Yes-Myths are human soul food. But I am a big Jung person and he was not an atheist but if his study and synthesis of universal myths helps Atheists - so be it.
Yeah I definitely appreciate that. I'm sure the uses I will make of Jung's archetypes will sour some as they already have. I've enjoyed Robert M. Ellis' work on archetypes, so that'll be the one that I'll be using at least for now. That may change in the future. Either way, he seems to take either an agnostic or non-theist approach to archetypes, which is what I would advocate for. My work is partly to return myth to overly logos-centric memetic structures. I'm aware of some arguments for "God" talk from a non-theist perspective, but I'm not convinced that is necessary so I leave that to those who may connect with that. And again, my thoughts on that may change on the future. In either case, I try to take something like a post-metaphysical approach to all of this.
Edit - and thanks for reading and restacking by the way! I really appreciate that
Peter Levine has an interesting term, "mythobiology," that serves to insulate communities from traumas by crafting schemas that can absorb shocks and maintain resiliency in the face of events that might otherwise threaten resilience. Jung's own myth Faust would be traced to Philemon and Simon Magus in the Red Book, all the way back to the "Two-Million Year Old Man" in all of us that would become the "wise old man" archetype that emerged during times of uncertainty. For a phylogenetic evolution of the earliest myths and fairytales, including the helpful animals, the half animal, and the animal marriage, as well as the Smith and the Devil that emerged in the neolithic and would become the basis of the alchemical/faust story, this study on comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736946/
i hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is a spectacularly impoverished understanding of mythology. and religion. and probably Jung. i'd be happy to point you toward some better sources, if you're interested.
I appreciate you taking the time to read the article, and I also welcome all criticism and recommendation. However, I'd appreciate it if you'd give specific examples of what you think is missing. Otherwise, you just come across as insulting my work to make yourself look superior. That's quite rude.
well, it's hard to know where to start... if you're out here in 2024, writing publicly about some pedestrian nonsense like "Christianity and paganism are full of bullshit that ripped us away from reality so that we wasted our lives praying to make believe men, women, and animals living in the sky for the vein hope of an afterlife that doesn’t actually exist"—and expecting nobody to call you out on it—you're playing in the wrong sandbox. plus, if you want to talk about insulting people to make yourself look superior, go back and read that quote again. that's me and *my* work you're talking about. so let's dance, sweetheart.
if you think it was all make-believe sky people and the "vein" (oof) hope of a non-existent afterlife, you're not qualified to write anything about mythology. period. end of. you don't have the first clue what you're talking about. the problem with writing "as an atheist" is imagining yourself looking at history from a purely objective vantage, with all the primitive thinking of the past stripped away, and then pretending to be some sort of intellectual authority on the ontological framing of all the world's cultures. which is just... profoundly embarrassing, from the point of view of people who actually know what they're talking about, meaning the people who actually practice this stuff. you're holding up a crayon-drawing caricature of something you barely understand and acting like you've Cracked the Code. it's like saying "Here's my blog about Expert Financial Advice, based on my understanding of penny stocks from the 1950s." you don't want to believe in gods? that's fine. they don't believe in you either. you're entitled to live in a purely physicalist universe. have fun out there. what you can't do, and then act all wounded when somebody calls you on your bullshit, is act like you're a) some courageous intellectual hero, who is also b) entitled to make pronouncements about *other people's* beliefs unchallenged. fuck that noise. don't come at me with this whiny petulance about "rude" and "insulting," if that's what you're building your brand around.
myths weren't just "bad science." they weren't just teaching stories or allegories to help people "adapt to their environment." they were things that people actually saw happening, in a reality you've never seen, in a way that you've never experienced and never will. what you're describing is the most superficial interpretation of a Wikipedia entry that you apparently skimmed while watching an America's Got Talent reaction video.
if you're looking for a catchy word to use for your life coaching blog, call it a "hero story." you're in the wrong weight class to be talking about mythology. if you want a big-kid book to read, try "The Master and His Emissary," and wonder if—maybe—what you think is your galaxy-brained perspective on all of human history is actually just the myopic muttering of an atrophied mind. in the meantime, if you're going to insult other people's beliefs with your featherweight philosophical cosplay, either keep your voice down or don't act surprised when somebody shows up with a corrective.
