Post your funny pictures here!!! part Deux

[Baruch]

I don't have obligations to anyone or anything.

Sad, you have only you to live for.  No pets?

[GSOgymrat]

[Baruch]

Western atheism is shooting Xtian fish in a barrel ;-)

[drunkenshoe]

Western atheism is shooting Xtian fish in a barrel ;-)

Western atheism? PFFFT. You think the home of atheism is the West? Or atheism is only apolitic or right wing in the West?

[Hydra009]

It's true.  Also a sort of laundry detergent.  They were very resourceful.  Care for some doormouse?

[Hydra009]

Western atheism? PFFFT. You think the home of atheism is the West?

Afaik, the earliest written records of atheism are from Greece and India.  The word atheism is an english variant of the french atheisme, which is derived from the greek atheos.

[Baruch]

Western atheism? PFFFT. You think the home of atheism is the West? Or atheism is only apolitic or right wing in the West?

If you were a former Muslim or former Hindu or former Buddhist .. then your atheism would be "Eastern atheism".  Not saying you were.  A former Christian or former Jew (religious) who becomes atheist would be "Western atheism".  The former culture milieux colors it.

[Baruch]

It's true.  Also a sort of laundry detergent.  They were very resourceful.  Care for some doormouse?

Women at Auschwitz, and in other poor situations, bleach their hair with their own urine.  All clothes whitener in Roman culture was by human urine.  Not the kind of slave work people were fighting to get!  Emperor Vespasian saw a good thing, and was the first to tax it saying "Pecunia non olet" aka money doesn't smell.  In the past, people had to do real work, and make do with all natural ingredients ;-) ... what did Japanese farms use to fertilize the rice field every day?

[Baruch]

Afaik, the earliest written records of atheism are from Greece and India.  The word atheism is an english variant of the french atheisme, which is derived from the greek atheos.

Atheism as irreligion or there are no gods at all?  Not the same meaning.  Socrates was accused of atheism ... because he introduced new gods not official in Athens (only the Archons can decide that).  Diagoras of Melos was convicted in absentia of atheism, in his case making fun of the gods.  Numerous philosophers from the first, were accused and often convicted of atheism, in the sense of irreligion. Anaxagoras was accused of atheism because he said the sun was a big hot rock in the sky, not the sun god Helios.  Theodorus of Cyrene was the first Western person to literally deny the existence (as opposed the the irrelevance) of the gods.  Epicurus was the first to systematically say that the gods were far away and irrelevant ... proto-deism.  Euhemerus was the first theorist of human deification of past heroes, and this was used by the Hellenists who deified Alexander, and later by the Romans who deified various Roman heroes.  Would Christianity even have happened without Euhemerus?

Eastern culture has had various forms of atheism while polytheist like the Greeks and Romans.  The Jains and Buddhists were accused of atheism by the Hindus, because they denied the authority of the Vedas and the brahmins.  The literal materialists, the Charvaka, were a small group compared to the latter two.  Sikhs were accused of atheism because they combined Islam with Hinduism.  Eventually some sects of Buddhists and Hindus developed non-personalist forms ... but they are still religions, even if they worship impersonal forces like karma.  Sufis have regularly been accused of atheism in the sense of irreligion by fellow Muslims.  I don't think that monotheism in Judaism would have happened (and it didn't happen until after the Babylonian Exile) except as a distant echo of the heretic Pharaoh, Akenaten.

So no, atheism has multiple meanings by multiple cultures across multiple centuries.  Most people here mean a very specific kind, and most are ex-Christians, not non-personalist Buddhists etc.  The idea that humans at first were pure atheists, and were deceived over time into the supernatural and into religions, is Marxist history.  Of old, humans didn't separate the natural from the supernatural (Heraclitus and Thales were the first).  Pyathagors wouldn't count ;-) ... since he believed in reincarnation.  Xenophanes was the first Western monotheist, so atheist in the sense of irreligious compared to most people.  The cultural path that India and China took to develop their own forms of (minority) atheism were independent of the West (though the Buddhists and Hindus developed statues/icons because of the Macedonians in India.  Westerners were not aware of Eastern beliefs nor took them seriously until the 18th century.

[drunkenshoe]

Oh I didn't mean the etymology of the word. It's incorrect and wrong to use the concept before the modern period because contrary to the common belief, atheism as we understand, is a modern concept.

It's is a famous historical problem, there is a discussion and book on it by Lucien Febvre about a 16th century French humanist, Françoise Rabelais who were thought a covert atheist in that period by some historians through his writing. Febvre is one of the founders of Annales School along with Bloch, I'm sure you have heard their names.

In short, Febvre says that Rabelais -or anyone else for that matter- can't be an atheist in 16th century France because the vocabulary and therefore the mentality to support that understanding, that world vision hasn't existed yet. If memory serves right he says, defining Rabelais as an atheist is like handing Diogenes an umbrella. Note that what he means is beyond the fact that the people did make things to shade themselves in Diogenes' time. (And no, it is not semantics, Baruch.)

