I am a secular and skeptic atheist. What should I read after these gents?

Why the fuck is Ben Stiller a Scholar?
That jerk is fucking everywhere!

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and Christopher Hitchens was a journalist. Get out of here with your hero worship of people barely above the bell-curve. It doesn't take a genius to know there's no god. But none of these people could make something unique out of this knowledge or present a totally different philosophy or worldview. They're empty vessels of real, in-depth intelligent thought.

Read Al-Ghazali and the Qur'an.

wikihow.com/Tie-a-Noose

Huh?

Why is Ben Stiller filling in for Sam Harris?

...

What are you talking about?

Fuck, it is him. I thought I was imagining it

By the way Sam is not a real neuroscientist (he only bought a PhD, never managed to get a. Bs and Ms).

I'm pretty sure that Hitchens would have said that it is self-evident, basing it on either the scientific method or common sense. It's not a bad stance per se, but it still comes out as extremely edgy.

Have you reallyread them? If this is the case just know that now you know less than nothing. If you've read Dawkins and Harris extensively chances are that you've actively learnt wrong things about these topics.
Read Nietzsche.

I find it astonishing how some people can string together words in grammatically correct sequences and make so little sense. Is this how you think?

I like Ham. The only areas in which I find his contributions mildly controversial are determinism and foreign policy. Why do you guys hate Ben?

Yeah, either way, not a "scholar." Every Muslim in the world could tell him "none of us are literalists" and he would still say "it says X so it's bad!!!" (ignoring of course, that moral judgements are irrelevant in a godless world).

>self-evided
by that account, Millibank's god is self evident as well
>the scienthific method
cannot be proved outside it's own paradigms

I'm an atheist but science people are brainlets, Jesus

I'm an atheist, but Dennett's stance of the hard problem of consciousness makes me consider him a moron.

>reddit fedoras are science people

oops, I mean "stance on the hard problem of consciousness"

Newborns are not "anti" anything. They have no beliefs.
It would do much better to examine children of a young age; their early beliefs in Santa or at least their predisposition to blindly believe and enhance these tales into something much more. However, you'll find most of it easily reducible to societal influences, and parental guidance.
Really dumb post!

Are you by any chance on Chalmers side?

>Title is 'The Four Horsemen' which has font similar to Man of Steel
>All pictures of men are gray
>Frames have different, primary colors to them
>Scientist, Scholar, Philosopher and... what?
>None of these quotes satisfy me at all
>Despite being atheists and anti-religious all these people are made to look like prophets and be feared

This picture feels wrong and stupid. I commission a man who've made it to explain himself.

>Le blank state

I understand how someone might like Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens at like 15 or so. I was also a big fan at that age. But a man of 20, 30, or 40 should have reached a new level of maturity by that age. What great insights do any of these "4 horsemen" provide other than the obvious (there is probably no supernatural realm) or the cliches of science (evidence is better than irrational belief")

There are plenty of Muslim literalists. They pick and choose, but I would argue that there is a brand of Islamic exceptionalism that lends itself to literalism more easily than in any other Abrahamic religion. Muslims believe that the scripture is not only the word of God, but the speech of God. Unlike Christians who have received the word of God through revelations (with the exception maybe of the ten commandments), the Quran in its entirety is believed to be the direct speech of God. This presents the risk of various brands of fundamentalists that have more interpretative currency when faced with moderate Muslims. You could argue that Jihad is an internal existential struggle, but if God had wanted to put it like that, he would have. Couple this with the historical context of the scripture which gave birth to tenets of state building, warrior heroes, etc and you get a religion that is inherently more resistant to secularisation. I think it's a problem.

OP here. It isn't mine: I just wanted to put Ben Stiller in it (and did a bad job of it).
However I am genuinely interested in hearing about atheist books after Dennet, Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens.

They're weakening evangelism and literalism, while steering apologetics onto a better path. Better theists and better atheist should come out of their effort.

I don't mean to discourage you from your genuine interests, but I think, and it's just my opinion, that you will waste more of your time with them than you can spend exploring great literature.

I don't know a lot about these people, but of atheism I know from life. I live in Russia, which was under Soviets not so long ago and one of it's primary dogmas was atheism. Aftermath of it is great and still lingers on. It didn't give us culture nor enlightened us, quite the contrary - it was part of the ideology that pressured and in the end destroyed cultural Russian tradition in everything and not just arts.