I'm not trying to engage in a competition with anyone who reads my work. I'm here to collaborate with people who both agree and disagree with me, without needing the end result to be agreement, but perhaps mutual growth. Let's both agree to be collaborative rather than throwing insults at one another or one another's work, which was never my intention.
My intended goal with my last comment was to show you what you said sounded like to me because it seemed unnecessarily hostile when you could have chosen to engage collaboratively and said, "hey I think you're missing this, this, and this that would have made this piece better for these specific reasons."
Instead you immediately went straight to insulting the piece and setting yourself up as being the intellectual authority relative to me. You then doubled down on trying to make me look uneducated, stupid, and less than you. Maybe you are more educated on these topics than I am, but if you honestly think you can help me, which I would welcome, then that doesn't seem like the best way to go about it in my eyes because that just alienates the person you seek to help, which is exactly what you did. That's not the way we should engage with each other, at least to my mind. We find a better understanding of each other's and our own position when we communicate in collaborative ways.
As for your criticisms of the piece itself. I think it would be helpful to remember that this is an introductory piece meant for atheists, as the subtitle said - Jungian psychology for atheists. As I say in the piece, "The fact is though, you will never be able to teach everything there is to know about the past and so that means some things won’t be learned by the vast majority of your culture ... no matter how well you pick many won’t even get access to those myths ... embedded within is a story about our past that either gets approving claps or outraged hands thrown in the air."
I think your disagreements with what I'm saying connects quite nicely with these quotes because it speaks to the differences in the memetic standpoint of you, my intended audience, and myself. My article is for people who believe that mythologies are meaningless bullshit, and so speaking to that fact helps open up the memetic defenses they have against the possible usefulness of myth.
To be clear, I'm not saying that because I intend to pace and lead, but because I honestly think it's true that there was a lot of meaningless bullshit. It's fine if you disagree, but do you not think there was a lot of meaningless bullshit in these ancient traditions? As I say in the introduction to my substack, there was a very precious baby in that very grimy bathwater, so perhaps we can both agree that there was also some very grimy bathwater - which is all I was intending to say in that part of the article.
Several of your claims about what my piece says such as, "myths were just 'bad science'" are also responded to with the above because I never made the claim that they were just bad science. Saying quite the opposite is precisely the point of my article. I wanted to demonstrate that despite the aspects that were bad science, there are many other aspects that are incredibly powerful and essential for our cultures moving forward. Many of these aspects cannot be reduced to science because they simply exist outside the scope of science.
So given the memetic standpoint of my intended audience and the fact that not all aspects of these traditions were good (nor were they all bullshit), do you not see how my statements are perhaps less absolutistic than you seem to be interpreting them?
Maybe you're right and these people were having legitimate experiences that defy the modern materialist reductionist paradigm, but I'm not speaking to that in this piece. It's simply beyond the scope and outside what I wish to talk about because as you said, I don't have these experiences and so I can't speak to them. As such, it doesn't help me nor my audience to mention them, especially when mentioning them might cause them to lock down against those things I actually have experience with, believe in, and wish to speak to.
If they do want or need that stuff, then I hope they come across your work because it sounds like you're writing passionately about it. Until then, I would be violating my own words from above when I say that we shouldn't engage in a way that alienates the very people we seek to help. The nature of the beast is that we are always going to alienate people, which is another point that was embedded in the essay itself and one of the difficulties in creating new myths for people who, for whatever reason, cannot connect with the old myths.
If I seek to engage atheists about the importance of myth despite what they see as meaningless bullshit, then to connect with that audience I better mention that yeah I also think there was a lot of those traditions that was bullshit. It wasn't my intention to alienate you, but in talking to one audience we inevitably alienate another, especially around as charged topics as myth.
