Oh god
, this is kinda getting out of hand.
Ok now, step by step:
People really love to generalize. Atheist arrogance towards an omni-spiritual worldview? You need better atheist friends then as most of the arrogant people I have met were religious, not to say I haven't met my fair share of arrogant atheists.
A misunderstanding. I only meant to describe my own transition in response to Artois:
Agnosticism was a great leap for me; a leap from an arrogant atheist stance towards (= leap into) an (=my) om
ni-spiritual worldview.
"Arrogant" in this sentence meant my own atheist arrogance at the time. Although I do think that atheists can be pretty arrogant in discussions like this ("you and your obsolete bullshit ideas about some 'god' ... freak!") I didn't mean to say that here.
As for generalizations, we are dwelling in a western dominated forum here and I assume that most people know their fair share of "atheists". Nominally, I think not even 15% of the worlds population are "unreligious", only some 1%? declared atheists. There are many regions in the world where people cannot even cope with the idea that someone isn't religious. The religious diversity is enormous and concepts of divinity are plenty ... yet here we are dividing everyone into two groups and having a little trouble fitting the odd muslim in already.
For me, atheism is a phenomenon paralleling western modernization, "scientification" and secularization and as such is a genuine cultural and economic luxury. If anything, atheists can be generalized but certainly not religious believers or even the idea of "god".
Omni-spiritual, that means all spiritual. Omni-spiritual worldview is basically a religious worldview, you view the world in it's entirety as religious, based on religion, like any religious believer would view the world.
Yes, sort of. What I meant to say was that I am a "generalist" believer and try to take into account that the various manifestations of "god" could be different expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, a phenomenon I believe to have taken a glimpse on.
I wouldn't want to consider myself a "christian", "buddhist" or whatever because most religions eventually fail to seperate organizational politics from the core of religious belief to the benefit of their followers ... Religiously motivated disagreement and mayhem is sadly the outcome. As soon as spirituality becomes an institution, problems arise that seem widely unnecessary when looking at the original intent of spirituality.
@ airframe:
Yes, Artois' definition for agnosticism is pretty good, a bit heavy on science but that's fine.
The whole idea behind agnosticism is that there IS a reason to
possibly believe in a god, a reason that currently cannot be conjoined with any type of proof/reasoning, be it scientific or else. Agnostics don't just sit there and wait for "science" to prove something ... "proof" itself is contradictory to the agnostic stance since it refers to human rationality which is, for an agnostic, not the right approach towards the issue: God cannot be truly recognized by the human ratio, a part of which is especially speech so above all god cannot be expressed or proven to anyone.
As for drawing parallels between religious faith and atheism, I did indeed do that.
As stated above, I view atheism as a phenomenon that originated in western modernization. Now I am not really sure what exact kind of "atheism" we are talking about here. When the Nazis reformed their country, they did install an atheist and yet symbologically highly sacralized new order as did all the atheistic communist regimes across the globe. However, I was talking about nowadays western atheism.
Of course there is no "church of atheism" or something but if you look closely most atheists in history have replaced the unconditional belief in a higher power with unconditional (but often critical
) belief in human achievement and the respective institutions. This belief often takes on cultic dimension.
If you want, universities, congresses, the stock-market, human rights postulations, religious plurality (funny enough), self-accomplishment ... are the temples and scriptures of the current dominant atheist belief-system with scientific method and rationality being the hallmark of their trustworthiness.
The western atheist world-view and the lifestyle that goes with it is actually really odd and I guess "fanatic" since it really doesn't perceive itself as something unique and minor among a variety of world-views but rather as the "dawn of a new mankind", an absolute truth and the only way to go in the future for anyone. The ideas, ideals and institutions that go with it are brought to the world with fanatic missionary effort and even under arms ... some call this "globalization" others call it "eurocentrism".
All that aside, if you claim that there is not/ cannot be a god, you will have to rest your claim on a belief since there is absolutely no real proof for your claim. If you rest your claim on science, then your unconditional trust in science is exactly that belief. Already on that micro-level atheism is quasi-religious.
