The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #65403 Message #1079952
Posted By: Little Hawk
25-Dec-03 - 09:33 PM
Thread Name: Can An Atheist Sing Believer Songs?
Subject: RE: Can An Atheist Sing Believer Songs?
toadfrog - No problem. There are probably as many different kinds of atheism as there are different kinds of religion. :-) I myself was an atheist until my early 20's, but that doesn't mean I would necessarily have seen eye to eye on it with various other atheists... I think what atheism usually is...is it's a reaction to various forms of traditional religion by people who can see through the more irrational and primitive aspects of those traditional religions. Or else it's just a learned attitude, picked up from atheistic parents. That's what mine was. Monkey hear, monkey do. You can see the same about kids who learn Catholicism or some other religion from their parents. Or it's both of those. Communists were usually atheists because they were trained to be from an early age. Lakota Indians were usually believers in spiritual things because they were trained to be from an early age. And so on....
I think one of the requirements to becoming a truly free being is this: Question everything you've ever been told by your parents, your culture, your peers, and your society. Re-examine it in the light of your own experience. See if it works. Question every common assumption and every habit and tradition. It's a lifelong process. Otherwise, you just let other people do your thinking for you, and surrender much of your own potential in the process.
Cruiser - Yeah, the reason that I give broader than usual definitions to words like "religion", "faith", etc...is that I am by nature a philosopher. I see people playing a few really basic and vital games in life (survival, mating, seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, forming familial and tribal groups, ego-enhancement, self-expression, working with Love...or fear, and finally...asking WHY?), and clothing them with different complicated symbols, which then get divided up into supposedly separate categories which aren't really separate.
Accordingly, I believe everyone has a religion (or several of them), and everyone relies to a certain extent on faith, and so on... I even consider party politics to be a form of organized religion, and a mighty stupid one, too! :-) I don't believe a religion presupposes the existence of "a supreme being"...just of a supreme concern. The supreme concern of political parties for instance is to gain power and hang on to it...by whatever means possible. The supreme concern of Communism (another "godless" religion) was to replace all other social systems with itself...kind of like the Catholic Church was trying to do for the last 15 or 20 centuries.
Primitive religions deal in the most primitive of human motivations...simple win-lose scenarios...and they rely heavily on FEAR/reward as a motivator. The whip and the carrot.
Advanced religions and advanced philosophies ask WHY? And "who am I?" And "who would I wish to be?" And then they ask HOW? And then they apply what they have learned through asking those questions, step by step...and their strength and their purpose arises out of LOVE. This is as true of great science as it is of great philosophy or great religious faith.
But that's just my own peculiar view of things. Most people don't use those words the way I choose to.
- LH