Church of Reality

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Anyone here in the Church of Reality?

The only doctrine is "if it's real, we believe in it".

Link:
Church Of Reality

I'm a pastafarian, myself.

Long live the flying spaghetti monster!

What is real? What is Real?

ruveyn

Ahaa! Now I understand your posts.

Well, technically, everyone's doctrine is "If it is real, then we believe it". I mean, nobody goes around saying "I believe falsehoods!", there is too much cognitive dissonance involved with doing that in the first place. And of course, the question of "what is real" is also a deep one, as frankly, one can easily argue that the Christian God is "real", as after all, many experience this entity, and who would go around saying "My experiences are falsehoods"? Such is nihilistic. So, in order to force a rejection of this entity, an epistemic foundation must be asserted without proof of it, and thus we would have to have a hidden dogma, but without this hidden dogma, the church doesn't really make sense at all, and with it, the supposed openness is essentially undercut.

Beyond this, I really mostly see a veiled amount of (American) liberal atheist wankery. Why do I say this? The idea of the church is stupid. The notions within the church seem to reflect a more communitarian and relativist view than I would expect from any other basic cultural group. And the only way that this church can really exist is in opposition to some sort of "churches of unreality", which seems to indicate atheism and some pointless desire to make a stupid parody. (if one wants to make a parody, make it funny, please)

Because there is an ideology, however, a high lack of real content, I just have to consider this group nonsense. The only open claim that I've seen so far is "people are basically good" which is "Original Virtue", but even then this claim is essentially contradicted by the claim "Right and Wrong and morality and ethics are all relative to your basic assumptions and goals." which is part of the group's ethical doctrine. (we can argue that the doctrine is ambiguous since beyond that statement it essentially says nothing) And even ignoring the basic internal contradiction, the claim made is essentially nonsense, because it is contingent upon a definition of "good" and also something like Darwinian selection will really just select for survival traits, and generally forms of self-interest aren't considered moral at all. Nothing is provided, and so it seems silly.

Of course, I would be surprised if somebody didn't attack this post, but frankly, everything I've said is essentially true and one doesn't have to be a theist or an atheist to recognize it.

I agree with the first part, but I don't see how you can be so quick to dismiss and make the judgment that there is a desire to make a parody. Atheism has some rather strong negative connotations, one of them being that without a central figure in power, atheists will tend towards anarchy. Uniting atheists/humanists under something like a Church of Reality could be one way to get around that, by providing a more formal framework. That being said, I'm not really sure why the framework has to be as mystical as the CoR seems to describe itself.

You'll never unite all atheists/humanists together, the group is heterogeneous, and more self-consciously so than Christians. An example of this would be Objectivists, as Objectivists are atheists but also strong laissez-faire capitalists but humanists have traditionally promoted the welfare state. There are also existentialist atheists, who will tend to emphasize human subjectivity while rejecting God, and these won't get along with scientistic rationalist atheists. And of course, the atheists who don't care about atheism just won't care.

Look, my problem isn't one with atheist organizations at all. Yes, I will likely criticize an atheistic society along with any other society, but I think the CoR is worse than it has to be. Here's why:

1) The CoR is too much of a parody, as it openly is trying to just reverse a lot of Christianity to make itself an anti-Christianity. One can see this with the doctrine of Original Virtue, or the claims to not be faith-based and other things of that nature. I mean, the church of the flying spaghetti monster served a purpose, that is to mock Kansas and it's desire for ID by creating a false mythology, and the flying pink unicorn mocks theistic paradoxes and contradictions, but this doesn't serve such a constructive role, and the former two at least seem relevant.
2) The CoR is a group that is too mocking for my tastes. I mean, I like groups that show humility, and atheists laying claim to "reality' just hits my nerve just like a Christian site doing the same. I mean, one can say "We believe", "We promote", etc, but the CoR's position makes no sense unless they posit a CoU (unreality) which is just condescending but implicit.
3) The CoR holds to a doctrine like "man is inherently good". I mean, look, if one is going to promote atheism and realism, why not just dispense with this qualitative and unmeasured judgment? Heck, I agree with the notion of depravity much more than I believe in man's inherent goodness, but realistically from an atheistic standpoint, saying "man has evolved" without throwing in some value judgment just to piss off Christians seems better.
4) The CoR is somewhat naive seeming. I mean, perhaps they go into more depth in other places about their beliefs, but as it stands there appear to be contradictions and implicit doctrines that can be questioned. (the aggravating part is that the doctrines are implicit, as explicit doctrines are more honest and can be discussed more easily) I mean, I recognize that we all can't be grand philosophical intellectuals, but a group trying to represent a position should definitely put a lot of effort into making sure that everything they say can be defended logically with evidence and/or argumentation. I suppose there is going to be some pandering to lower denominators, and... well... I actually don't like that anyway, so yeah. I also know that some sloppiness or disagreement can occur, but still, the CoR is worse than it has to be.

