What's your story of why you're an atheist?

Debate Room
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If people are hallucinating in extremis it would be utterly expected that they would tend to bring the same human perceptions and assumptions to the experience.

It also isn’t quite true that “everyone” has the “same” experiences. If a Christian has an NDE it will tend to involve things they expect from the Christian teachings on heaven. If it is a Muslim or a Buddhist or whatever then they will have experiences more congruent with their expectations. If the person has angst about hell, they may find a lake of fire at the other end of the “tunnel” rather than streets of gold. And so forth. People tend to skim over these inconvenient narratives and cherry pick what confirms their personal biases.

Many years ago, up through high school basically, my stepson was very intrigued by ghost hunting shows on TV. We took him to a local ghost hunt as a high school graduation gift and I noticed a phenomenon similar to the above. The people attending were from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs. They were mostly Christians, but a few spiritualists, and a few new agers, and a conspiracy theorist type. I noticed that they tended to interpret supposedly supernatural communications just as they wished. Christians saw the civil war-era “ghosts” as angels or demons or people communicating from the Christian afterlife. Spiritualists saw it as simply “the dead” and tended to put more stock in the notion that they are “stuck” in a location and unable to “move on”. New age types thought they were definitely angelic beings from some more vague “beyond” than the Christian heaven. The conspiracist wondered if it was telepathic communication from space aliens. All seemed equally convinced that their experiences were confirming their assumptions.

As an atheist I put what I observed down to the ideomotor effect, and I like to think it is the most reality-based hypothesis among those given. It was really just entertainment to me – entertainment that I wasn’t super eager to suspend disbelief for, either.

I also noted that a lot of emphasis was put on being as “open” (credulous, really) as possible, lest there not be an environment conducive to spirits wanting to communicate. That sort of circular reasoning is also common with NDEs and other personal subjective experiences attributed to the supernatural. It suppresses skeptical thoughts or doubts about things being discussed and of course along with that it must always be night, it must be dark and in a suitably “creepy” old building, etc. That is all about atmospherics and mood and vibes.

NDEs are experienced in great distress and peril and so there’s a distinct “vibe” to that as well.

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Humans share the same brain structure, and their brains work in the same way, within a certain variance. Thus, it should not be unexpected that the brains would experience similar stressful conditions in roughly the same way. Just like humans respond to other types of stress, like hunger, burns, broken limbs, grief, etc. in similar ways.

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It isn’t a fallacy because you weren’t making a formal argument.
It is aspiring to become a fallacy, but hasn’t quite gotten that far yet. The users who called it an Argumentum ad populum are being generous with you imo.

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65

He’s still suggesting that it’s somehow relevant or impressive if “thousands upon thousand” testify to NDEs. It may not technically be a fallacy because he didn’t technically make a formal argument, but IMO that he didn’t say the right incantation doesn’t make the argument more valid or persuasive.

“Millions” of people used to believe there were three (or four) elements or that bleeding with leeches was an effective medical treatment. So what; they were wrong. Widespread ignorance or misconceptions are not right, or even “less wrong” because they are widespread or commonly accepted.

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66

Well quite, and it’s becoming tedious to see posters think they can hide their poorly reasoned and unevidenced claims from rational objections, behind semantics. As if they’ve read the definition of the fallacy, not to try and reason better, but as some sort of dodge. As if we can’t see quite plainly what it is they’re implying.

Clearly one idea is not more worthy of another in any way based solely on a bare appeal to numbers. And the idea THE woo woo claims about OBE’s and so called NDE’s haven’t been thoroughly investigated is highly implausible, as is the idea the investigations supported anything but an entirely natural phenomenon, and we are just now hearing about it in an online chatroom.

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You are implying one claim has more merit than another based on a bare appeal to numbers, though you offered no argument and thus it is not a fallacy, it is nonetheless poor reasoning. In certain parts of the world more people believe in religious creation myths, than the scientific fact of evolution, this doesn’t make those unevidenced myths more worthy of investigation. Also so called near death experiences have been investigated, and are explained as an entirely natural phenomenon.

Indeed, but in this instance that has no relevance to my point. At this point so called NDE’s represent a partially understood phenomenon, but it is understood as an entirely natural one, and does not provide objectively verifiable evidence that anyone has experienced or can experience an OBE, that claim and idea is a subjective religious one.

The word necessary is redundant, since all NDE’s involve resuscitated patients, they were in cardiac arrest, which is described as clinically dead. That the brain keeps functioning after the heart stops is not in dispute, though it is difficult to measure how long this is possible, for fairly obvious reasons.

They’re not having the same experiences, this is a) a bare claim, and b) untrue.

"Thirty-nine per cent of patients who survived cardiac arrest and were able to undergo structured interviews described a perception of awareness, but interestingly did not have any explicit recall of events.

“This suggests more people may have mental activity initially but then lose their memories after recovery, either due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory recall,” explained Dr Parnia, who was an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton when he started the AWARE study.

Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE’s. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE’s with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ events."

CITATION

NB You will note these appear to be anecdotal recollections here, it is not made clear in that study that the “recollections” could be verified objectively as anything more than what a “dying brain” conjured up.

I explained this at the start of the thread. Here it is verbatim:

I never got an answer to either of my questions?

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Hi! I have my own definition of what a atheist is as Raelian some things will change while others don’t.

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I can pin point the moment. I was about 4 or 5 years old and the family was driving home from church. Sunday school in my case.

I was looking out the back window of the car and happened to see a car hitting a dog running across the street. Obviously a little overwhelmed by the scene I asked my mother why God didn’t protect that dog? Afterall, I had just spent an hour listening to how God was everywhere and looked out for all of us…

She didn’t even look up when she said “God works in mysterious ways.”

