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Baphomet Has Fallen
How much good faith is required for an American state government respecting a religion's symbols?
The Satanic Temple, specifically the Satanic Temple of Iowa, put a statue depicting the pagan idol Baphomet in the Iowa Capitol, following the letter of the law allowing religious symbols. Thing is, it's explicitly an atheistic (or rather "non-theistic") religion; they have as much belief in the reality of Baphomet as they do the Flying Spaghetti Monster (mHNAty). They use literary symbols and provocative symbols to promote science and promote humanist atheist goals of tolerance and justice. It was designed to provoke a response, and it has; a Christian broke it. Deseret News reports that:
The state of Iowa finds itself in the position of avenging the rights of atheists to display a pagan idol they don't even believe in, which mocks people of genuine Christian faith with a dark symbol drawn from mythology.
Take that to its logical conclusion.
A Christian church could create a parallel object to be installed in the Iowa Capitol, a similar deliberately provocative anti-atheist symbol to be promoted as a sacred symbol of a pseudo-atheist "Church of the Human Condition" which exposes the failures and tragedies of the Enlightenment and promotes learning how to morally philosophize using the Jefferson Bible and select readings from Ayn Rand in after-school clubs. I can think of a few:
Desecrating any of these would bear the same fourth-degree criminal mischief charges, with up to a year in prison and a $2,560 fine, and exposure to lawsuits by the artists and owners of the symbols.
But aside from the turnabout, I'd like to remind that atheism is treated as a religion de facto by its adherents and proselytes, and de jure by the government in having Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment. Anyone who says it is not a religion must, by implication, accept that the broken Baphomet statue is only a violation of Freedom of Expression (under the same Amendment) so any cries of Christian hypocrisy at its destruction are inaccurate on their face due to the uneven parallel. Only by accepting that atheism is a religion can atheists claim a sacred right to offend Christians.
Your list of things to trigger and own the atheists betrays a complete lack of understanding of non-theist world views.
You are holding up a list of things that exist as though they are the same thing as a given religions idols (the cross, the prophet, the tablets, etc) when the whole point of atheism is that there is no such thing as an idol.
If you are a committed christian (or theist in general, I guess) your reality requires lots of maintenance. You have to believe in things for their own, not believe in other things because that would endanger the things you do believe in, hold things sacred for no reason other than because they are, abore things that are aborent for no reason other than that they are.
Atheists don't have to do that: they just have to not respect and privilege your personal reality over the shared reality that is the material world. Religion is the practice of having faith in things you can't deduce through empiricism, atheism is a rejection of faith, and anti-theism considers faith the be a type of negative utility delusion.
There is no special claim atheists have to uphold or special symbol they have to respect. All they need to do is shrug.
What sort of reality maintenance do you have in mind, here?
Do you believe in free will?
I can, empirically, observe and interact with my will on a minute-to-minute basis. I can gather it, direct it, strengthen or weaken it. My interactions with it are nearly as inescapable as my interactions with gravity.
It is routine for me to observe Atheists arguing that Free Will does not exist. They admit that this belief makes no testable predictions, that one should act in every way as though it existed, and yet assume that it does not. They explain that this is because, under Materialist assumptions, it can't exist. They do this despite a considerable history of their forebears making confident predictions for something like two centuries that the will's nonexistence could be demonstrated and used for basic engineering of people, only to have all those claims falsified; the current position is the "determinism of the gaps" that they have retreated to.
It seems logical that they wouldn't pick a fight on such poor terms if they had a choice. If Materialism demands that free will not exist, then evidence of free will is evidence that Materialism is wrong. We each have a lot of evidence that free will exists.
The above, to me, looks like a pretty good example of "reality maintenance". What do you have in mind?
I don't believe in free will in a mystical sense as a motive force that comes from nothing and goes nowhere; so I don't believe in free will the way you mean it.
People can make decisions, but those decisions aren't free. They are constrained by physics and history. This can be observed by the fact I can't simply will myself into the air, and instead have to jump.
A question for you: do you believe in cause and effect? That every effect is preceded by a cause?
If so, isn't free will an incoherent concept?
The chain of observable cause and effect seems reliable within the observable universe, back to the origination point of the universe. Past that point, we cannot observe further. Our understanding of physics precludes a looping universe under observable conditions, so we can be highly confident that cause and effect, as an observable chain of evidence, break in at least one point.