Now, I recognize that other atheistic groups also have some similar issues, such as I know humanists will seem to appear to fit into 3 & 4 too easily, and generally speaking most people will hit upon 4, but the CoR is just not something I would respect based upon what I've seen. I know, I am probably being too critical, 3 & 4 are things I would generally have attacked anyway, so throwing 1 & 2 onto the mix doesn't help things.

Thank of this. Ten normal people exposed to the same events, the same facts etc and you might get ten ways of interpreting these commonly experienced facts. Why is that? Because we each come with our own unique history and experience line. How we assimilate facts is as much a function of our experience as it is the facts themselves. And that is way this hypothetical Church of Reality will splinter into various sects just as other (real) Churches have. Here is the bottom line: A given set of facts do not uniquely determine world views. It is as simple as that.

ruveyn

On a serious note, to appease my better half, who's a non-believer, but feels a need for the social structure that a church typically provides, we attended a number of services at the local Unitarian Universalist church. It's ... well, I suppose you could consider it a non-religious church, though some members are religious in one way or another, the tenets are more ethical standards, like tolerance and respect.

The pastor at this particular one's an agnostic.

I'm not big on needing the social aspects of church, myself, but I really found nothing objectionable there, and it's well-established and sincere. May be worth checking out if that's what you're looking for.

If it's more a thumb-the-nose thing (and I get it), then, yeah, this CoR or the Pastafarians will serve nicely.

Do you really believe that the doctrines of the established religions are totally believable and defensible? People have been fighting tooth and nail over interpretations and reinterpretations for centuries. Might as well add agnostics and atheists to the fray.

They are clearly believable. Count the believers. Are they logically defensible? In the sense that a non-logically-contradictory theory can be formulated to defend them, some of them are. Look at what Thomas Aquinas did for Catholicism or Maimanides for Judaism. If you mean not falsified by known fact, that is a different story. Not a single religion known today does not collide with some fact or another. Religion is either non-falsifiable (which makes it nonsense) or it is falsified by contrary fact. The Biblical notion of a world just made six thousand years ago is one such set of beliefs. It is ground to crumbs under the weight of fact.

On the other hand the idea that the human races has been influenced in some fashion by non-Terrestrials is not totally falsified. Unfortunately there is little hard evidence to support such a belief. I happen to think that somewhere between the end of the last glacial period and maybe 2000 years ago the human races has been contacted, influenced and even interfered with. The sudden explosion in various parts of the world of the naturalist world view might have taken place spontaneously or it might have come about by humans being influenced or even instructed by Visitors.

Even in our recent historical past there are many examples of Europeans descending upon aboriginals in other parts of the world and influencing, nay, even disrupting their native cultures. If we could do it to our own kind, I see no a priori reason why it could not have been done to our kind, somewhere in the not too distant past. Clearly there is little if any evidence to support this notion, but the notion itself is not logically contradictory or contrary to known fact. It could have happened. Or maybe it didn't happen. Short of coming up with a time machine or finding parts to a space ship in the basement of the Great Pyramid we are unlikely to know for sure.

I find the Visitation theory consistent with the facts that I know. It is an explanation of sorts. However the theory lacks hard convincing evidence. But as we all know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And the idea of a Visit (or Visits) is totally consistent with the naturalist world view. No magic, no supernatural, no miracles. We moderns know how to interfere, insert our views and even insert our sexual organs in the affairs of more primitive folk.

You may recall what the late Arthur C. Clarke had to say on this matter. A sufficiently advanced science and technology would appear to primitives as miraculous, supernatural and magical. In the absence of an underlying theory one would be discombobulated by sufficiently advanced science and technology. And just keep this in mind. In matters of science, we are just five hundred years out of kindergarten. We are still in Grade School. In matters of philosophy, the naturalist world view is less than five thousand years old. Before this, humans appeared to be primitive and ignorant (although clearly not unintelligent). They believed in gods and spirits.