It's actually very important how did scholars see/read men like Rabelais and his contemporaries, in early 20th century and certainly now, even devoutly religious ones because it's about the building blocks of roots of modernism, individualism; reading societies from the bottom...what has given birth to hypermodern civil liberties, identity politics...every concept we wrestle today is based on the evolution of those interpretations and re-interpretations. And we are going through a natural phase, a crisis if you will, on that department.

In short, throwing the word atheism around as we understand it, esp. in a narrow sense beyond our own backyard is not a good idea because it is anachronistic.

[drunkenshoe]

Baruch, you are talking about 'you don't believe what I believe, so you are an atheist' mentality. This is not about religion or belief.

It's about the accumulation and evolution of knowledge. It's not just the concept of atheism, a lot of fundamental concepts have the same problem. The main reason is that -as you all know- social disiplines are inherently historical and linguistic and while it is based on thousands of years of telephone game, what we read today is the last version of these concepts applied to our time's mentality and vocabulary. It's all re-written in higher contexts with richer vocabulary. They are not the same thing they started, they cannot be.

There is a reason that why in the last 30 years, there is an explosion of new terms for everything in cultural studies from gender studies to sociolinguistics. A huge amount of them will fade away in the next 50 years. That's what has been going on, that's how it works.

[Baruch]

Baruch, you are talking about 'you don't believe what I believe, so you are an atheist' mentality. This is not about religion or belief.

It's about the accumulation and evolution of knowledge. It's not just the concept of atheism, a lot of fundamental concepts have the same problem. The main reason is that -as you all know- social disiplines are inherently historical and linguistic and while it is based on thousands of years of telephone game, what we read today is the last version of these concepts applied to our time's mentality and vocabulary. It's all re-written in higher contexts with richer vocabulary. They are not the same thing they started, they cannot be.

There is a reason that why in the last 30 years, there is an explosion of new terms for everything in cultural studies from gender studies to sociolinguistics. A huge amount of them will fade away in the next 50 years. That's what has been going on, that's how it works.

Knowledge is filtered by belief and delusion and prejudice.  It isn't free ... see fake news reports.  I know myself, that arithmetic works.  That is reliable knowledge.  Whether or not Karl Marx wore a fake beard in public appearances ... we will never know ;-)  I have posted before, there is clear evidence of a case against Benjamin Franklin, for being a serial killer.  That totally changes the American Revolution narrative.  Believing Marxist history theory (an obsolete form of 19th century anthropology) gives an entirely different narrative of the 20th century.  Lenin for example was put into play, by the Germans in wartime, and backed by Jewish financiers in NYC.  So he was a traitor (and per Hitler, a half breed barbarian who was a useful tool for international judaism).  Biden today was put into play by the CCP and their running shi tzu.  Depending on what you believe.  The idea that one is purely factual and purely logical ... is a complete lie and irrational.

[drunkenshoe]

Oh ffs. You confuse information with knowledge and categories with ideologies. Marxism is not an ideology. It's a philosophical form of analysis, criticism of capitalist social, political, economical developments of societies. Of course it is materialist, forget everything, as form of set of opinions only, it is a reaction to the traditional idealist German thought in the first place. Because we live in a physically real world and we have to make a living. Because everything has started to change when we stopped growing our own crops, making our own clothes...etc.

So people have to challenge the power structures. What makes our period unique compared to the 150 years ago -besides and with the scientific revolutions- is that we know that all power structure must to be challenged. Note that I'm not talking about a physical or military challenge in this context. When speaking of knowledge, this is literary analysis. It's criticism. Critical theories, modern, old...etc.

In the Western civilisation, universities, reserach instutions...etc have autonomy. (For example, ours don't.) What does that mean? It means they produce scientific traditions, they produce knowledge... academics, scholars, researchers, thinkers...etc. Obviously, STEM; science and technology works VERY differently in every sense.

Now, those scientific traditions also goes with social disiciplines, this has been going for hundreds of years. As Western civilisation accept the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations as their founding point it has been going on for thousands of years.

So the knowledge I mean is the result and constant evolution of that accumulation. It's still in the books. Not in podcasts or vlogs or blogs. Because those mediums are the killer of this kind of knowledge. That's why Sam Harris gets surprised when white supremacist, far right, racist, sexist male groups follow him devoutly. I wonder, why?

The situation right now is that masses of people -guess who- keep screaming that anything besides STEM is bullshit and it should be abolished, wiped out from education, esp. high education. This doesn't change the fact that the civilisation they live in is based on that 'bullshit'. And that bullshit has an order, methods, strong influence all our lives. If they can go out and have a drink with a woman and then go to her place to have sex, it is because of that development. So they're like women defending sharia in this context. They are so fatally ignorant, it is not even shooting oneself in the foot but in the head.

So, again, we are not talking about the same things.

[Baruch]

Human beings individually and collectively are part of a chaotic psychological dialectic.  Hegel and Marx were optimists.  Human beings have no real knowledge, real understanding or real wisdom.  Anything a person does or society does, is done in spite of the irredeemably corrupt human nature.

Human thought, human communication, human culture are all gibberish.  We do what we do without understanding what we are doing, similar to a computer.  Consciousness exists, but it is useless.

[Unbeliever]

Baruch often talks about apples when everyone else is talking about oranges.