Friday, July 1, 2022

Atheism And Anarchy

There is a great deal that needs to be realized by any rationalistic thinker about those who become atheists out of a desire for there to be no cosmic authority to submit to, no being of superhuman power with its own demands of humans.  A desire for personal freedom does not make anything true or false (except that someone has a desire for personal freedom), and theism does not necessarily mean there is a deity with a personal, moral nature to begin with, so this is an absolutely imbecilic reason to be an atheist--not to mention the facts that the existence of an uncaused cause is logically necessary [1] and it could not be disproven even if one did not exist.  Since many atheists are also naturalists even though the two are very distinct, and since naturalism is the idea that nothing nonphysical exists and thus leaves no room for consciousness and free will, there is relevance in seeing the grand contradiction at the heart of a naturalist believing ideas based on a longing for existential autonomy.

Naturalism is objectively false (the laws of logic, metaphysical space, and even basic consciousness are all immaterial aside from the issue of God's existence), but it is incredibly ironic that some people are irrational enough to think that total determinism, which means no human is metaphysically free to think or act in a self-guided way, is the rational idea to leap towards in response to the possibility that the uncaused cause has both a moral nature and the power to enforce it.  In order to reject an ideology that would require their submission to a deity, such fools turn to an ideology that, if true, would mean they have no intellectual or behavioral autonomy because they do not even have free will!  Human freedom of all kinds would be an illusion.  Their pathetic motivations have nothing to do with discovering or understanding most logical facts about these issues, though, amounting only to a petty irrelevance.

Still, since atheism is not naturalism, the contradictions of naturalists thinking their worldview provides genuine freedom are far from all that need to be recognized here.  There is another factor that illustrates just how emotionalistic atheists seeking grand freedom are even if they are not naturalists: if they truly oppose the concept of theism out of an irrelevant desire for total autonomy and not having to submit to a deity's moral commands, they are hypocrites for submitting to any government.  The only political philosophy this kind of atheism is conceptually compatible with is a total anarchy, and not even anarchy embraced for supposed moral reasons (some anarchists believe that all hierarchical authority is evil), as atheism entails moral nihilism by necessity.  Nihilism can be true even if theism is true, but if atheism was true, nihilism would not be a mere possibility, but an accompanying truth.

Anarchy is the only consistent political application of atheism if total freedom from a metaphysical hierarchy is the goal.  Of course, emotional preferences are objectively irrelevant to reality, even to the ultimate grounding of truths about emotional preferences (reason grounds these like it does all truths), and only a highly irrational person would either believe in anything because of emotionalism or think that preference-driven epistemology is invalid for theism but valid for atheism.  Moreover, what many atheists want is not anarchy on Earth, but to live according to their own preferences without everyone else living according to conflicting preferences, which are no more or less significant than the preferences of any other human.  The bias is specifically against moral obligations or supernatural power that do not correspond to their subjective desires.

Most people, atheists or not, are not autonomous, consistent, deep, or sincere thinkers on almost any explicitly philosophical level.  The point here is not that atheism and atheists are irrational in ways that other false philosophies and their adherents are not.  Relativism of any kind, total skepticism, and anti-realism are even more asinine than atheism because they are self-refuting, so atheism is not even the most problematic worldview a person could have.  It is just that almost no one seems to openly acknowledge, or perhaps even realize, that atheism driven by a desire for total cosmic freedom is inconsistent with a desire to submit to the utterly arbitrary whims of fellow humans with political power.  Atheism is false and it would be epistemologically asinine to believe it either way given human limitations, but atheists wanting existential freedom betray their emotionalism even more when they do not simultaneously long for earthly anarchy.


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