I might speak ignorantly about this, but I believe that atheism, in perspective, can become nothing more than this.

hate it when SovietBlockFags conflate atheism with 'God is dead'. I'm sorry for what happened to you, but they're not the same thing.

Ok, so what would you suggest? Existentialism stuff instead?
Do you happen to know any atheist critique of the four horsemen?

They may not be. I still think that this is a meaningless pursuit that will end in disaster.

t. Harrisite

Even Chalmers, Harris's hero, acknowledges that Dennett's attempt is respectable because all methods have to be tried on the hard problem

Rejecting theism still leaves plenty of viable meaning to grasp for. Atheism is indeed meaningless in an existentialist framework, but it doesn't deny meaning. It's not nihilism.

Stirner.

First you stop believing in God, now it's time to question your idols.

Human rights? Liberalism? Humanism? Morality? Meaning? Purpose? Truth? They're all little Gods in their own right.

It's time to do away with them as well.

Most Muslims fall under 1 of 4 main schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Whatever the case of their belief may be, most go through imams and other scholars which help interpret the Qur'an and Sunnah and try to place everything in its proper historical and ethical context. The problem that arises with some countries is the vast amount of illiteracy and academic failure. These Islamic terrorists aren't guided by Islamic learning; they're young men in their early 20s with a false sense of identity and from unstable countries. These conflicts have to be seen as results of a post-colonial world, not simplistic "clash of civilisations".

Actual decent arguments for atheism.

There are more literalists among Muslims than any other religion in the world, though.

And they are right. If you go Muslim, be Muslim. Don't just be a sand-flavoured liberal.

If you can find Losev's 'Dialectic of Myth' that'd be my recommendation. It is a Russian philosopher. I don't know if his works are translated into English

All Muslims have imams and scholars used to interpret the Qur'an and their religion for them. Literalism is a recent phenomenon.

I'm not rejecting post-colonialism as a framework, I think the issue is extremely nuanced and complicated and the effects of Western foreign policy have certainly played a role in Islamic extremism, even Islamism.

You haven't addressed my case for Islamic exceptionalism though and why I believe it leads to resistance to secularisation. I wouldn't rush to dismiss the motivations of terrorists. I am sure that if you ask some of these people what their motivations are, they will respond with a scriptural interpretation that you'll probably find preposterous. So will an alarming number of Islamist Imams. How do you respond to them?

So in the time of the prophet when he would say 'stop fucking lads' people would go 'what did he mean by this?'

I will look at it. From what've read it is similar to Joseph Campbell (somewhat). I think it could be a nice complementary to "Why religion is natural and science is not".
That book argues that religion comes more natural due to our psychology. I can see myth still playing a role even if we become post-religious in parts of the world. If that happens.

It is possible that religion makes comeback in Europe just like it did in post-communist places.

Will people forget about God and Myth if you simply say that they don't exist, not real? Atheism takes on itself a burden to save people from mythical perception of reality, but it is impossible. Myth is one, if not largest component of human life. When you teach people that God, Heaven and Hell are not real - you don't save them from myth. It will still live. It will appear in other forms. Like communism for example, or tendency that happiness can be bought. That we can understand everything.

/r/ing a version of OPs pic where Daniel Dennett's face is subtly replaced with James Randi's and Hitchen's is replaced with the photoshopped visage of his brother morphed to fit Chris's dimensions

The Qur'an makes several criticisms of the prophet Muhammad, so it's likely not even the prophet had full knowledge or control over what he was saying.

Glad you could join us Mr. Jordanson.

> Myth is one, if not largest component of human life.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I am having difficulties of seeing this as self-evident. If by myth, you mean archetypes of morality, sure, I agree. And you're right, in the absence of religious thinking they can lend themselves to all sorts of ideologies, some more conducive to well-being than others. Rejecting theism won't kill ethics, you're right. I don't see how that's a point against atheism though.

Why are you dodging my case for Islamic exceptionalism

> These conflicts have to be seen as results of a post-colonial world

No, they don't, at least not in the way that term is conventionally understood. Not that post-colonial factors are irrelevant, but "post-colonial thought explains everything about Islamic fundamentalism" is no less simplistic than

>not simplistic "clash of civilisations".

Which I agree is overly simplistic. Rising literacy rates in MENA and elsewhere, which has happened in countries in the decades since the end of colonialism, have given millions more people the ability to read key scriptures, and create their own interpretations outside of traditional schools of jurisprudence, and now the Internet, cell phones has made it much easier for people to share and debate their interpretations. Laypeople, those who aren't trained in esoteric, technical, or otherwise specialized readings of texts, will tend to interpret them very literally.

