the mouse wrote:

theropod wrote:Pure weapons grade bullshit, the mouse. You are making adjudications based on absolutely nothing but your opinion.

Of course it is my observation, based on reading the variety of works and writings of atheists, both in places like this, and else where, in various books and articles, etc., and in particularly in regards to atheists who might label themselves as rationalist, and whose aesthetic dimensions are aligned with those of prominent atheists figures, like Dawkins and PZ Myers, and Coyne, etc....

I think there might even be a reason for it. I think the more one is transfixed by the notion of love, the more he borders on the edge of becoming religious. The more one ventures from seeing love as merely a thing of pleasant feeling, to more of something of profound power and beauty, the more mystical his views of life become. An anathema to any self-respecting atheist.

Lol..?

Why the arrogance? You come here with an opinion about people and tell it to those people. Those people tell you you're wrong. You just reiterate your previous opinion and muse about why things are as you think they are. If you really were interested in how atheists feel about various things, you'd ask them and then actually heed their responses. Then perhaps you wouldn't post such embarrassing nonsense.

the mouse wrote:I never claimed atheists were only moved by the cosmos, but appear in the various appeals to aesethics, to feel a greater a sense of wonder and awe in regards to scientific observations, the cosmos, etc... than in regards to relational aspects.

This reminds me of Kantian aesthetic philosophy. The Sublime is a different category of awe found primarily in the vastness of Nature - Kant, of course, a deeply religious man.

Poets, on the other hand, Byron, Shelley, Keats - without having them here to ask they all seem to have been atheists.

Well the Romantics were writing at a time of incredible change, revolution and questioning of the prevailing "norms" so it's not surprising. Wordsworth too, see my sig.

I never knew Wordsworth was so into triangles.

Oh, you!

Here's the great Wonder, and there's a star, but I have to admit that I'm not very moved by it. Is it because I'm an atheist, or is it because I think his music is pretty meh?

virphen wrote:I never knew Wordsworth was so into triangles.

Newton dug alchemy!

one of my favorites is from William Blake - Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

He was a (unorthodox) Christian, seeing angels in trees and such. Great poet though.

Fallible wrote:

Why the arrogance? You come here with an opinion about people and tell it to those people. Those people tell you you're wrong.

The problem is the many claims of me being wrong, were based on misrepresentation of what I wrote. I.E. if someone pointed out I was wrong, because atheists have feelings, and are moved by love, than it wasn't a real objection to anything I've said. Since I never claimed they didn't.

There was some valid objection, that appear to at least understand my point, which I hope to address later today.

Argument by omission.

bullshit.

I hate everything except science because I hate God, and therefore people.

the mouse wrote:

Fallible wrote:

Why the arrogance? You come here with an opinion about people and tell it to those people. Those people tell you you're wrong.

The problem is the many claims of me being wrong, were based on misrepresentation of what I wrote. I.E. if someone pointed out I was wrong, because atheists have feelings, and are moved by love, than it wasn't a real objection to anything I've said. Since I never claimed they didn't.

There was some valid objection, that appear to at least understand my point, which I hope to address later today.

You're wrong.

virphen wrote:

The Final Voyage.

and a prose poem from my collection The Joy of Science:

Omen

Hyakutake passed the Earth 18,000 years ago and with it came the end of our most recent ice age; when our hunter-gatherer ancestors were still enthralled to the migration of wildebeest. We had mastered fire, but could barely knap a flint. Agriculture was still just a dream.

Most recently and brilliantly it passed in 1996 and in place of the ice age it took our Carl Sagan from us. I envision him riding Hyakutake outward from our small blue planet, urging the comet onward, zooming toward the Oort cloud with a galactic smile on his face.

And during that most recent pass, gravitational perturbations shifted and extended Hyakutake’s orbital path such that it will not return for 40,000 years. Given the state of human affairs, I must wonder if we’ll be here to greet it.

The Mouse wrote:Most of the time when an atheist shares something they find sublime and beautiful, it's typically something in regards to the cosmos, or the sciences, like Dawkins "moved to tears" by the Hadron Collider.

Really? Can you actually provide any statistics to this effect, or are we expected to simply take your word for it?

One sentiment that's very rare among atheists, is that they rarely ever raise anything human to this level of wonder, no act or action of man, of love, of motherhood, of friendship, is ever raised to the point of overwhelming us like the stars do.

Which directly contradicts your previous contention. Tell us again how the Large Hadron Collider isn’t ‘an act of man’…

And it's not they don't find these human things beautiful in their own way, but they rarely ever raise it as a source of wonder and awe to the extent of the cosmos.

Again, got any statistics to support this?

I’m minded of the Hitch here, who wondered aloud how anybody could read a page of Stephen Hawking (a human) or see images from Hubble (an ‘act of man’) and still be impressed by a burning bush…

I've always found this odd, and this has left folks who share the aesthetics of Carl Sagan, Neil Tyson, Dawkins, etc..., as those that seem so alien to me.

Of course, and that’s entirely because you commit a category error from the get-go here, failing to notice that among the things that those three men vaunt above all others are the fabulous achievements of the human intellect. All three of them repeatedly talk in awed tones, not just in the things that science has discovered, but also in the astounding fact that we were able to develop the tools to discover them. These are precisely the things you say that atheists rarely do, because you fail to recognise what constitutes an ‘act of man’.

And rather than sharing some half thought idea as to why I believe this is so, i'd rather confess that I don't really understand it.

Well, you certainly didn’t share any half-thought idea, because it’s as transparent as a lattice of elemental carbon that no fucking thought went into this post whatsoever.