That’s being suggested in Britain:
Humanists UK welcomed the recommendation that humanist beliefs and values be taught. In general, the commission’s conclusions were a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to save the academically serious teaching of religious and non-religious worldviews in our schools”, said Andrew Copson.
But the Catholic Education Service said the report was “not so much an attempt to improve RE as to fundamentally change its character … The quality of religious education is not improved by teaching less religion.”Harriet Sherwood, “Call for atheism to be included in religious education” at The Guardian
Surely the Catholic Education Service is missing the point. Atheism is a religious stance and an important one, given that many prominent people are atheists. Teaching beliefs other than atheists’ beliefs as “religion” means that the worldview on which atheists’ choices are based is going to be represented in a confusing way.
For example, many atheists don’t believe in free will. That doubtless influences what they advocate or think reasonable but if we can’t unpack it, we can’t talk about what it means.
See also: Sam Harris, atheists, and charitable giving
and
Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.
I have no problem with students being taught about atheism or agnosticism in religious education classes just as I have no problem with students being taught about Intelligent Design or taught about the variations of human sexuality in sex education classes. The distinction, which teachers and students should clearly understand, is that there is a difference between teaching about the world’s faiths – or lack thereof – and promoting or proselytizing one particular religion.
So Intelligent Design in sex education classes, eh?
That doesn’t make any sense at all
Well Atheism does match **some** definitions of a religion.
Religion
: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
: a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe
aarceng – one problem with claiming that atheism is a religion is that it covers a wide variety of beliefs: western Humanism is only one form. Taoism, for example, is atheistic (at least as far as I understand it, although there are spirits within Taoism that are viewed as supernatural, and perhaps even god-like).
Until an atheist can prove there’s no God, Atheists have a religious belief there is no God.
In fact, all the posturing, pretense, and mental frameworks of Atheists rival and often surpass in intensity the same things in people of other beliefs.
Andrew
@Bob O’H one problem with claiming theism is a religion is that it covers a wide variety of beliefs: western Christianity is only one form. Hinduism, for example, is theistic.
ET:
Does it need to make sense?
Comparative religion courses do discuss atheism, agnosticism, etc, along with the other major groups.
I don’t know what they’re complaining about. Do they want religion courses to be SOLELY about atheism?
EricMH – Indeed.
Should atheism be included in religious education?
Well, I think the presence of the term “theism” in the word “atheism” is something of a clue.
If I make a statement that 2 + 2 = 4, that is a mathematical proposition.
If I make a statement that 2 – 2 = 4, that is also a mathematical proposition.
That one of them is wrong and one is right doesn’t alter the nature of the propositions themselves. You cannot change he subject by changing the sign.
So, if theism is a religious proposition, then so too is atheism.
If atheism is NOT a religious proposition, then neither is theism.
Just choose one, please.
Teaching everything there is to know about atheism would be the shortest course in the world.
RJS@11
Heh! +1
ScuzzaMan @ 10
Is assenting to or rejecting a particular religious proposition equivalent to being a member of a particular faith in your view? For example, I have an opinion on the historicity of Jesus. Does that make me a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or Jedi Knight or even an atheist?
Atheism being a religion makes as much sense as not believing in the supernatural being a supernatural belief.
So, using the same reasoning, disbelief in atheism is not a theistic belief.
Charles Birch – indeed, I’d say you are right. But the worldview that such a person would have instead would (almost certainly) be a theistic belief.
Atheism is a lack of belief in any deity. It is still a faith thing.
Indeed. It’s the unscientific faith leap from: God hasn’t revealed Himself to me in a way I would prefer, to ———–> God doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, Atheists ape a lot of Christian ideas.
Andrew
ET,
I lack the belief that extraterrestrial aliens have visited Earth. Is that a faith thing?
Yes, daves, it is a faith thing especially given the evidence.
daveS,
Since you really don’t know if they have visited or not, and no way of ever finding out if they have or it, I’d say it was a faith thing.
Andrew
It is interesting that the lack of belief in a thing requires the exercise of faith, apparently.
I lack the belief that Russell’s Teapot exists, but that doesn’t seem like an act of faith to me.
daveS apparently holds that, via the reductio ad absurdum of Russell’s Teapot,
,,, daveS apparently holds that, via the reductio ad absurdum of Russell’s Teapot, that the logic of reductio ad absurdum is a valid way to infer whether something is true or not.
Yet, besides the fact that free will, and therefore logic itself, cannot be based in daveS’s atheistic worldview, why does not daveS reject atheism altogether since it is reductio ad absurdum of all human experience and not just reductio ad absurdum to an imaginary teapot used in his fictitious circular argument?
Metaphysical Naturalism, i.e. atheism, is reductio ad absurdum on (at least) these eight following points of personal, and direct, human experience:
And here are some additional notes along Dr. Craig’s line of thought. Additional notes that have references to go along with them:
It is sadly humorous that “the illusion of daveS” would appeal to the reductio ad absurdum of an imaginary teapot to try to justify his rejection of the real and living God Whom without which, no ‘realness’ of our experiences would be possible for us in the first place.
As to this comment from daveS
Atheism is certainly far more than ‘lack of belief’: it is to embrace “ultimate irrationalism” over rationality itself.
asauber,
Certainly if I claim to lack belief in X, then that indicates that in my assessment, the evidence I have seen in favor of X (if any) is not compelling.