I'm not talking about archetypes of morality. I'm not talking about morality itself. I'll repeat what I said - Myth is one, if not largest component of human life. Atheists think that they can save people from mythical perception of reality. It is impossible. Atheism becomes a mythology itself. One that will have it's own prophets, it's cult, it's literature and other things.

But everything concerning atheism will be tainted by falsehood - that they have conquered myth. You can live a satisfying life till the end being an atheist, nobody will disagree with you. But what's going to be your favorite literature, movies, places to visit. Who are going to be your best friends, what will be your dreams about? Who's going to become your love? What will your intimacy look like? Will they have to be also influenced by atheism?

Being an atheist would mean disconnecting yourself from all of this, because they all work only because of myth and nothing else. It means being something inhuman. A delusional man thinking that he can control every act of his life and give prosperity to someone, that he can be objectively kind and make good, while not realizing that he's still a caveman.

not sure why you replied to me as well, but aside from agreeing with you, I think the nature of Islam makes its religious texts far more palatable to literalism. Literacy and pluralist education won't necessarily solve the problem and if they do it will be a happy correlation, not a direct cause.

>Are you by any chance on Chalmers side?
Sort of, but I was already against Dennett's position before I had ever heard of Chalmers.
>t. Harrisite
I have never read or watched anything by Harris, no idea what his beliefs are.
>Even Chalmers, Harris's hero, acknowledges that Dennett's attempt is respectable because all methods have to be tried on the hard problem
I agree that the attempt is respectable and that all methods have to be tried. What I don't respect is that Dennett doesn't actually understand the hard problem, yet goes on and on about consciousness.

>Dennett doesn't actually understand the hard problem
Why the fuck would you believe this?

If I may interupt you: you seem to imply that atheism must be rational and materialistic/physicalistic. Is that so?

I thought both posts were by the same person because of the "imams and scholars" reference, my mistake. What do you think makes the primary texts of Islam particularly prone to literalism? Not that I disagree, I just don't have enough familiarity with the texts themselves to form a solid opinion.

Because Dennett wrote a whole book called "Consciousness Explained" which has nothing to do with consciousness, and is all about describing the way that thought works. So he seems to not understand that the question of consciousness is separate from the question of thought. Thought is a relatively easy problem. We could imagine an extrapolated version of a computer that performs thinking at a human or super-human level. We have a good idea of how matter can give rise to things like problem-solving and learning. Consciousness is the hard problem. No-one has any idea how matter gives rise to consciousness, if it does at all.

I'm having a really hard time following what you said there. You seem to think that the inescapability from mythical perception is self-evident. I fail to see it as such, so you might want to be a bit more charitable there.

You seem to conflate atheism with killing God. Killing all Gods. In the Nietzschean sense of the word. Well, we have started doing that a while ago and I agree it's a problem. I don't see why the only solution conducive to well-being would be theism though. Atheism doesn't reject mythical thinking or artistic interests informed by mythical thinking. Hell, it doesn;t even fully refute deism.

I'm sorry, I really don't see your point.

no worries. this

BEN STILLER. KEK

But this assumes a whole picture of consciousness that Dennett rejects. It assumes that what's distinctive about consciousness is things like qualia and phenomenality on a strong conception which Dennett rejects as quasi-Cartesian.

>It assumes that what's distinctive about consciousness is things like qualia and phenomenality
The hard problem would exist even if the concept of qualia had never been invented.
>quasi-Cartesian.
Just because someone doesn't like the mind-body problem doesn't mean that it has actually been successfully resolved. It hasn't.

>The hard problem would exist even if the concept of qualia had never been invented.
explain your thought here

Not that user, but I think maybe he means something like that qualia are just a subdivision of consciousness, but consciousness as a whole still has the same problem. Like, you don't need to know that there are molecules to know that there's an ocean.

Religions are pretty much bad

Also this

Just a strange thought in this context since where would the hard problem come from if you considered consciousness apart from what-it's-like-ness? That's how Chalmers originally defined it and still does

>The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them.
>consc.net/papers/facing.html

someday, possibly soon, we'll be seeing images like this in a museum of memes

my sides

These will be in the "snarky Facebook circa 2014" wing of the Great Meme Hall.