However, if I were speaking directly to you, I would do my best to do so collaboratively, which is what I have tried to do here. So please, if you do respond to this, I would ask that you do so in the same spirit.
i'm not following. you're writing an introductory essay for atheists about a topic that you, yourself, evidently don't understand? maybe i can help, in the spirit of collaboration, and i'll say it louder for the folks in the back this time: if you're a self-described atheist, you don't get to have an authoritative opinion about mythology. it doesn't belong to you. you don't get to speculate about what is "meaningless bullshit" and what isn't. you don't get to talk about babies and bathwater. you don't understand what you're looking at. i'm still in kindergarten with this stuff, and i have the good sense to mind my betters; you people aren't even walking yet, and you're talking like you're ready to compete in the Olympics.
your fundamental prejudice is apparent in the cavalier attitude you have around this. you think it's all silly stuff for superstitious primitives, obviously, or else you wouldn't be treating it like your own intellectual property. forget "oppressive stories full of bullshit"—as if that wasn't thoroughly sufficient to disqualify you from serious discussion—if you think Spiderman movies are just "modern myths," you're already out of your league. the foundational myths aren't just prehistoric Marvel movies, and not just "stories about the past." if you don't recognize that before you even start writing—don't see the parts of them that are literally true, and contemporaneous with the present world—then your whole enterprise is pointless.
the thing that's so galling about all of this is that you don't even understand what it is you don't believe in. tell me what you think a god is, and i'll tell you why you're wrong. you lack the physical courage to experience what these myths are actually trying to communicate. you imagine that everybody from these elder cultures are just doing the only thing you're good at: sitting around and thinking really hard about stuff. do you have any idea what people put themselves through, in order to get into the trance states where they could experience these things? sneer at it all you want, but the fact remains that you have *absolutely no idea what you're talking about* because your whole epistemology was invented by baby-soft aristocrats who couldn't make it up to the Mountaintop if they were winched there. you're a bunch of armchair generals with plastic toys, role-playing the battles of the past in miniature and pretending you're Patton. and you have the fucking temerity to talk about *other people* wasting their time with silly beliefs. no matter how hard you think and how many books you read, how many Oxford debates you win, you will never see what the real initiates see. because you don't have the stones for it. so there's no point in flattering anybody's intellect with all this nonsense. if you call yourself an atheist, you get to warm the bench until you have what it takes to play the game for real. sit there in respectful silence. and don't goddamn dare condescend to anybody about their "beliefs."
and just parenthetically, if you're expecting civility, maybe don't use the same club name as Hitchens and the rest of those smug cunts (in the British sense of the word, naturally). those clowns poisoned the well twenty years ago. these are the consequences.
Listen man, I just think you're assuming way too much about what I think, who I am, and how I live my life. If my article affected you then I take responsibility for the language I used and the effect that language has on people. However, your interpretations of what I say are simply not what I was trying to say, and repeatedly are opposite to the point I was trying to make. You have a caricature of "atheist" in your mind that you've made the enemy, substituted me for that, and then used that to justify being extremely hostile. I don't expect to be treated with hugs and kisses when I put my ideas online. However, I also don't wish to engage with someone who treats me as the stand-in villain for a group of people they don't like rather than as a human being.
let me see if i've got this right: you're upset because somebody is making a caricature of your beliefs—making a generalization about a whole group you belong to, based on vague understandings and the misbehavior of a few reactionaries—turning that into an imaginary enemy, and then using it as a moral justification for tearing you down?
well, gosh. that sure sounds bad.
would it make it better if i said that "deconstructing atheism is an absolute necessity," which is a task rightfully performed by non-atheists, because atheism is just "oppressive stories full of bullshit"?
except it's worse than that, because Christianity and paganism have contributed something beautiful and enduring to human culture. what has atheism given us, apart from an easy way of identifying some of the most vicious, petty, self-aggrandizing, intellectually impoverished non-thinkers of the past century?
your whole project is built on the idea that the world's people need to be saved from their beliefs by the White Knights of rationalism. it's right there in your essay. "[X] needed to happen, and thanks to atheism, it did." this belies the fact that atheism, which you are choosing to identify with, is flatly anti-scientific. it's making pronouncements about things it has no direct experience of, on the basis of some unapologetically racist prejudices. you're looking at cultures that are thousands of years old, who have sophisticated technologies for widening their perception beyond what's available in everyday life. (and, incidentally, even the everyday perception of those people, on their worst days, was more nuanced and sophisticated than the brain-rotted static that modern people experience as normal cognition.) the people from these cultures are saying, "we have plenty of evidence that these things are real, based on countless experiments conducted over thousands of years, and we have piles of training materials for how you can experience them too, even for you weird larval baby-people who can barely perceive the physical world after all the brain damage your culture has inflicted on you." and what does atheism say to this? "your evidence doesn't count, because you're inherently stupider than we are. your sky people are hallucinations; your afterlife is a lie; your myths are just allegories, or misunderstandings of 'natural phenomena,' based on the explanations we've rushed to print in the past couple centuries. you need to be saved from your primitivism, and we—the beneficiaries of a culture whose entire history is a sliver of yours—are the ones to save you."
