously suggests that absence of eternal punishment means no incentive to not be evil, it means it's them who fail to notice all the other incentives that may be there. I already understand their point of view - their incentive is very clear to me and would work on me had I believed it; while for some reason they seem incapable of understanding mine that come from elsewhere. Asserting that lack of religion is just another religion seems very similar - if all you know is religionful life, you may have a hard time trying to think about what being religionless actually look like. I know both, so it's easy for me.

I can't disagree with this reply. You've changed the subject, which very much was about definitions of specific words, as held by groups of people.

I have done it deliberately, because it really wasn't ;) The original comment (29952729) was clearly about some religious people not being capable of understanding that one's life doesn't have to be founded on religion. Then the reply that I replied to muddied the waters by adding people who religiously believe that there are no gods into the mix, which may still fit the definition of "atheism" (even though it isn't what "atheism" actually means), but it wasn't what the original poster was talking about at all.

When someone says I'm essentially a murderer because I don't believe what they believe, I get a bit annoyed.

When someone says I believe in something I don't believe in, and gets condescending about it, I get somewhat annoyed, but I mostly want to know what's going on in their head. I think I have some of it figured out, but you just accuse me of dishonest debating tactics. Why do you think I'm so wrong? Why do you think the people who think I'm a monster necessarily have a point?

Two things.

- Yes, you are right that many theists equate "does not believe in God" with "would perform the most perverse and tortuous murder if given the chance." That would agitate anyone, and is not what I'm critiquing. But beyond this, do keep in mind that theists are like any other segment of the general population. If you let the beliefs and actions of some color your vision of all before you've met them, you very literally have a bias against a legally-protected class. This doesn't mean you're acting on it, but it is there. Some people like to know it is there, some don't care.

- Secondly, you're speaking contradictions. When you say that you want to understand why some people think such and such about you, and someone else gives you some insight into their thinking (and this wasn't me), and your reaction is to defend yourself, your actions show you aren't attempting to understand, you're attempting to CORRECT. But you can't correct what you don't understand. You also can't correct epistemological and psychological concerns by shouting from the top level that all they understand about you is wrong. I mean, you CAN. But you won't like the results.

I know all theists aren't like the ones we're talking about here. A lot of them don't think I believe in anything at all, and I'd say that's nice of them except they wouldn't regard something like "understanding atheism" as being nice as much as being basically cognizant of the world around them, like I'm not especially nice for understanding Lutheranism.

I passed the yelling phase a while ago. I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused, and I am annoyed but I do attempt to keep it out of my voice. I think people projecting a massive amount of anger onto me is their problem, not mine. As for trying to correct the condescending people who think I believe in some supernatural ethos or entity, maybe it's a bad habit, but thinking I must be angry to do so is a worse one.

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