I came across an interesting series today as I was looking around the website Surf the Channel. I was looking for a documentary to watch (I know, I’m a nerd) when I came upon Richard Dawkin’s series The Enemies of Reason. In the first episode, which I am currently watching, Dawkins strays from his usual topic of religion to discuss New Age superstition. Technically, you can be an atheist and still believe in tarot cards, psychic readings, and ghosts, but why would you? Many atheist pride themselves on using logic and reason to rid themselves/avoid a belief in God. It seems only natural that they would want to use those same skills to decide whether to visit a psychic healer or a doctor to help with your arthritis?
If any of you have an irrational belief (and everybody does), I encourage you to take a second look at it. Do some research, and ask yourself, Does this make sense? It can be hard, and a little bit scary, to get rid of long held beliefs. Sometimes you need to let them go one at a time, weening yourself off of superstition. Finding the distinction between truth and lies is a life long battle that everyone is fighting. But everytime you throw off a silly superstition, whether it is religion or avoiding black cats, it brings you that much closer to the truth.
The phrasing in this post is urging me to comment. “Many atheist pride themselves on using logic and reason to rid themselves/avoid a belief in God” – that’s kind of backwards. The Atheist comes to the conclusion that there is no God because there is no substantial evidence for God, and therefore, no reason to worship such a being. They don’t actively seek out proof to specifically rid themselves of a deity.
Most Atheists find there is little proof of any supernatural forces, and so most will turn a skeptical eye to any paranormal claims including New Age superstition, because it flies in the face of rational thought.
Your conclusion in this post, however, is in the right spirit (pardon the obvious pun). I just felt I needed to point this out.
Good observation, flawedprefect.
I suspect there are some atheists in each camp. Some arrive at atheism simply through argument (“lack of evidence” — though this presumes that the only modes of rational inquiry that are legitimate are empirical). But I suspect that other atheists (I actually suspecet many atheists) snagged their sweaters at some point in Sunday School, never got over it, and “use logic and reason to rid themselves/avoid” the belief.
Just for fun:
It seems we all willingly believe things that we have not ourselves verified, but that either someone credible has verified or a sufficient mass of people has seen. Things like “the war of 1812 happened” or “the eiffel tower is in paris.” So what about ghosts? There are millions of accounts of ghost sightings. These accounts cross all cultures and are had by people both apparently insane and apparently sane. There is little to gain in claiming to have seen a ghost, but yet millions of people across all cultures from time immemorial have claimed to have seen/experienced such things.
I’d venture to guess that we believe many things (like “the Taj Mahal exists”) on far less “second-hand” evidence.
This leads to this issue: is it possible to have a “simply rational society”? Is it possible for a human being to be or become “purely or perfectly rational”?
GK Chesterton puts it this way: “We believe an old apple-woman when she says she ate an apple; but when she says she saw a ghost we say, ‘But she’s only an old apple-woman.” (Orthodoxy p279)
Those who did not “get it” in Sunday School, this would have started the slippery slope into logic which only seems to provide more and more evidence for the non-existence of God. Even if such an Atheist were to seek out proof for the existence of God, the little that is around is often an argument from incredulity, or simply statements such as “well Science and reason can’t explain this… therefore God Exists” which are poor proofs. True skeptics would be open to a serious argument. The problem is that it takes a leap of faith to believe in the supernatural.