what else is atheism, if not that? your whole philosophy is built on pure denial of a reality you can't see, and the dogmatic defense of a reality you invented. you're Terrance Howard telling career mathematicians they don't know what they're talking about. you're a Flat Earther denying thousands of years' worth of carefully-calculated evidence to the contrary.
i'm not saying you're an asshole because you like the wrong sports team, or because your favorite movie sucks: i'm saying that writing about *anything* metaphysical "as an atheist" is intellectually indefensible, because you're willfully misunderstanding 99% of the picture. and there's no way you can write "as an atheist" without fundamentally opposing people like me, who do recognize an afterlife, and have directly experienced things that don't fit within reductive materialism, because they've *physically done things in the real world* that you're incapable of doing. (take some mushrooms and go swimming in the ocean at night, and then come talk to me about what spirits are.) i'm not some Young Earth creationist who can be dazzled with fossils. my reality encompasses your reality. but you can't write "as an atheist" without directly attacking mine. which is what atheists—the people in your club—have been doing for decades. and now all of a sudden you want to fight with Queensbury rules?
anyone who wants to write "as an atheist" should stick to geology, or pop culture, or making unboxing videos for kitchen gadgets. if you get tired of sitting at the kids' table, stop writing "as an atheist" and consider widening your perspective. atheism is for edgy teenagers in 2008 who think that Richard Dawkins is the smartest guy they've ever read. if you want to be taken seriously as a public thinker, act like an adult.
Yes-Myths are human soul food. But I am a big Jung person and he was not an atheist but if his study and synthesis of universal myths helps Atheists - so be it.
Yeah I definitely appreciate that. I'm sure the uses I will make of Jung's archetypes will sour some as they already have. I've enjoyed Robert M. Ellis' work on archetypes, so that'll be the one that I'll be using at least for now. That may change in the future. Either way, he seems to take either an agnostic or non-theist approach to archetypes, which is what I would advocate for. My work is partly to return myth to overly logos-centric memetic structures. I'm aware of some arguments for "God" talk from a non-theist perspective, but I'm not convinced that is necessary so I leave that to those who may connect with that. And again, my thoughts on that may change on the future. In either case, I try to take something like a post-metaphysical approach to all of this.
Edit - and thanks for reading and restacking by the way! I really appreciate that
Peter Levine has an interesting term, "mythobiology," that serves to insulate communities from traumas by crafting schemas that can absorb shocks and maintain resiliency in the face of events that might otherwise threaten resilience. Jung's own myth Faust would be traced to Philemon and Simon Magus in the Red Book, all the way back to the "Two-Million Year Old Man" in all of us that would become the "wise old man" archetype that emerged during times of uncertainty. For a phylogenetic evolution of the earliest myths and fairytales, including the helpful animals, the half animal, and the animal marriage, as well as the Smith and the Devil that emerged in the neolithic and would become the basis of the alchemical/faust story, this study on comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736946/
Thank you so much for the recommendations I really appreciate that. I'll definitely check them out.
i hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is a spectacularly impoverished understanding of mythology. and religion. and probably Jung. i'd be happy to point you toward some better sources, if you're interested.
