Sunday 8 May 2016

Summary of four worldviews: 2. Spiritual atheism

SPIRITUAL ATHEISM:  reality is a  meaningless mixture of  natural and supernatural experiences.

 Creation of universe: it was not created.

Duration of universe : eternal, since it was not created.

Future of universe: eternal and without overall direction or purpose.

Afterlife:  unknown, good or bad. 

Basis for universal morality: none. Depends on your own whim, your social environment, your ancestors, or whatever some particular demon,  ghost, 'angel' etc.  happens to tell you.

Hope for individual: all depends on luck, how well you are able to use the abilities you have been dealt and how well you are able to exploit others or whatever magic your  spirit, 'guardian angel',  etc. decides to offer you. Hope is only a state of mind.

Fears of individual: illness, accidents, poverty, natural disasters.  Fear of loss of friends and relatives. Fear of evil spirits, ghosts, vampires, witches, extraterrestrials etc. and afterlife.

Free will:  Yes.

Social order: only sustainable in the long term by despotism since without it there will be chaos.Usually turns into a totalitarian regime with  worship of some kind of demigod (e.g. Hitler rose to power in a regime where Christianity was despised and belief in the occult was growing if not widespread.)

Justice: purely a relativist  construct  in a meaningless reality, unless perhaps the spirit world has its own moral absolutes which have always existed.

Truth: no absolute truth to aim for. What we call truth is that which works, and that depends on who is in power or on messages from the spirit world.

Science and technology: would not exist since under spiritual atheism it  has little to do with truth. There is no reason to expect order in the laws of the universe and so no impetus to look for them. (Materialist atheists still expect underlying order out of habit but there are already signs of this failing, e.g. model dependent realism and irrational cosmological models designed to circumvent the reality of the Big Bang space-time singularity.)

Being written are summaries on deism and Christianity.
see also
Summary of four worldviews: 1. Materialist atheism

John Sears
author

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cosmik.jo@gmail.com