It is possible that significant portions of physics do in fact loop seamlessly, and the remaining portion of the loop is simply unobservable to us. Alternatively, it is possible we are in a simulation, or we are boltzmann brains, or a god of some description created the universe. All these possibilities, and any others that might be contained beyond the back wall of the observable universe, are neither observable nor falsifiable. Given that they are neither observable nor falsifiable, it seems obvious to me that one cannot form beliefs about them based on evidence, since that evidence does not exist. Based on what we do know, that something cannot come from nothing, it seems reasonable to do so as one pleases, but it likewise seems obvious to me that none of these explanations are "Materialistic", in the sense that is commonly meant. None are observable, none are falsifiable, none can even be adequately defined for a valid comparison.
We can be quite confident that there is something to know, and we can be equally confident that we don't know it.
Incoherent how? What process of Free Will specifically gives rise to this incoherence? It appears to me to operate seamlessly and ubiquitously throughout each of our lives; certainly it has done so within my own decades of life. It appears to be simply what it claims to be: the individual, fine-grained capacity to choose actions, intentions, attention, focus, even various forms of mental state such as mood. The process of choice can be directly observed, manipulated, even engineered within oneself.
To the extent that Materialist priors argue that this apparent reality cannot be the case, the observable and ubiquitous fact of free will is strong evidence against Materialism. Of course, Materialism is free to present evidence to the contrary, to demonstrate that free will is, in fact, an illusion. Materialists attempted to do so for roughly two centuries, and now they've given up and admitted that their best strategy is to claim it only appears to exist in every observable and testable way, but is nonetheless fake despite all evidence to the contrary. That does not seem to me to be what "simply following the evidence" looks like, but then, it is obvious to me that beliefs are chosen, not forced, which seems to explain the behavior quite well.
You say materialists have given up, but isn't it the opposite?
Materialism has become the base state that all other claims need to beat to be considered; and the strongest free will claim is especially weird.
Re. incoherent: you are describing compatibilism, which is what I hold: there is no free will in a mystical, 'my decision are unconstrained in some essential way' but there is free will in practice.
EG, I think that you are absolutely constrained by your history and the nature of experiencing time as a three dimensional creature. When you can choose, you only choose one thing and looking at it from a 4th dimensional perspective, you could imagine your life as a written narrative. That said, you still experience free will and I believe that free will as a concept still exists. Just because every decision you will ever make and have ever made could only have been made as you made them, doesn't mean those decision still didn't happen.
Basically, if you refer solely to the experience of free will, then yes it exists. If you claim that you can make a decision that isn't wholly the result of your nature and your history, what the fuck does that even mean?
On this specific issue, no. Two centuries' worth of previous Materialists made bold, highly falsifiable claims about the non-existence of free will. Such claims served as the theoretical basis for multiple revolutionary ideologies, as well as dominating the field of Psychology for decades. These claims were thoroughly falsified, but their intellectual polution continues to inflict harm to this day.
More generally, also no. Hard Materialism is not observably verifiable, and is not required to conduct scientific or engineering pursuits. It seems to me that even many people who self-identify as "Hard Materialists" are not actually hard materialists, any more than people who attend church on Christmas are "Christians".
Okay. What novel, falsifiable predictions does this idea allow you to make? Can you actually predict or manipulate what people will do, the way you can predict and manipulate a screwdriver or some other piece of dumb matter?
What part of it is confusing? What falsifiable predictions does claiming otherwise allow you to make, that can't be made equally well without claiming otherwise? Skinner claimed that if you gave him control of a child's environment, he could make that child into anything he wanted. He and his disciples tried and failed. Marx claimed that the revolutionary reorganization of society would create New Soviet Men, thus solving crime and war and poverty forever. He and his disciples created half a world of horror and despair. Do you think you can do better? Does observing a pattern of failed predictions shift your priors, or is that just for claims one does not personally favor?
Aren't all those objections kinda pointless? Also, why are you talking about Skinner and Marx? Shouldn't you be talking about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer?
I can't make those predictions, because it is impossible for me to have that information. But the information exists, and the events happen.
I am making the non special claim that all matter behaves as matter, and all energy behaves as energy. Basically, that there are no special cases. If you are making the strong claim for free will, you are claiming that all matter behaves as matter, and all energy behaves as energy; except for the bit that is inside the skulls of humans.
Why should I believe this strong claim, and how do you back it up?
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