I think it is of the utmost importance that government define environmentalism as a religion!
That is the only way we will ever get the environmental propaganda out of our schools!
Some atheists even meet on Sundays at gatherings singing songs & showing the hallmarks of a budding religion.
As for this particular bit of opinion, attempting to explain origins is not evidence of religion, neither is worrying about possible outcomes. It's silly to try and re-cast everything as "just another version of what I believe, simply not the correct one." It's a childish game.
Atheists cannot prove that there is no God, they have to take it on faith.
“Every religion tells a story that frames its worldview. So does atheism”
So does Star Trek. But I’m not praying to Mr. Spock either.
…atheism isn't exempt from analysis or critique of its real world consequences. Atheism is a metaphysical stance -- there are no gods and no God, there is no intrinsic purpose to existence, there is no natural moral law, there is no accountability in an afterlife. Those are quite explicit and consequential assertions, just as the negation of those assertions -- that there is a God, that there is a purpose to existence... -- is an explicit and consequential assertion. Atheism lacks liturgy. It does not lack beliefs and consequences. It lacks belief in God; it does not lack belief in the intrinsic consequences of God's non-existence. As Nietzsche emphatically noted, if God is dead, everything changes....atheism is to sin as alcoholism is to angst. Stupor-- metaphysical or medicinal-- is a denial of reality and a denial of consequences, which feels good for an evening or a weekend.
- Michael Egnor
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First, nihilism can’t condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or those who fomented the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one. If there is no such thing as “morally forbidden,” then what Mohamed Atta did on September 11, 2001, was not morally forbidden. Of course, it was not permitted either. But still, don’t we want to have grounds to condemn these monsters? Nihilism seems to cut that ground out from under us.Second, if we admit to being nihilists, then people won’t trust us. We won’t be left alone when there is loose change around. We won’t be relied on to be sure small children stay out of trouble.
Third, and worst of all, if nihilism gets any traction, society will be destroyed. We will find ourselves back in Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature, where “the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Surely, we don’t want to be nihilists if we can possibly avoid it. (Or at least, we don’t want the other people around us to be nihilists.)
Scientism can’t avoid nihilism. We need to make the best of it. For our own self-respect, we need to show that nihilism doesn’t have the three problems just mentioned—no grounds to condemn Hitler, lots of reasons for other people to distrust us, and even reasons why no one should trust anyone else. We need to be convinced that these unacceptable outcomes are not ones that atheism and scientism are committed to. Such outcomes would be more than merely a public relations nightmare for scientism. They might prevent us from swallowing nihilism ourselves, and that would start unraveling scientism.
To avoid these outcomes, people have been searching for scientifically respectable justification of morality for least a century and a half. The trouble is that over the same 150 years or so, the reasons for nihilism have continued to mount. Both the failure to find an ethics that everyone can agree on and the scientific explanation of the origin and persistence of moral norms have made nihilism more and more plausible while remaining just as unappetizing.
- A.Rosenberg, The Atheist Guide to Reality, ch.5
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Scientism shows that the first-person POV is an illusion. Even after scientism convinces us, we’ll continue to stick with the first person. But at least we’ll know that it’s another illusion of introspection and we’ll stop taking it seriously. We’ll give up all the answers to the persistent questions about free will, the self, the soul, and the meaning of life that the illusion generates.The physical facts fix all the facts. The mind is the brain. It has to be physical and it can’t be anything else, since thinking, feeling, and perceiving are physical process—in particular, input/output processes—going on in the brain. We can be sure of a great deal about how the brain works because the physical facts fix all the facts about the brain. The fact that the mind is the brain guarantees that there is no free will. It rules out any purposes or designs organizing our actions or our lives. It excludes the very possibility of enduring persons, selves, or souls that exist after death or for that matter while we live. (….)
The neural circuits in our brain manage the beautifully coordinated and smoothly appropriate behavior of our body. They also produce the entrancing introspective illusion that thoughts really are about stuff in the world. This powerful illusion has been with humanity since language kicked in, as we’ll see. It is the source of at least two other profound myths: that we have purposes that give our actions and lives meaning and that there is a person “in there” steering the body, so to speak. To see why we make these mistakes and why it’s so hard to avoid them, we need to understand the source of the illusion that thoughts are about stuff.
-Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide To Reality, ch.9
Why on Earth does it matter what we call it? It doesn’t. That is unless you want to give it First Amendment religion protection. The specter of Hobby Lobby.
What most popular "scientists" like Tyson preach is materialism, which is a remnant of 19th-century philosophy that has nothing to do with real 21st-century science.
Many people are vaguely aware that the discovery of quantum physics in the early 20th century changed our understanding of reality profoundly in ways that are incompatible with what might be called "naive materialism". But what few are aware of is that within the past five years we've seen an even more profound understanding of the implications of quantum physics emerge that conclusively debunks materialism at its core. See Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism for a short video about some of this eye-opening information (with citations for those who want to dig into the published scientific literature).
The emerging reality is that real cutting-edge physics, not pseudo-science like popularized creationism, has already proven the existence of God. Few want to admit it, but science has been wrestling with that question by implication for the past century and the results really are in: Science can today prove the existence of God.
Now before anyone gets too jumpy, science has not proven any particular religion's understanding of God. And in fact, I suspect that many religions will find what science is actually saying even more disturbing than the babble that contemporary atheists spout. But at this point no one can really call themselves a scientist if they subscribe to materialism.
At least atheists are consistent when they reject “G-d the magician.” Can’t say that about everybody, now, can we?