I've never witnessed an atheist making such an argument. Usually it's the theists getting hung up on him because they are used to appealing to authority figures and project.

Great example is when people refer to Richard Dawkins' books as proof that there is no god

As was said earlier by someone else, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

There are also many definitions of god, and Dawkins engages with all of them. Dawkins is much more strongly opposed do theism, than deism for example. He engages with philosophical ideas about god.

Dawkins argues that we don’t need god to explain the universe, life, or anything else. He further goes on to argue that religious belief in god trains people to be irrational fanatics, which damages society, progress, science. In the end Dawkins says, there’s no proof for the existence of god, and that we would all be better off without religion. However IIRC Dawkins recognizes that religious belief can have positive psychological effects.

The new atheists have become their own subculture with its own values. The online new atheist scene also attracts people who love to argue, provoke, and pick fights. Contrarians and skeptics are not the same, but can overlap.

There‘s also a pipeline that goes like this: new atheism > anti religion > anti islam > white nationalism

The issue here is that the left has abandoned its opposition to religion, especially regarding Islam, in the name of anti-racism and intersectional identity politics. So these people are rejected by the left and driven to the right.

You tell them to fuck off because you engaged with it and found it completely meritless/abhorrent, not because you're above engaging with it. If they present new evidence for lizard people, you should skeptically examine the evidence and tell them to fuck off when it doesn't hold up.

You don't have to engage with them and waste your time debating them, but you absolutely should be open to challenge your own positions.

Confirmation bias is an incredibly stubborn human trait (and a near universal one at that). The particular issue this post is engaging with is called attitude polarization: two groups of people diverging more and more in their opinions despite being presented with the same evidence.

Why are humans like this? I think it’s a survival trait that people conform to the opinions of their in-group and are reluctant to let go of opinions that are most central to their world-view. They’ve already invested a lot in both their in-group and their world-view, so rejecting all that is more costly to them than rejecting the truth about some particular fact (that they may not even care about that much).

When you consider that beliefs and openly held opinions have different costs and different benefits depending on which group you belong to, it becomes a lot less obvious that abandoning a position is the right move.

It’s a good counterpoint. In my first example I definitely have thought about it previously.

In my second example it’s clearly stupid so I’m not going to engage with it. I haven’t thought about it previously (I have now !), but I don’t think that makes me an intellectual nepobaby.

Almost, the two parts that make it problematic to me are:

1. It can be used used as a low-effort defence
2. The defence is a personal attack

Yep, whole lot of people echo what they read in they're social media echo chambers. Feelings and opinions thrown around like they are facts.

Granted this problem has always existed but I believe the overuse of the internet and social media has made it worse.

Prime example, bunch my friends who would definitely be Democrat voters (just bring it up as they are very much not maga supporters), despite me bringing up research showing the very clear negative side effects that Facebook had on people even 10+ years ago... Every last one of them ignored it and each one thought they were the exception.

Yeah "it came from me or my people" means that it is harmless and everything else is Satan. There's probably a psychological breakdown of that somewhere.

(Flip that assumption and you have the plot for half of all horror movies)

Gentle as lambs and subtle as serpents, as they say.

People who can't rotate an apple in their head. In the context of the video - people who don't interact with abstract arguments and think you're talking about specific things or people instead

Not really all that interesting. It's just the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox wearing the cape of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

Without the fancy jargon, the argument is "All people must be free to do whatever they want (the paradox part they don't say out loud is: except form a consensus)"

If you resolve the paradox, what you're left with is exactly the same world we have now: everyone is free to do exactly what they want, including forming a consensus (that may restrict the freedom of the individual)

It's a philosophical sleight of hand that's easy to hide in grandiose and virtuous rhetoric. I've seen it often from the Libertarian Right, and I suspect so have others on Lemmy.

I recommend you check out analytic idealism instead:

https://philarchive.org/rec/KASAIA-3

Thank you! And very interesting, from My end it's showing 4 upvotes and 4 downvotes. From your end is it showing a negative score? If so, I bet those votes come from instances we've defederated, because we don't federate with realist instances like lemmy.ml. Those people over there are really big on objective reality, and we aren't interested in arguing with them.

Anyway, sure thing! I wrote an antirealist manifesto which you can read at https://soulism.net. But here's the elevator pitch: You're not a body, you're a mind. You're made of information, and so are your perceptions. So is the world you inhabit. Your subjective view of the world is a reconstruction, created from raw data by your brain. Babies don't know how to do that, they have no idea what's going on, they just see colours and shapes. You had to learn how to see objects, how to see a world. So what if you learned differently? What if you took the time to examine the way your perceptions are formed, and made conscious choices about how to do it? That is a thing that can be done, and the colloquial term for such is... magic. Rewriting reality through belief and perception. I would argue that we have an ethical duty to use magic to ensure we are perceiving the world in a way that is just. We need to be active agents in our subjective universe so that we can't be manipulated into doing harm.