Posted: Jan 20, 2020 6:09 pm
Jayjay4547 wrote:Fallible wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:Hermit wrote:
Just speaking for myself: This is my 73rd post in this thread. Not a single one of my previous 72 attempts to deny that there can be such a thing as atheist ideology. I just keep asking you to define it, which is something you steadfastly refuse to do. As felltoearth wrote (using other words): You can't discuss - let alone deny - the existence of something that lacks a definition.
Atheist ideology is a set of notions about the world
List them.
List of ideological notions held by atheists:
(a)We not in relation with anything more creative than us.
(b)There is nothing special about human beings
(c) There is no purpose in evolution
(d) We are apes with smarts.
(e) Evolution is a bushing out of life into a variety of forms.
Each of these notions has played a part in messing up the human origin story as told in terms of evolution.
A summary of the specific set of hooks you hang your coat of "atheist ideology" on at last. The biggest problem with them is that most of it is not "ideology" in the strict sense of the word unless you insist on using its original - now archaic - one. The word was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in a 1795 monograph that culminated with the publication of his five-volume Eléments d'idéologie 20 years later. He conceived of ideology as the "science of ideas".
It did not take long before the meaning of "ideology" changed. Napoleon Bonaparte dismissively referred to his opponents as ideologues and Karl Marx condemned all hitherto existing ideologies (as far as he was concerned there were basically only two, which he labelled as the feudal and the capitalist ideologies) as concepts aimed at hiding or justifying the exploitation of the masses. He went one step further by denying that communism is an ideology for two reasons: Firstly, it was alone in not being aimed at exploiting anyone. Secondly, and more importantly, communism was grounded in nothing but the real, material relations of production. It was therefore in no need to resort to figments of the imagination.
The twin characterisations of ideology as something odious and "all conceptions of reality entertained by anyone that differ from mine" remain with us today. I prefer more neutral definitions, such as the one provided by the Cambridge Dictionary: a set of beliefs or principles, especially one on which a political system, party, or organization is based and the Wikipedia's a set of normative beliefs and values that a person or other entity has for non-epistemic reasons.
Now, if you agree with those definitions, we can start discussing your list of notions that in your mind define "atheist ideology" in detail. If you disagree, we're stuck with discussing the meaning of "ideology" for a bit longer.
Over to you.