Before you splutter your soup all over the floor, I better define "atheistic" as I mean it. But to give a concrete example, I'll take Arlo. Arlo can't be a pantheist AND an atheist. Believing that the whole of nature is the source of being and the source of value is what a pantheist does. Atheist has practically come to mean "non-christian deists" but it really means there is no god at all, or no good at all. It's all just random. Bob Dylan said "ya gotta serve something" and by this he means, every person must have a source of values. Where a person imagines his values coming from, is his god. If it's all just cosmic randomness, then cosmic randomness is your god. Cosmic randomness is your good.
It seems to me that people posit the good of cosmic randomness, in order to free themselves from imposed moral restraint. To be free is a moral choice. But how it works out, is that to such people, the self becomes the source of values. It's easy and tautological. I value what I value. It's complete and irrefutable on its own terms. Trouble comes in when you actually start in and asking questions like "who's this *I* you talkin' 'bout white man" and learn that your source of self-value is on a very shaky foundation. Ultimately, *I* is a social construct, therefore the source of values to a self-valuer is the social matrix into which they are born and raised. duh. That's always the way it's always been. But social matrices evolve and change. That's historical. And today we have a culture and society that brings children into a maze of social matrices, and say to them, "choose one". Without any over-riding way of choosing, except for parental preference - but usually they don't really have a clue. And to my mind, most conspicuous of all is that they are never given in training in how to do this choosing, how to figure out the kind of thinking it takes to even make such a decision, or analysis, and we let them wait until they get to college and try and be reprogramed according to the best thinking of the Academy there and then. The MoQ is opposed to all that. The MoQ says there are ultimately values, the source of value is undefinable, but the realization of value is possible in pure experience. This is a value, realized in individuals, that obviates the atheistic assertion that there is no ultimate source of values. Thus the MoQ can be anti-theistic, if it wants to, but it can't be atheistic without contradicting itself in the most blatant ways. Not that that's ever stopped anybody before.... Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