I wasn’t familiar with the word at the time, but my gut reaction was “well, fuck him then”. I have never felt the need for a fickle part time fabricated overlord ever since.

That was over 60 years ago.

Still faithful to no discernible faith.

Cyn1

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I envy people like you who had the bullshit filters even at such a tender age to turn towards reason. My wife is like that, too. In my experience and observation, the percentage of the population that is constitutionally like that is somewhere in the single digits.

I on the other hand, was in my mid-thirties before I really embraced freedom. I was a compliant child who assumed my parents and teachers and other mentors and handlers must (or course! Ha!) know what they are on about so it took me a long time to wrap my brain around the sheer hypocrisy and cruelty of the system.

That I was reasonably intelligent and curious only just made the cognitive dissonance more painful. I mean, the world was supposed to work a certain way according to certain rules and that’s a pretty seductive belief. Or it was for me anyway.

I don’t miss it now but at the time I could not imagine a godless existence. I basically had to become that which I had been taught to hate.

It helped my theism that I wasn’t traumatized by life in my youth, but my adulthood made up for that with lots of loved ones suffering and/or dying in various baroque ways. This brought me to my own questioning of how lived experience was vs what it was supposed to be.

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For me, becoming an atheist didn’t happen in one night – it was a long, painful journey that tore me apart inside. It started with small doubts during my teenage years, when I was forced to pray and follow rituals that felt empty and forced. My mind kept whispering that something was wrong, that the rules and stories didn’t make sense. Over months and years, those doubts grew like a storm, pulling me away from religion step by step. I felt lonely, scared, and guilty, hiding my thoughts from my family who would threaten me if I missed a prayer. Joining communities like this one gave me the courage to face the truth: it’s all a made-up story designed to control us. Now, I’m free in my mind, but the fear of what could happen if discovered – like violence or worse in my home country – keeps me going. What’s your story? How did you find the strength to break free?

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I had it pretty easy by comparison. In fact, pretty easy even in comparison to other Americans. For all its faults, Christianity didn’t, until very recently, create a climate of physical jeopardy for the non-conformant (although in some families the fear of being shunned is very real). My parents came to the faith late in life and had already been socialized to be decent human beings, and they respected my independence to make my own choices once I was an adult. I never felt their love for me was conditional on my adherence to the faith, even though it was of concern to them.

It must be hard for you to have grown up in a country that was trying, as far as I could see, to be a modern, tolerant democracy as established by Ataturk, and then have it devolve into autocracy again and fundamentalist religion coming back to the forefront. If one has a fairly unbiased view of history rather than the sanitized and valorized official version usually presented to Americans, though, we are not that much different from Turkey. We began to become a modern, tolerant, egalitarian society with a social safety net only in the 1930s, and we are now perp-walking it back to maybe the 1830s.

By the way, we vacationed in Turkey a year or so after the Gezi Park massacre in 2013 (mostly Istanbul and Cappadocia), and saw much that was good and healthy and promising – and much that was ominous. I don’t think we’d feel comfortable visiting now; things have devolved too much in Turkey and in the region.

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Anthropology & evolution were the biggest turning points for me to dismiss Christianity. That and the fact there are thousands of dead religions out there that were worshiped by pagans. Our primate ancestors made up gods to worship. Chimps worship trees and waterfalls like they did.

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Depends what questions you are willing to ask. I hold the very contradictory position to be true. Nothing that we observe can be explained by “science alone” or without God.

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I don’t see how adding a deity has any explanatory powers at all? The idea is certainly not evidence or needed in any scientific explanations. If it were, then it seems odd that atheism rises so sharply among elite scientists.

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That is just an argument from incredulity. You assume god is a necessary entity, so you see him everywhere. If you assume nothing one way or the other, and do not insist on knowing more than can be substantiated, you will see that everything we CAN know with any certainty and CAN substantiate, doesn’t involve God. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that any remaining gaps in our knowledge or understanding are unlikely to involve him either.

Of course you’re assuming too much even before that, because to you, “God” is the God of the Christian Bible, a very specific entity to which people assert very specific attributes and claims. In my observation, even more general conceptualizations of god (e.g., deism, pantheism) don’t hold together well for any practical purpose, despite that being less specific, aren’t as obviously incoherent.

For example, a deist essentially believes that god made the universe and then walked away from it, is not interventionist or involved; the universe is just a clockwork basically. But as there’s no way to distinguish an absent god from an indifferent god from a non-existent god, even that lame attempt to salvage a “sorta-god” to believe in fails, because all of those kinds of gods behave exactly the same: they don’t do anything at all.

In my experience and observation, the more specific the god claims, the less believable they are if you look at actual lived experience vs the claimed attributes. That’s why I left fundamentalist Christianity decades ago and never looked back. It got rid of a lot of painful cognitive dissonance and I never saw any real downside apart from it being a little harder to find enduring social connections, and as an introvert, that never was a big factor for me anyway.

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Hmm. I don’t think I made an argument.

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I am being a little too terse perhaps, I apologize… But I was not talking about God as known and understood in the Bible, the God of Abraham, let’s say.

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Well, yes you did. You argued that you take the contrary position that

Thus, you argue that god is necessary to explain anything and everything. So, taking this literally, science alone cannot explain that water is wet, but you need god for it.

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No, I just stated that I hold a different view - a dramatically different view - which is in itself kind of interesting (at least to me). But is not an argument. :white_heart:

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I hold the view that you’re trying to be semantically clever, but just come across as a jerk. It’s not an argument. Just sayin’.

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