Even in the modern world there is a tribe in the Amazon where the people do not know how to count beyond two (the Piraha), yet they are intelligent enough to have a language and can make the tools necessary to feed and cloth themselves. I think all humans of our species (which itself is maybe a quarter of a million years in existence) was once as primitive as that. Then in a rather short time we got Smart. How is that possible? Maybe we just got lucky (that is possible) or maybe we had Help (I think that is also possible).

ruveyn

A pretty unfunny parody, in my opinion.

Possible, yes. Firm enough to support belief, no. Religions all along have had no faith in the intricacies of natural processes to produce life but the more we learn about how sophisticated chemical reactions can be and even single cell organisms and viruses are, the more natural processes are believable as producing what we see today. The same goes for mental processes. It just has been established that ravens with the brain size of walnuts show intelligence equivalent to primates. Don't jump to unwarranted conclusions.

Well, there is no evidence or means of evidence either way, so it is essentially a blind conjecture, and one that suffers from all sorts of burdens, such as how they could ever get here and why they would come here just to interfere? Not only that, but how would they instruct us? Aliens don't speak any earth tongue, so you posit that they came over here from thousands of lightyears away so they could come down, learn our language, and then teach us naturalism and then they left to never be seen again?


Europeans influenced native cultures so they could take advantage of them. Y'know, there's that imperialism reason in history, it isn't as if white people did this entirely so they could screw around with people.

Well, here are the difficulties:
1) A lack of motive.
2) A lack of known ability to reach our location.
3) Great difficulty in doing this.

I mean, one can handwave these off, but I think most intelligent people would say that these problems are significant enough to generally dismiss the idea. After all, these visitors from beyond aren't likely to be able to have done this as a weekend trip, and they gain so little from what they've done that there is no reason to think any intelligent being would have acted.


No, we don't know that, as the statement is a bit of rhetoric. We have an absence of evidence about unicorns, however, for most that is the evidence that unicorns do not exist. I mean, the simple issue of Occam's razor shaves aliens away just as easily.

The issue isn't just the naturalist worldview, the issue is rather absurdity. I mean, naturalism isn't supposed to be the cool thing to believe, but rather like most ideas, it is believed on the basis of making more sense and invoking only the necessary amount of entities. Throwing aliens into the mix kind of throws things off a bit.

The comparison of aliens to Europeans fails from the start given that the Europeans had clear motives and based upon these clear motives generally didn't just come to teach the natives naturalism and then leave, but rather came for resources.


Well, we started getting into agriculture. This led to a need for more powerful counting systems. This also led to division of labor. The division of labor required more advanced concepts and also allowed more people to have abilities to innovate. This process continued to improve while ideas built upon ideas and the population increased, allowing more innovative minds to come into being. I mean, the evidence of "having help" seems rather absurd. You have to say that an alien group decided to learn our culture and language and psychology(we've never encountered a non-human psychology so the European comparison starts failing here) just so they could attempt to expand our vocabulary and tell us to be scientific? I mean, really? ruveyn, the notion of God is unquestionably better than this kind of foolery, as at least a God arguably has more of a reason to mess around with the human race, more of an ability to freely do so, and can be argued on some sort of grounds. Aliens have no motive, no real reason to believe they would have the ability to reach us, and nothing even approaching the evidence that an apologetic provides.

Clearly not firm enough to support YOUR belief. As I said, Our Mileage May Vary.

When you get right down to it, there is very little that any of us know First Hand, directly using our own senses and having our own experiences. What we claim to "know" is really highly plausible second hand evidence, essentially hearsay which is not blatantly contradicted by our own personal experiences.

Did you know that as late as 1915 there were reputable physicists who were not convinced that the atomic theory was true? Ernst Mach (he of the Mach supersonic speed scale) was one such. Till his dying day he did not fully accept the atomic theory as more than a convenient rule or heuristic for tying up the measurements. This skepticism was finally worn away by the pioneering work of Albert Einstein (yes, that Einstein!) in molecular dynamics. Einstein's most quoted paper is on Brownian Motion in which he demonstrated very convincingly the molecular and atomic theory of matter (he published this in the pre-quantum physics days before quantum theory hit the big time in 1913). Nowadays, no one doubts for an instance that atoms exists, even though no one has every seen an atom (they are too small to be resolved by the human eye or any optical microscope).

So have a caution and distinguish what you know for damned sure and what you hold provisionally and what might be true, but not well supported by empirical evidence.

ruveyn