Peterson recently was in a Jubilee Media video titled "One Christian vs. 20 atheists".
Peterson's views on many things, including religion is basically just incoherent word salad. That event was worse than most which is saying something.... hard to debate someone who won't even tell you what their real positions are....
In my experience, an alarming number of online atheists (as opposed both to people who simply don't believe in a god or gods and get on with their lives, or to philosophers who actually take atheism seriously) are attracted to atheism precisely because it allows them to be "edgy," particularly about Muslims and women.
I agree. I'm an atheist but don't feel the need to talk about it often. The main advantage to being an atheist is that it doesn't require ritual of any sort. But I think a lot of online atheists are mostly just contrarian. To many of them, bashing feminism is just part of that. I agree many are Islamophobic but think Islamophobia is still worse among Christians on average.
AGREED! That and many "atheists" still have weird, wooster, supernatural beliefs. A surprising number are into tarot and new age Pagan stuff and all kinds of things. I have often just said "I don't believe in the super natural" instead.
Because I don't pay that much attention to the theories of non-belief, I'm not sure I know how it is generally used. My impression is that it means one feels the question of whether or not there are gods is either unanswered so far or that it is unknowable, therefore one doesn't definitively repudiate the possibility of their existence.
I'd say that I'm agnostic as to whether the Loch Ness Monster exists, in that, while I can see no reason to suppose it does, and plenty of reasons to suppose it doesn't (no apparent food supply in the loch to support something of that size, for one thing), I can't say as a matter of fact that the Loch Ness Monster does not exist in the same way I can say with certainty that Manchester is not the capital of France.
I think you're mostly correct, but not entirely. The way a friend of mine put it is that most people who say they believe in god don't really do so in the way we believe tables exist. BUUUUUT, some people really do believe in god with the same certainty that we might believe our computers exist. I think some American Evangelicals and many more primitive cultures really do believe in god with that absolute level of certainty. Which is something most modern educated people can't really relate to.
Hmm. I'm closer to that perspective than I am to the more militant argumentative atheists I've encountered (mostly in media, never in person). I just never believed.
From my end of it, I also recoil from atheists who try to rock someone's faith with arguments. I get testy if someone's beliefs get out of their lane and tries to regulate my life according to their dogma, but otherwise it's simply none of my business. If they are wrestling with faith and need a sounding board for their doubts, I'm still not the person to tap. I have no idea what it's like to go from belief to non-belief, so my personal landscape is not a useful reference point.
As I understand it, the rationale for torturing suspected witches or heretics was pretty much the same as is, more recently, the rationale for torturing suspected spies, traitors, class enemies or members of al Qaeda -- to extract a confession and information about their confederates and their plans. The inquisitors and witch hunters had the additional motive that by to bring the suspected heretic or witch to confess and repent, they were offering them the opportunity to save their immortal soul and, thus, sparing them the pains of hell.
