altruistic atheism?

More cross-pasting™ I’m sad to say. The debate at TRA’s Sept. 12 question of the day snarls on, and after a few days absence I jumped back into the fray…

I’m trying to figure out what all this dogma means. Several times in the comments above, various commentors have said something along the lines of, “belief in god is irrational, because there is absolutely no evidence he exists.” Rocketman said, “If I make a statement that all crows are black, and someone demonstrably shows me that there are white crows in the universe, then I am wrong.” But the truth of the matter is that Rocketman could go his whole life and never see a single white crow and still be wrong. The subset of all available evidence of white crows to which he has access is infintesimal. There could be white crows huddled in the extinct calderas of Io, and Rocketman might never know it. And if he said, “There are no white crows” every day until he died, he’d be wrong. (I’m not picking on Rocketman in particular, it’s just that he introduced this delightful concept of white crows.)

What has actually happened throughout most of athiestdom™ as nearly as I can tell is something like this: 1) a religious dude claimed some connection to a revealed God, 2) a questioning dude examined religious dude’s claims, and found them disappointing. His claims were shallow, inert, contradictory or even mendacious. 3) The questioning dude may or may not have repeated step two several times, experiencing disappointment each time. By this time he has developed a strong emotional reaction to religion or to any dudes who claim to be hooked in with the Almighty. 4) the questioning dude decides to believe there is no such thing as god, and thereby becomes our hero, Atheist Dude™.

My point is threefold: 1) atheism seems to exist mainly not as a avenue of new discovery so much as a reaction to religion. 2) This reaction seems very often to have a strong emotional basis rather than being based purely on cold logic as is popularly implied or claimed. 3) When Atheist Dude™ has examined 17 major religions including eight flavors of Evangelical Post Tribulation Ecumenicalism, he has not nearly borne the burden of proof necessary to be able to say, “I have proved there is no god.” We can look inside a cookie jar, see no jelly beans there, and then reasonably claim we have proven there are no jelly beans in the jar. But the universe isn’t as small or as simple as a cookie jar, and God, if he exists, would probably be a bit more complex and mysterious than a jelly bean.

My point is that the question of God’s existence has exactly nothing to do with what the religions of the world can or cannot prove. Suppose for the sake of argument, that we could demonstrably prove that each and every single religious person on the face of the earth was mendacious in as much as he or she believed or claimed to believe in the existence of God. This still does nothing to disprove the existence of God. So it is ironic to me that in this thread Steve G has repeatedly had to remind his worthy opponents that he hasn’t said diddly-smack about his own religious flavor. The only thing he’s revealed is that he is un-atheist. In this way he has given his worthy opponents a taste of their own medicine: atheism is un-relion-ism, and does not, cannot offer real proof that God does not exist.

This un-religionism makes the problem of meaningfulness problematic. If your credo is “I don’t know what we are, but we’re not like them,” you still haven’t answered the question of what you are like. All I see in the comments above are sentiments; appeals to emotional concepts like “helping others,” and “the good of society.” These are mostly just virtues exported from major world religions, dressed-down and rinsed out and dudded up like Darwinism so you can claim they are morality free. But the only atheists who bring anything original to the table are the intellectually honest, clear thinking ones who realize that if their goals could be furthered with a steep murder rate, then let us have murder. You atheists come in two flavors: wolves and sheep. If there is no god, and all the world’s religions go down to dust, it will be the wolves who prevail, for they are not encumbered by vestigial moral sentiments like “helping people.”