Yes I am saying the opposite of that, “atheism” is just a particular class of religions. Some religions posit many gods, some just 2 gods, some 1 god, atheism posits 0 gods.

Perhaps the only difference between atheism and the others is that atheists are so boorish and conceited that they think that they just believe what is true because they deny that assaying metaphysical truth is even a thing you need to do or can do at all.

This is related to the fact that in modernity atheism is the default class of religion for the masses. Before that for a thousand years the default class of religion was monotheism, and before that polytheism. With atheism unlike the other classes of religions, you get a natural tendency to deny metaphysics whereas metaphysics is inherent in the others. This matters a lot when we’re talking about how the masses engage with things.

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gjm11 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> If you’re an athiest tech worker living in a major city, you still have a religion, it’s just a random mishmash of various things (like Marvel movies and Huberman podcasts) rather than based on something more intentional.

> atheists are so boorish and conceited that they think that they just believe what is true because they deny that assaying metaphysical truth is even a thing you need to do or can do at all.

What, all of them? You don't think it might be possible, e.g., that someone might grow up holding some sort of theistic beliefs, and be more intentional about those beliefs than the people around them and decide that actually there are probably no gods? That some people might arrive at an atheistic position precisely by "assaying metaphysical truth"?

(Or does something only count as "metaphysical truth" if it's not atheistic?)

> in modernity atheism is the default class of religion for the masses.

I'm not sure what you mean by "modernity" to make that true. Something like 60% of US adults describe themselves as Christian. Likewise for people in Europe. No doubt a lot of those people aren't very actively and enthusiastically Christian, but that doesn't seem to me to be what "atheism is the default class of religion" would look like. And the figures were much higher, say, 50 years ago, and if you're reckoning "modernity" to start after then then you've got a very eccentric definition of that term.

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monideas an hour ago | parent [-]

That there is G-d or at least Divinity (more than one god), is a direct logical consequence of existence. It can be reached and understood purely through logic, the essential “trick” being to recognize that when trying to understand the fact of existence, you always end up asking “ok so what came before that”, this is inherent to the structure of human reason. “Where does the world come from, it comes from the Big Bang, and where did that infinitely small point of matter come from? It came from universes in the multiverse colliding with one another (M-theory), ok and where did those multiple universes come from?” Etc

Aristotle’s Prime Mover is the first articulation of this, and there are others that take different tacts such as Thomas Aquinas and Descartes.

Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d I.e. that G-d is the god described in the Bible who wants particular things, has a particular relationship with existence and with Man. You cannot access that understanding or knowledge through pure reason, the only thing you can understand/know through pure reason is that there is G-d. This is the reason, by the way, that G-d created existence because G-d’s nature can only be understood/known by experience (as in experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition).

Notice that I am saying “that there is G-d”, not “that G-d exists”. G-d is “prior to” or “above” existence, existence “comes from” G-d. Understanding this and understanding Aristotle’s Prime Mover are the same phenomenon of understanding in the mind.

Also by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment, not just 50 years ago but post-Industrial Revolution/post-urbanization is another useful epoch to consider.

	▲	gjm11 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		(I remark that my comment that's the grandparent of this one challenged a couple of specific claims you made about atheists, and that what you say here makes no attempt whatever to address those challenges, preferring instead to argue that atheists are wrong, which is entirely beside the point. What you claimed is that atheists are boorish, conceited, oblivious to metaphysics, and given to believing random things rather than "anything more intentional"; even if your first-cause argument for "Divinity" were perfectly valid it would not establish that any of those things are true about atheists.) > That there is [...] at least Divinity [...] is a direct logical consequence of existence. No it isn't. The sort of infinite-regress argument you describe has, as you say, been around since the time of Aristotle. It's been a bad argument since the time of Aristotle too. 1. Obviously you can keep asking "OK, and what came before that?" or "why?" or whatever. Equally obviously this doesn't prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality, because the mere fact that one can keep asking such a question obviously isn't the kind of thing that could possibly prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality. It might be a different matter if there were some guarantee that we could sensibly always keep asking such a question, but there isn't. At some point the answer might be "literally nothing came before that" or "for no reason". We might find that unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us. 2. You haven't actually made your argument explicit, so let me try to do so. "We can always ask what came before. This can't really go on for ever, so at some point we will have to land on something about which we can no longer ask that, quod dicimus deum." There are several serious problems with this. (a) It could, in fact, really go on for ever. Maybe there just is a neverending supply of predecessors when we ask "what was before that?" (including when we ask "what was before that whole chain of predecessors?" and "what was before that?" and so on). You might find that unsatisfying but, again, reality is not obliged to satisfy us. (a') It could go on for ever without being infinite. Maybe everything is cyclic in some sense. Again, arguably unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us. (b) It isn't actually true that if we land on "God" as an answer then we can no longer ask "what came before that?". We might choose not to, but only because there's a tradition of not asking that question or of shutting it down as illegitimate when asked (as e.g. it commonly is by small children when they're told that God made everything). There are religious traditions in which gods were made by or born from earlier gods or earlier proto-gods. The "Abrahamic" tradition is very much not one of those, but just as you can ask "so where did the multiverse come from?" you can ask "so where did God come from?". (c) There could be a point beyond which there is no answer to "so what came before that?" without that last (or rather first) thing being anything remotely like a god. For instance, maybe (i) when you keep asking "what came before that" literally, referring to time as we experience it, you eventually get to some point that's "earliest" in the same way as the south pole is "southernmost" and there is nothing "earlier" in the universe, and (ii) if you then say "so what came before the universe?" in some broader sense the answer is "nothing did". Then the universe plays the role of "first mover". Once again, you might find this less satisfying than putting a god in that role, but reality is not obliged to satisfy you. Or maybe you might say that in-some-sense-prior to the universe are the laws of physics but those are even less godlike than the universe. (But also less like the sort of thing that needs anything to have "come before". Yet again, you might find it unsatisfying for there to be laws without a lawgiver but yet again reality is not obliged to satisfy you.) (d) No argument I've ever seen for why a god is a better candidate for "thing we stop asking 'what came before' about" than the universe has seemed any good to me. Maybe you've got a better one than I've seen, but that's not the way I would bet. > Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d (I remark that the paragraph beginning with what I've just quoted was edited into monideas's comment while I was writing this one, without any acknowledgement that anything had been changed. It's only by chance that I happened to see the change.) That grotesquely understates how little any first-cause argument says about the nature of the thing it allegedly proves that there is. You can call your "first cause" by any name you please, "God" included, but calling something a god doesn't make it one. (I reiterate that I don't actually think that any first-cause argument manages to establish the existence[1] of anything. But even if somehow it did, it would tell you far far too little about that thing to justify attaching a name like "God" to it.) [1] I know that you prefer to use "exists" more narrowly and to say that "God is" rather than "God exists". Feel free to substitute "being" or some more complicated phrase; what I mean by "existence" here is "the thing that theistic first-cause arguments are claimed to establish about God". > by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment Then it is hilariously false to say that in modernity atheism is "the default class of religion for the masses". The great majority of the masses in the "Western" world were (at least in name) Christian at the time of the Enlightenment and at every time since until very recently.