Opinion of internet atheists

[The Mikado]

People are posting me like I'm Scripture now?

Anyway, the point I was trying to make in that post was that I fundamentally reject the entire "Rationalist" ethos of the supremacy of, superiority of, and triumph of science.  Scientific thought, like any other school of knowledge, is fundamentally ideological, but science's advocates make claims to objectivity.  There is far more complexity and emotional depth to the human experience than Reason and Logic can ever plumb, wild waves of profoundly irrational emotions, forbidden desires, dark lusts, and crazed cravings that torment and madden us.  The Romanticists knew it and the ancients knew it, but modernity tries to reject it and compartmentalize and explain everything about us and the world we live in. 

Mystery, grandeur, the graceful, moral highs and the wicked, murderous lows of the human condition reduced to diagrams and technical terms in an attempt to crush the colorful fables and fascinating origin stories of yore.  I don't agree with "Christianity" on too terribly much, but on a sentimental level, its recognition of human wickedness and human divinty, of the chaotic, dark mess of the human spirit, is far more compelling than the vision of crushing us into mechanistic contraptions  of pumps and joints and electric signals and chemical triggers.

In other words, what I oppose isn't atheism, it's Rationalism and the scientific paradigm itself.  It refuses to keep to itself and expands into fields it can't comprehend, intruding on and smashing literature, music, philosophy, history, economics, and others beneath its weighty models.  I wish to keep that which I prize most out of the hands of the Rationalist Positivist ideologues.

I've become quite fond of William Blake lately.

[The Mikado]

Mikado, I don't think rationalism seeks to crush or negate the importance of human emotions. I think the need for rational thought is perfectly compatible with acknowledging that the human mind is much more complex than what science can describe of it. And I consider myself a hardcore rationalist.

That's just it, though.  The very desire to know or understand the Universe is a fool's errand, especially if you reject the metaphysical and the philosophical to myopically focus on the physical Universe around you.  It's not just the human mind, talking about stars as hydrogen slowly fusing into helium producing a nuclear fusion reaction that generates massive amount of energy may be true for one value of truth, but sealing that as the only definition and ridiculing others for solar worship or the view that the sun is Helios pulled by a chariot is narrowminded in the extreme.    The Rationalist viewpoint tries to freeze out all approaches to truth that don't revolve around the Scientific method as not legitimate avenues to truth: in the same vein as Christianity, it is the ultimate in small-mindedness to say that one approach is right and the others are empirically wrong and prima facie absurdities. 

I have no problem with science itself, I have no qualm with it as one approach to knowledge, my problem is the outright rejection of the irrational and, in fact, turning irrationality into a derogatory term.  Many of the most valuable parts of human experience and the universe in general are inherently irrational, chaotic, unorderly, and downright messy.  Rationalism deprecates old wisdom and proclaims the value of new "knowledge," and attempts to see further and further into the tiniest particles, the most distant corners of the Universe, the creases of the human brain, and the most deep depths of the Earth's core, but loses the knowledge of the human spirit, the soul, in the process, and ridicules what it can't understand, abuses the "irrational."

Irrationality is freedom.  Freedom from the formalized structure of the scientific method, freedom from the hypocrisy of scientists who proclaim that they are working to better mankind while they perfect weapons with which to better kill vast swathes of mankind, freedom from the arrogant idea that the old gods of yore, whether they be named Zeus or Thor or Jesus, will be replaced by a new pantheon of Newton, Tesla, and Einstein. 

[The Mikado]

But we are "mechanistic contraptions of pumps and joints and electric signals and chemical triggers". That being said, there is way, way more to be learned about the human brain. And it is best learned through the scientific method!

That's just what my problem is, though.  Science denies the validity of types of truth other than scientific truth, and values systems other than Rationalism.  What I'm rejecting is the notion that scientific "truth" is inherently more valuable or valid than other ways of interpreting the universe.  If that involves rejecting "reality" itself then so be it.

[The Mikado]

Al, what's your point exactly? Because if your point is "science can do bad things", then you probably believe we are all idiots, since only an idiot can be unaware of that.

