Thread by @EveKeneinan

Lacks of belief have entailments, so atheism does have an ideology, viz.
1 Nothing is sacred
2 There is no divine order to the cosmos or to human life
3 The cosmos is not imbued with intelligibility by an intelligence
4 Human reason is not from God
5 Persons are not images of God

https://twitter.com/zypisfy/status/1186538217106882560

And each of these in turn has entailments, e.g. “nothing is sacred” entails “there are no moral lines an atheist will not cross in some circumstances.”

“Human reason is not from God” entails “we have very strong reason not to trust human reason in general.”

“There is no divine order to the cosmos or human life” entails that human life is meaningless and purposeless, except of the unreal purposes we may invent arbitrarily.

As @ctlansdown notes, this puts “purpose” and “meaning” firmly in the realm of “things that cease to exist when no on is thinking of them”—which is of course the very definition of “subjective” as opposed to “objective.”

@ctlansdown “Humans are not made in the image of God” is just another way of saying “There is nothing sacred about human beings” which in turn entails they may be treated however one pleases, except as forbidden by this or that arbitrary principle.

@ctlansdown Human life is not sacred.
Human rights are not sacred.

Because nothing is sacred.

@ctlansdown So, broadly speaking, atheism entails nihilism and absurdism.

One can frame it is “just a lack of belief,” but that is no help when one says “I just lack a belief in absolute moral evils, in reason, in the intelligibility of the cosmos, in any objective meaning and purpose."

@ctlansdown There is NO FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE between “lacking a belief that there are lines that cannot be crossed” and “believing there are no lines that cannot be crossed.”

In either case, there are no lines one will not cross, except arbitrarily.

@ctlansdown There is NO FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE between “lacking a belief in truth” and “believing there is no truth” — since both states render it impossible to coherently seek, find, or assert anything as true.

Same with reason. Same with meaning and purpose.

@ctlansdown “To lack a belief in God” and “To believe there is no God” both equally commit one to living PRACTICALLY, FUNCTIONALLY, as instantiating in one’s life the view that NOTHING IS SACRED.

And that radically affects one’s ability to live ethically.

@ctlansdown Do not misunderstand the point.

Can atheists be ethical? Yes

Can atheists be ethical in a way that is rational and non-arbitrary and involves lines that cannot be crossed? No

That’s the problem.

@ctlansdown It is very much like the way a person who doesn’t believe in health can still be healthy—if he happens to adopt a lifestyle that is in fact healthy, which he will not of course do BECAUSE it is healthy, since he doesn’t believe in that—but he may pick one up for another reason.

@ctlansdown He may simply live “as he was raised.” And if his parents raised him to live a healthy lifestyle, he’ll generally be healthy, his lack of belief in health notwithstanding.

But very little stands in the way of his adopting a very different sort of lifestyle.

@ctlansdown So it goes with Western society. Modern Western secularists are still “Christians” for the most part in values, because they were raised in a post-Christian context.

But that will not last. Nietzsche knew that and was interested in accelerating the process: