Friday, December 19, 2014

... on Atheism Being a Religion (CMI argues so in a well made video)

Is Atheism a religion? 7 criteria for detecting a religion
CMIcreationstation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbICbKaCJjU


I
You have missed out on two points:

  • narrative includes a double scenario eschatology - pessimist scenario religions provoke Harmageddon by believing in it and by being rivals, optimist scenario atheism and secularism manage to avoid it;

  • ritual seems to include (from time to time) Gish-Gallopping (their term in dubious reference to Duane Gish) Christians, Prolifers, Creationists, Catholic and Evangelical alike.


II
Bald and Atheism.

Shaved heads (totally, without a crown) can denote oy-skins, right-wing skins, lay brothers in Catholic monasteries (tonsure without a crown, while priests get tonsure with a crown), Buddhist Monks.

Atheism (as philosophical technicality) can be certain different religions:

  • Western Atheism, most prominently Secular Humanism, which is the one here described

  • Raelianism

  • Zechariah Sitchens' Ancient Alien Astronauts theory, where gods are animals developed higher than man

  • as mentioned earlier here: La Vey Satanism and perhaps one or two more

  • Certain varieties of Buddhism.

  • The more Buddhist Oriented and less Hindoo Oriented versions of New Age.

  • Atheistic varieties of Judaism (extreme Sadducees) and of Hindooism.


III
New religions - and Western Atheism was not around in quite its present form as little far back as 13th C. - are often rooted in older ones.

I suppose Homeric religion was rooted in Hittite one (though after fall of Hattusha, it was basically omertà against mentioning Hittites : the Greek word Ethos once was Hethos, changed when NSg Thrix and DPl Thrixin remained while Thrikhos, Thrikhi, Thrikha became Trikhos, Trikhi, Trikha ... I have a hunch tax duties to Hittite rule may have started lampooning Hethos by pronouncing it Ethos ... linguists can't tell if Mykenean Greek was pre- or post- this change, so it is possible).

I know that Salvation Army was rooted in Methodism, Methodism had a double root in Anglicanism and Moravianism. Anglicans are a compromise between Bucer and schismatic Catholic Henry VIII, Moravians are a more peaceful variety of Thaborites which was the violent revolutionary more anti-Catholic branch of Hussites, which, like Anglicanism, had a prequel in Wycliff - ALL of which, excepting Methodism and Salvation Army which were also later and isolated from Catholicism, had a direct root in Catholic childhood of founders.

Samarian religion was rooted in the Mosaic one which was preserved as OT JUdaism - which both Christians and Jews claim led up to them.

So, what are the religious roots, not of Theravada Buddhism which is a different religion, but of Western Atheism?

When we trace it to its pre-Darwinians beginnings:

  • Calvinists - via Bayle's denial of the miraculous (originally after NT times)

  • Anglicanism - via Shaftebury's denial that fearing Hell can make a man moral

  • Freemasonry - with its Rosicrucian roots of denouncing religious warfare, started in Protestant London

  • Hobbes, whatever faction of Anglicanism he was from, through his materialism

  • Hume [apostate from Kirk of Scotland] and Kant [German Calvinist] with their denial of knowability of religious claims

    Usually denial of the Creator took a form like Eternal Steady State Universe.


When was this/alternatively Biblical creation superseded by Deep Time (acceptable to shallow Christians as well as atheists) as we know it?

  • Siccar Point involves Kirk of Scotland.

  • Cuvier was not a Catholic but a Lutheran from Alsatia (Louis XIV kicked out Huguenots and conquered the ancestors of Cuvier ...)

  • Lyell was a Broad Church Anglican


I think I see something systematic here ...

1517 - Luther, Zwingli & Oecolampadius, Münzer (a link between Zsiska and Trotski, though his disciple Menno - also ex-Catholic - went peaceful like Zsiska's Moravian disciples), Uncle and Nephew Sozzini, denied Holy Trinity and Biblical infallibility (all of which were condemned by Trent and Exsurge Domine)

1717 - Freemasonry founded

1917 - Russian Revolution makes Atheism for the first time State Religion.

Also 1917 - Blessed Virgin appears at Fatima (as Bayle and Hume would scoff at) and Russia needs to be consecrated to Her Most Pure Heart, up till then infidelity will be spreading. Or so I have heard it repeated.

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