I appreciate you taking the time to read the article, and I also welcome all criticism and recommendation. However, I'd appreciate it if you'd give specific examples of what you think is missing. Otherwise, you just come across as insulting my work to make yourself look superior. That's quite rude.
well, it's hard to know where to start... if you're out here in 2024, writing publicly about some pedestrian nonsense like "Christianity and paganism are full of bullshit that ripped us away from reality so that we wasted our lives praying to make believe men, women, and animals living in the sky for the vein hope of an afterlife that doesn’t actually exist"—and expecting nobody to call you out on it—you're playing in the wrong sandbox. plus, if you want to talk about insulting people to make yourself look superior, go back and read that quote again. that's me and *my* work you're talking about. so let's dance, sweetheart.
if you think it was all make-believe sky people and the "vein" (oof) hope of a non-existent afterlife, you're not qualified to write anything about mythology. period. end of. you don't have the first clue what you're talking about. the problem with writing "as an atheist" is imagining yourself looking at history from a purely objective vantage, with all the primitive thinking of the past stripped away, and then pretending to be some sort of intellectual authority on the ontological framing of all the world's cultures. which is just... profoundly embarrassing, from the point of view of people who actually know what they're talking about, meaning the people who actually practice this stuff. you're holding up a crayon-drawing caricature of something you barely understand and acting like you've Cracked the Code. it's like saying "Here's my blog about Expert Financial Advice, based on my understanding of penny stocks from the 1950s." you don't want to believe in gods? that's fine. they don't believe in you either. you're entitled to live in a purely physicalist universe. have fun out there. what you can't do, and then act all wounded when somebody calls you on your bullshit, is act like you're a) some courageous intellectual hero, who is also b) entitled to make pronouncements about *other people's* beliefs unchallenged. fuck that noise. don't come at me with this whiny petulance about "rude" and "insulting," if that's what you're building your brand around.
myths weren't just "bad science." they weren't just teaching stories or allegories to help people "adapt to their environment." they were things that people actually saw happening, in a reality you've never seen, in a way that you've never experienced and never will. what you're describing is the most superficial interpretation of a Wikipedia entry that you apparently skimmed while watching an America's Got Talent reaction video.
if you're looking for a catchy word to use for your life coaching blog, call it a "hero story." you're in the wrong weight class to be talking about mythology. if you want a big-kid book to read, try "The Master and His Emissary," and wonder if—maybe—what you think is your galaxy-brained perspective on all of human history is actually just the myopic muttering of an atrophied mind. in the meantime, if you're going to insult other people's beliefs with your featherweight philosophical cosplay, either keep your voice down or don't act surprised when somebody shows up with a corrective.
I'm not trying to engage in a competition with anyone who reads my work. I'm here to collaborate with people who both agree and disagree with me, without needing the end result to be agreement, but perhaps mutual growth. Let's both agree to be collaborative rather than throwing insults at one another or one another's work, which was never my intention.
My intended goal with my last comment was to show you what you said sounded like to me because it seemed unnecessarily hostile when you could have chosen to engage collaboratively and said, "hey I think you're missing this, this, and this that would have made this piece better for these specific reasons."
Instead you immediately went straight to insulting the piece and setting yourself up as being the intellectual authority relative to me. You then doubled down on trying to make me look uneducated, stupid, and less than you. Maybe you are more educated on these topics than I am, but if you honestly think you can help me, which I would welcome, then that doesn't seem like the best way to go about it in my eyes because that just alienates the person you seek to help, which is exactly what you did. That's not the way we should engage with each other, at least to my mind. We find a better understanding of each other's and our own position when we communicate in collaborative ways.
As for your criticisms of the piece itself. I think it would be helpful to remember that this is an introductory piece meant for atheists, as the subtitle said - Jungian psychology for atheists. As I say in the piece, "The fact is though, you will never be able to teach everything there is to know about the past and so that means some things won’t be learned by the vast majority of your culture ... no matter how well you pick many won’t even get access to those myths ... embedded within is a story about our past that either gets approving claps or outraged hands thrown in the air."
I think your disagreements with what I'm saying connects quite nicely with these quotes because it speaks to the differences in the memetic standpoint of you, my intended audience, and myself. My article is for people who believe that mythologies are meaningless bullshit, and so speaking to that fact helps open up the memetic defenses they have against the possible usefulness of myth.
To be clear, I'm not saying that because I intend to pace and lead, but because I honestly think it's true that there was a lot of meaningless bullshit. It's fine if you disagree, but do you not think there was a lot of meaningless bullshit in these ancient traditions? As I say in the introduction to my substack, there was a very precious baby in that very grimy bathwater, so perhaps we can both agree that there was also some very grimy bathwater - which is all I was intending to say in that part of the article.