It’s perfectly reasonable to claim a lack of belief in X and a lack of belief in not-X, incidentally (IMHO).
p>These appear to be statements of faith:
Dawkins – we are merely lumbering robots doing the bidding of selfish genes created by a blind watchmaker in a universe of blind pitiless indifference without good or evil.
Rosenberg – we have an illusion that thoughts really are about stuff in the world – we live with the myths that we have purposes that give our actions and lives meaning – and that there is a person “in there” steering our body.
Provine – no ultimate foundation for ethics exists – no ultimate meaning in life exists – and human free will is nonexistent.
Pinker – brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth
Ruse – ethics is an illusion created by our genes to deceive us – morality is an adaptation.
Harris – Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making…. You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.
Coyne – You are robots made out of meat – behavior is absolutely determined by the laws of physics… That is the infinite regress and the sort of annoying thing about determinism. It’s turtles all the way down.
Dennett – Nobody is conscious – we are all zombies – Darwinism is like “a universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.
It is important here to point out the distinction between God, gods, and fairies as explained below by David Bentley Hart:
>
daveS,
What makes your assessment correct or accurate or even in the ballpark?
Your opinion could certainly be wrong, especially when there isn’t good evidence either way.
Andrew
I guess you could say Atheists also have a religious belief their own opinion.
Andrew
Thanks Heartlander. It has been a while since I read the entire article, “God, Gods, and Fairies by David Bentley Hart”. I usually just quote the little snippet I quoted earlier. I lost sight of just how well written, and argued, Hart’s entire article was.
Here is another article, which just appeared on my FB feed, (recommended via Richard Weikart), which I have not read yet, that looks very interesting. I plan to read it as soon as I warm up a cup of coffee. 🙂
daves:
Then why call it a belief or lack thereof?
Why not just say that you don’t know of any compelling evidence for/ in support of X?
I don’t say that I lack a belief in Darwinian processes to produce the diversity of life. I say that there isn’t any evidence to support the claim nor is there a way to test the claim. And then wait for anything that counters those claims. I am still waiting 😎
“Is assenting to or rejecting a particular religious proposition equivalent to being a member of a particular faith in your view? For example, I have an opinion on the historicity of Jesus. Does that make me a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or Jedi Knight or even an atheist?”
Both “there is a God” and “there is no God” are religious statements, irrespective of (A) which one is correct, and (B) which one we believe.
That’s not hard, is it?
The truth about Life, the Universe … Everything, really, has no necessary connection to the contents of our thoughts. The entire point of exploring the universe, of talking to other people about their experiences in it, of science, i.e. of gathering evidence, is to adjust the contents of our thoughts to more closely approximate congruence with the actual truth of things.
But the truth itself doesn’t change, because it cannot change. Of the two, only our thoughts can change and thus it is our thoughts that should change. Necessarily, therefore, our thoughts about the truth are imperfect, incomplete, inadequate – at whatever point we survey them.
A degree of humility thus behooves us.
asauber,
We all do the best we can. I obviously don’t have any special access to the truth, so I err just like anyone else.
ET,
Well, you defined atheism as a lack of belief in a deity. That describes me fairly well. I also don’t find the proposed evidence for the existence of a deity to be compelling, so both are true.
OK, so to you a deity isn’t required. And yet you don’t have a rational/ scientific explanation for our existence.
At best you are unable to say one way or the other, but it definitely takes a great leap of faith to accept materialistic explanations for our existence.
As to compelling evidence for God, I would like to present daveS with a snapshot of his very own brain:
And please remember, unguided Darwinian processes have failed to account for even a single neuron of that ‘beyond belief’ complexity:
It is simply insane to deny that the brain as well as the rest of our body, is a product of supreme intelligence, i.e. a product of God!
If the billion-trillion proteins dedicated to the singular purposeful task of keeping a person alive for precisely a lifetime and not a moment longer (Talbott) does not constitute at least an inference to ‘top down’ intelligent design, i.e. to seeing the ‘purposeful arrangement of parts’ as Dawkins put it, then all reason is lost and the atheist is drifting about in an Alice in Wonderland world of profound insanity.
Which atheism are we talking about?
The absence of religious beliefs is not religion. It’s like having a discussion in film class about people who have no interest in watching movies.
On the other hand, I suppose you could talk about why some people don’t want to watch movies. Maybe they went once, saw The Last Jedi, Patch Adams, or anything directed by John Woo and decided that the entire art form was a waste.
Along the same lines, a discussion of how corruption, hypocrisy, greed, ambition, and other assorted evils have driven many to atheism would fit in well when discussing religion.
The other sort of atheism, belief that there is no God or gods, isn’t technically a religion by most definitions. We say it is because it asserts that religious beliefs are false. It invades the turf. But can any religion have only one belief? I can’t think of any examples.
Darwinism is a religion, complete with sacred texts, faith in miracles, schisms, and a competing, incoherent set of incomplete creation myths.
I’m not a Darwinist myself, but if I had to choose a religion to leave my kid alone with for a few hours they wouldn’t be my last choice.
“The absence of religious beliefs is not religion”
Maybe there are different definitions of religious beliefs at work here.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have any religious beliefs.
I do know some people with a religious belief that they don’t have any religious beliefs …
This very broad definition of “religious” (and its variants) does seem odd to me.
For example, let’s say I reject the claim that Muhammad is the messenger of God. That’s a “religious belief” in the sense that it’s a belief about a religious issue. But does having that particular belief make me religious? Not in my book. I use the word religious to describe someone who subscribes to a religion. That is, they believe that some religion X is true. And I think it’s pretty clear that’s how most people use the word “religious”.