I topkek'd

Basically this, yes. Qualia are sort-of atoms of subjectivity. Subjectivity would be mysterious whether or not you cared about the concept of particular "instances" of subjectivity - the redness of the rose, the odor of the cookie, etc.

Cont...
The basic mystery of subjectivity is related to the question of why it exists at all. I can imagine a being that has human-level intelligence (in that has human-level problem-solving ability), but is not conscious, has no subjective experience. So what is subjectivity? Why is it there, in addition to intelligence? How is it related to the material? Obviously what one is conscious of, even whether one is conscious or not, is affected by material reality. If I get hit on the head, my consciousness might be stopped... etc. But no-one has ever even come close to proposing a mechanism by which matter could give rise to subjectivity. Indeed, even the idea of such a mechanism seems somewhat ludicrous if I really consider it.

>I'm pretty sure that Hitchens would have said that it is self-evident, basing it on either the scientific method or common sense. It's not a bad stance per se, but it still comes out as extremely edgy.
No, it's a fucking terrible stance.
Science is nonsense, and common sense doesn't exist. Lookie, his own stance is cannibalistic.
>there is probably no supernatural realm
False, stop shitting platitudes.
muh feelies!

addressed that here:

Absolutely nothing wrong with this post.

Yes, the hard problem of consciousness IS the problem of what-it's-like-ness.

>In'shallah you infidels will die, read Qur'an now before it's too late!

Nice try abdul.

some extremely interesting posts in this thread. rare for lit.

Ben Stiller is my favourite New Atheist, I know more people like Owen Wilson but I think Stiller is much more original, although perhaps not as original as Vince Vaughn, although he is a bit unhinged desu.

I was unaware that rocks are massive ideologues

actual philosophy?

What? That's clearly Zack Snyder.

Does Veeky Forums believe we can at some point find a sub-atomic particle that corresponds to "consciousness" or thoughts or whatever you might identify as subjective experience? I mean we have no idea what the brain is doing and whether stuff is happening in the synapses or neurons (see Penrose's idea) and we haven't even mapped the brain. Structural psychologists early on were highly interested in creating a sort of "periodic table" of the brain, but failed miserably. In all these years, we have not moved forward at all. Instead, experiments like that of Benjamin Libet prove that something is going on here that cannot be easily quantified. Dennett's rebuttal on Libet's experiment just shows how naive he is on this topic.

>Science is nonsense
Scientific method here means only that you emphasize the importance of proof when making truth statements. Wether you like Hitchens or not (I'm anything but a fan too) saying "if you want me to believe x you should guve me a proof for x" is absolutely legit.

>and common sense doesn't exist.
Maybe when you compare a 5000BC mesopotanian with a 2017 Houston teenager, but when a culture is shared we can start talking about common sense. "You need proofs to prove things true" (or to prove, at least, the efficency of a model that represent a certain truth) is, in this day and age, common sense, and if you think so you will be basically unable of function in any sort of contemporary society, since people will just not take your unfounded stances seriously.
Society will make for you very few exceptions (Faith and feelings, mostly) but that's it.

Militant skeptics like you are worthless.

>It is big and longwinded. I tried it
A true Atheist, I see.

Nassim Taleb

>Scientific method here means only that you emphasize the importance of proof when making truth statements.
Proof and truth don't exist in the sense that you speak of them.
>"You need proofs to prove things true" (or to prove, at least, the efficency of a model that represent a certain truth) is, in this day and age, common sense, and if you think so you will be basically unable of function in any sort of contemporary society, since people will just not take your unfounded stances seriously.
I didn't realize arrogant ideology was a metric for truth.
>worthless
Why is worth good, and define 'worth'.

Isnt that second guy from the left just an actor...

>being this young on Veeky Forums

that's calvin harris, leading athiest philosopher and globe trotting dj

Someone who isn't a neocon retard like Harris or Hitchens, and someone who doesn't blow Marxist cock like Dawkins.

If you have to read an atheist, read Ryan Dawson, at least his political views aren't retarded.

Sarris isn't a neocon.

Sam "Arm the Moderate Rebels" Harris is absolutely a neocon. Really he's just a Jew, which is what neocons actually are, along with Jewish puppets.

He was advocating the exact policies that created ISIS for years before it actually happened. He belongs in the trash, which is exactly where Chomsky put him.

I like both Gnome ''Arm the Moderate Rebels'' Tchomsky and Ham ''Arm the Moderate Rebels'' Sarris. You're probably misreading both. Your feelings are also too strong on this for me to engage you in any way. Farewell pleb.