Several of your claims about what my piece says such as, "myths were just 'bad science'" are also responded to with the above because I never made the claim that they were just bad science. Saying quite the opposite is precisely the point of my article. I wanted to demonstrate that despite the aspects that were bad science, there are many other aspects that are incredibly powerful and essential for our cultures moving forward. Many of these aspects cannot be reduced to science because they simply exist outside the scope of science.
So given the memetic standpoint of my intended audience and the fact that not all aspects of these traditions were good (nor were they all bullshit), do you not see how my statements are perhaps less absolutistic than you seem to be interpreting them?
Maybe you're right and these people were having legitimate experiences that defy the modern materialist reductionist paradigm, but I'm not speaking to that in this piece. It's simply beyond the scope and outside what I wish to talk about because as you said, I don't have these experiences and so I can't speak to them. As such, it doesn't help me nor my audience to mention them, especially when mentioning them might cause them to lock down against those things I actually have experience with, believe in, and wish to speak to.
If they do want or need that stuff, then I hope they come across your work because it sounds like you're writing passionately about it. Until then, I would be violating my own words from above when I say that we shouldn't engage in a way that alienates the very people we seek to help. The nature of the beast is that we are always going to alienate people, which is another point that was embedded in the essay itself and one of the difficulties in creating new myths for people who, for whatever reason, cannot connect with the old myths.
If I seek to engage atheists about the importance of myth despite what they see as meaningless bullshit, then to connect with that audience I better mention that yeah I also think there was a lot of those traditions that was bullshit. It wasn't my intention to alienate you, but in talking to one audience we inevitably alienate another, especially around as charged topics as myth.
However, if I were speaking directly to you, I would do my best to do so collaboratively, which is what I have tried to do here. So please, if you do respond to this, I would ask that you do so in the same spirit.
i'm not following. you're writing an introductory essay for atheists about a topic that you, yourself, evidently don't understand? maybe i can help, in the spirit of collaboration, and i'll say it louder for the folks in the back this time: if you're a self-described atheist, you don't get to have an authoritative opinion about mythology. it doesn't belong to you. you don't get to speculate about what is "meaningless bullshit" and what isn't. you don't get to talk about babies and bathwater. you don't understand what you're looking at. i'm still in kindergarten with this stuff, and i have the good sense to mind my betters; you people aren't even walking yet, and you're talking like you're ready to compete in the Olympics.
your fundamental prejudice is apparent in the cavalier attitude you have around this. you think it's all silly stuff for superstitious primitives, obviously, or else you wouldn't be treating it like your own intellectual property. forget "oppressive stories full of bullshit"—as if that wasn't thoroughly sufficient to disqualify you from serious discussion—if you think Spiderman movies are just "modern myths," you're already out of your league. the foundational myths aren't just prehistoric Marvel movies, and not just "stories about the past." if you don't recognize that before you even start writing—don't see the parts of them that are literally true, and contemporaneous with the present world—then your whole enterprise is pointless.
the thing that's so galling about all of this is that you don't even understand what it is you don't believe in. tell me what you think a god is, and i'll tell you why you're wrong. you lack the physical courage to experience what these myths are actually trying to communicate. you imagine that everybody from these elder cultures are just doing the only thing you're good at: sitting around and thinking really hard about stuff. do you have any idea what people put themselves through, in order to get into the trance states where they could experience these things? sneer at it all you want, but the fact remains that you have *absolutely no idea what you're talking about* because your whole epistemology was invented by baby-soft aristocrats who couldn't make it up to the Mountaintop if they were winched there. you're a bunch of armchair generals with plastic toys, role-playing the battles of the past in miniature and pretending you're Patton. and you have the fucking temerity to talk about *other people* wasting their time with silly beliefs. no matter how hard you think and how many books you read, how many Oxford debates you win, you will never see what the real initiates see. because you don't have the stones for it. so there's no point in flattering anybody's intellect with all this nonsense. if you call yourself an atheist, you get to warm the bench until you have what it takes to play the game for real. sit there in respectful silence. and don't goddamn dare condescend to anybody about their "beliefs."
and just parenthetically, if you're expecting civility, maybe don't use the same club name as Hitchens and the rest of those smug cunts (in the British sense of the word, naturally). those clowns poisoned the well twenty years ago. these are the consequences.
