gurugeorge wrote:Heck, even judicious use of drugs can do it. Whatever. Just get that feeling of connectedness (re-ligio), and ease some of the burden of being a micro-God - let some Ultimate Concept shoulder most of the burden. Pay your money and take your choice, it doesn't really matter. Just so long as Church and State remain separate, believe what you like, but believe in something.
Even if you just LARP it.
I think when atheism was fighting for its own cause in the teeth of opposition, that could cover up the sense of the void with a fine commitment, but now that atheism has more or less won, it's faced with the question of "erm, well, what can we actually do, how can we actually live, in a meaningless world?"
It's all very well putting a brave face on it, but there's still a hole inside, and we as animals burdened with the ability to think simply can't live that way - and if we can't live that way, we'll just waste away, culturally, psychologically and physically.
That's why I think that what we need is activism for secularism and for liberal democratic values in general (freedom of speech, freedom of thought, the rule of law, due process, civil rights, etc etc.), plus some useful activism for skepticism (which matters, since a good enough education on pragmatic skepticism is useful to avoid all kinds of scams, from the crude Nigerian Scams to the elaborate forms of scamming like Scientology) and to try to promote better scientific education (which is always useful), rather than promotion of atheism
per se, especially now that at least in the "west" being an atheist isn't such a big deal.
A religious believer who's not in favor of obviously anti-scientific or authoritarian ideas is fine by me. If you see your god acting in mysterious ways that you can't scientifically detect and shouldn't legally enforce, quite frankly I don't care.
I really don't care about what people believe to get themselves happy, as long as they're willing to acknowledge that what makes them happy doesn't work for everyone, and so other people should be free to reject it, mock it, satirize it and not be persecuted, either by the state or by private individuals or associations.
The state shouldn't care about what you privately believe, only about setting a series of rules that tries to protect your rights to believe and minimize the harmful impact of your actions onto other people's lives and livelihoods. The state shouldn't be in the business of protecting offended feelings.
That's why today many "cultural Christians" or "cafeteria Christians" or even average Christians who aren't raving fundies aren't really a problem. Many of them believe in "something" but are ready to accept that it's "beyond science" and that they shouldn't kill or imprison or oppressing "sinners", "heretics" and former Christians.
The ultimate goal is to give room for muslims to come to the same conclusion: believing in "something" which cannot be detected and doesn't require killing or imprisoning or oppressing "sinners", "heretics" and former muslims. There's a long way to go before those ideas become commonplace, but a "softening" of islam, however improbable (and let's be fair, it's not very likely to happen anytime soon), is still more probable than a mass "conversion" to atheism.
The same thing is true for the SocJus. The problems with the SJWs are their specific anti-scientific beliefs (for example "no such thing as a biological sex") and their authoritarian positions, not the silliness of their gender identities. I'm perfectly willing to call a MtF trans "a woman" as long as they understand that a) they're not biologically a woman and b) they don't have the right to impose laws that punish those who "misgender" them. Of course it's easier for everyone is they put some effort into looking like a woman, and they should be the first ones to understand that how they view themselves and what the mirror shows would never quite match, but they can make some steps in that direction.
The big problem is how to get people to separate their private beliefs from science and the law.
