Do atheists understand abstract language?

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Beauty is an emotional reaction. If you do not have that emotional reaction then it does not exist for you. It exists for me.

If you believe in it you get the emotional reaction. God exists for many people for the same reason.

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To confuse an emotional reaction with a superbeing is like confusing a belly ache with the devil. I am not fascinated by such childishness.

Though it's not that simple, actually. "Beauty" is a value judgement that people apply to certain feelings, ( and/or things/environments ), which occur in a variety of situations/surroundings. Someone who believes in both love and beauty may very often label the same feeling "love" on one occasion, and "beauty" on another, depending on the context. Declaring a feeling/thing beauty, for example, makes it an act of worship; you offer the feeling to beauty, which transforms the feeling/thing into something sacred/special. The world becomes divided up into sacred and profane.

Someone who believes in god may describe/experience the same feelings/environments as god. Enlightenment is apparently when really see that even those environments which we tend to call ugly, and those feelings which we think of as painful/"bad", are god/the universe too.


You believe in "love" and "beauty" despite there being no objective evidence for their existence. You are very attached to them. They "mean" an awful lot to you. Your belief in "beauty" supports you in life.

Do I accuse you of being "silly", "idiotic", "insane", "stupid", "ignorant", "self-deluding/deluded/delusional", "misguided" or "weak"? No, I don't. You, however, constantly accuse people who believe in god, of being all these things, and yet you believe in things which have no objective existence either. They are your gods.
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Last edited by ouinon on 26 May 2009, 3:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

To which tradition the oldest folk and fairy tales might be said to belong aswell. They avoid abstract language like the plague, or use it only to challenge it/turn it on its head.

Thinking about where one finds "abstract language" used most, and one huge area is advertising. It is saturated with abstract language; natural, happiness, freedom/liberty, beauty, love, pure, perfect, success, good, better, quality, right, exceptional, etc.

Value judgements, ( of which abstract language is made up entirely ) make authoritarian gods. And if you believe in "beauty" you almost certainly believe in "ugliness". A veritable pantheon of warring gods.

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You are obviously confused about what abstraction is. The color red is an abstraction. It is the reaction of the nervous system to a particular frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. Smooth is an abstraction since it is the reaction of our sense of touch to a surface that has no detectable roughness to our macro senses. Plato's solids are abstractions etc. All language is comprised of abstractions. You are confused.

Quite. But this thread is about a particular subset of language, those words which are most clearly abstract/abstractions, ( otherwise the thread title would have been "Do Atheists Understand Language" ). As I said on the last page:

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Last edited by ouinon on 26 May 2009, 3:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

If you look into Alfred Korzybski's level of abstractions you may discover a bit of clarification on your levels of abstraction. I don't go along with his entire point of view but he has a few cogent things to say. There is no special clarity on abstractions. Although there may be levels, they are all very clearly abstract.

Right. ... That is very clear.
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I'm finding it really interesting and very evocative, seeing abstract language, ( words like love, truth, beauty, freedom, justice, etc, which express ideas/concepts/qualities ), as "gods", which people believe in, which exert pressure on people, etc.

It feels very illuminating, to realise that ( many ) people's behaviour around these words is like worship, their attribution of this or that feeling, this or that thing, to beauty, love, freedom, etc, like offerings to it.

I'm getting a glimpse of how despotic these "gods" are. Of how oppressive belief in them is. How they rule. How believing in them I reject/dismiss half of the world, as "bad", as in non-beautiful, unfree, unfair, etc, ( and it isn't the same half, so most of the world becomes intolerable ).

And the demands they have made on me to lead a certain life; to "fall in love", look "beautiful", tell the "truth", hang onto "freedom". "Absolute" rules which make it difficult to relate to the world as it is in all its continuous ( as opposed to "discrete" ) variety.

I think that some of the greatest spiritual traditions were invented by people who ( had ) suffered as a result of taking language very literally, had found the/a solution, and wanted to help liberate others like them from the emprise of ( the most abstract ) language.

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You seem to be confusing social pressures with gods. There is a seed of relevance in this but it's still a stretch.

I used to believe in truth, beauty, love, freedom, and justice. I used to believe that they existed. And while I believed that they existed they had enormous power over me. I both longed for them, and feared them, sought to meet their standards, to obey them, wanted to satisfy them. They have really been like gods.
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Last edited by ouinon on 26 May 2009, 11:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

PS. While I believed in them, in their existence, I thought they could be found in certain places, and not in others.

When I thought I saw them I would remark on this manifestation of one of my gods; "That is beautiful", "That is true", "Yes, that really is love".

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So to conclude my meanderings on the subject, I would say that, atheists, unless they no longer believe in love, truth, beauty, justice, freedom, etc, ( the rest of the subset, "abstract language" ), don't in fact understand "abstract language", because they fail to see how they believe in gods, as much as, if not more than, most "believers".

Thanks for the idea, Magnus.

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Thank you ounion.

Greek gods and goddesses are archetypes of these abstract words like beauty, love, justice, and so on. Does beauty, love, truth, justice, etc really exist? I think so. Although I can't prove it to you because it is an inner experience.

The question that's meaningful is not whether they exist or not but where they derive their standards