...or maybe you were just trolling.

The point isn't "science can do bad things," it's that "scientific 'progress' is not inherently good, but its advocates take it to be as such and make little effort to philosophically justify that contention."  There's an arrogance involved in people attempting to bring order to chaos or whatnot and neglecting to realize that a substantial amount of humanity finds refuge, beauty, and grandeur in that chaos that they're beating back and don't want it to vanish.

Put simply, in the battle between trying to further understand the universe and accepting life, nature, and the universe itself as chaotic, beautiful, and terrible unknowable mysteries.  I side with the chaos over the order, with celebrating the unknown over the efforts to "know," and I resent the idea that "science" is ideologically championed as "a good thing" that should be blindly furthered without questioning.


EDIT: I should clarify.  I keep seeing goals like "furthering human knowledge" given without seeing even an attempt to justify why "furthering human knowledge" is in any way a desirable goal using any sort of moral philosophy.  Science's advocates have become arrogant enough that they neglect to use any sort of philosophic framework to justify the pursuit of more "truth," which, like all information, is quite possible of having drastic, lethal results.  Astronomy improved trajectories for rockets and ballistic missiles, aeronautics allowed for the deaths of millions in aerial bombing raids, chemistry allowed (and allows) for mass poisoning, biology for the intentional cultivation of illness, and physics tampers with the fundamental building blocks of the universe and unimaginable power.  Why is this allowed?  How can scientists justify their "right" to further research in these fields?  Where is the philosophic justification for why the furthering of knowledge in these fields is at all desirable?  Science used to be a subdiscipline of philosophy, which was as it should be.  Its divorcing from morality and its complementary status to metaphysics has produced a field allowed to tamper with the very foundational building blocks of life without any sort of extensive soul searching as to why this quest to further humanity's understanding of the universe is even a desirable goal to begin with.

[The Mikado]

The problem, again, is the treatment of the advancement of "knowledge" qua knowledge as an inherent good that doesn't need to be justified or rationalized when the pursuit of said knowledge is hardly disinterested and is quite often directly motivated by the inclination to murder, maim, torment, and subjugate humanity.  Foucault lays out very clearly in The Birth of the Clinic how the scientific community engages in an effort to lay claim to specialized knowledge in order to aggregate its own power and sideline its competitors (in the case of The Birth of the Clinic, that would be every variety of alternate medical provider, but in a larger context we can include alchemists, astrologers, clerics, and others who formerly had a claim on specialty knowledge).  This pursuit of information about how the human body works aids efforts to monitor people straight to their biometrics and genetic sequences: it will not be long until your insurance provider or medical provider has access to  your most intimate genetic details.  This quest for knowledge also puts the more and more dangerous tools in the hands of states, both weapons of war and the information network that accompanies it.  The satellites above our heads allow for 24/7 surveillance to a degree unimaginable 25 years ago, the drones through our skies allow for quick removal of those distasteful to authority, the medical technology allows for vials of virulent pathogens like smallpox once removed from the human experience, weaponized and ready for a second round of fatality.

There's little to no effort to recognize, let alone defend, how the scientific community's best friends are military researchers and developers.  The presentation of the idealistic quest to expand the human frontiers of knowledge covers a cynical desire to gather information for the purpose of allowing easier subjugation, control, and slaughter of human beings, and in fact said slaughter are often referred to as part of an earlier era, unfit for our enlightened modern times.  This convenient attitude slanders our ancestors by unjustly accusing people  the Medieval or Antiquity periods of crimes they didn't commit and conveniently attempts to whitewash how scientific learning and knowledge have made the modern era more horrific and inhumanly, grotesquely brutal than those that preceded it, through notions derived from the scientists of an era not too distant of racial inequality, sterilization, and the inhumanity of one's fellow humans, not to mention justifications for the inherent inferiority of women.  Thinking that the scientists of today are somehow more enlightened and disinterested than the politically-motivated scientists of a hundred years ago and their justifications for racism and sexism is naive in the extreme.