Listen man, I just think you're assuming way too much about what I think, who I am, and how I live my life. If my article affected you then I take responsibility for the language I used and the effect that language has on people. However, your interpretations of what I say are simply not what I was trying to say, and repeatedly are opposite to the point I was trying to make. You have a caricature of "atheist" in your mind that you've made the enemy, substituted me for that, and then used that to justify being extremely hostile. I don't expect to be treated with hugs and kisses when I put my ideas online. However, I also don't wish to engage with someone who treats me as the stand-in villain for a group of people they don't like rather than as a human being.
let me see if i've got this right: you're upset because somebody is making a caricature of your beliefs—making a generalization about a whole group you belong to, based on vague understandings and the misbehavior of a few reactionaries—turning that into an imaginary enemy, and then using it as a moral justification for tearing you down?
well, gosh. that sure sounds bad.
would it make it better if i said that "deconstructing atheism is an absolute necessity," which is a task rightfully performed by non-atheists, because atheism is just "oppressive stories full of bullshit"?
except it's worse than that, because Christianity and paganism have contributed something beautiful and enduring to human culture. what has atheism given us, apart from an easy way of identifying some of the most vicious, petty, self-aggrandizing, intellectually impoverished non-thinkers of the past century?
your whole project is built on the idea that the world's people need to be saved from their beliefs by the White Knights of rationalism. it's right there in your essay. "[X] needed to happen, and thanks to atheism, it did." this belies the fact that atheism, which you are choosing to identify with, is flatly anti-scientific. it's making pronouncements about things it has no direct experience of, on the basis of some unapologetically racist prejudices. you're looking at cultures that are thousands of years old, who have sophisticated technologies for widening their perception beyond what's available in everyday life. (and, incidentally, even the everyday perception of those people, on their worst days, was more nuanced and sophisticated than the brain-rotted static that modern people experience as normal cognition.) the people from these cultures are saying, "we have plenty of evidence that these things are real, based on countless experiments conducted over thousands of years, and we have piles of training materials for how you can experience them too, even for you weird larval baby-people who can barely perceive the physical world after all the brain damage your culture has inflicted on you." and what does atheism say to this? "your evidence doesn't count, because you're inherently stupider than we are. your sky people are hallucinations; your afterlife is a lie; your myths are just allegories, or misunderstandings of 'natural phenomena,' based on the explanations we've rushed to print in the past couple centuries. you need to be saved from your primitivism, and we—the beneficiaries of a culture whose entire history is a sliver of yours—are the ones to save you."
what else is atheism, if not that? your whole philosophy is built on pure denial of a reality you can't see, and the dogmatic defense of a reality you invented. you're Terrance Howard telling career mathematicians they don't know what they're talking about. you're a Flat Earther denying thousands of years' worth of carefully-calculated evidence to the contrary.
i'm not saying you're an asshole because you like the wrong sports team, or because your favorite movie sucks: i'm saying that writing about *anything* metaphysical "as an atheist" is intellectually indefensible, because you're willfully misunderstanding 99% of the picture. and there's no way you can write "as an atheist" without fundamentally opposing people like me, who do recognize an afterlife, and have directly experienced things that don't fit within reductive materialism, because they've *physically done things in the real world* that you're incapable of doing. (take some mushrooms and go swimming in the ocean at night, and then come talk to me about what spirits are.) i'm not some Young Earth creationist who can be dazzled with fossils. my reality encompasses your reality. but you can't write "as an atheist" without directly attacking mine. which is what atheists—the people in your club—have been doing for decades. and now all of a sudden you want to fight with Queensbury rules?
anyone who wants to write "as an atheist" should stick to geology, or pop culture, or making unboxing videos for kitchen gadgets. if you get tired of sitting at the kids' table, stop writing "as an atheist" and consider widening your perspective. atheism is for edgy teenagers in 2008 who think that Richard Dawkins is the smartest guy they've ever read. if you want to be taken seriously as a public thinker, act like an adult.
How so? I'd like to know what better sources you'd point to