I'm an atheist, I don't believe in higher powers. I'm non religious.
My highest "placeholder" is a society that values all its members equally regardless of race, intelligence, physical abilities, sexual or gender preferences.
Without wanting to take sides on any culture war issues, I think that people from any political persuasion will agree that such higher powers do indeed exist.
I put it to you that much talk of "spirits" is far more aligned to the kind of higher power that you already believe in, rather than the dualistic way of seeing spirits as some kind of invisible smoke hiding inside living creatures. This kind of thinking is a curse of our modern age, handed down from the likes of Descartes and the "Enlightenment".
No, they don't. Unless you are actually talking about human power structures, in which case, of course we do.
Doesn't make us "religious".
> I put it to you that much talk of "spirits" is far more aligned to the kind of higher power that you already believe in, rather than the dualistic way of seeing spirits as some kind of invisible smoke hiding inside living creatures. This kind of thinking is a curse of our modern age, handed down from the likes of Descartes and the "Enlightenment".
I don't believe in spirits or souls or any of that. I'm an atheist, stop making up versions of "higher powers" or "something that exists outside of an individual, and across multiple individuals" and insisting I believe must believe in them. I assure you I don't.
I think that we live in a time where our understanding of what a spirit is, is very different to what religions traditionally believed. We only think of some kind of ghostly person which might be in some kind of other dimension which science has yet to discover. But I think that the way we think of Patriarchy is actually much closer to the way that a spirit was thought of in the past. It's not exactly the same, and it lacks some aspects, but it is a much better starting point for a secular person to understand what a spirit is, rather than childhood memories of caspar the friendly ghost.
So, you're proselytizing? This is pretty common reaction when I say I'm atheist. An assumption that I'm just ignorant as to the true nature of God or Spirituality.
Eh? Those are social phenomena, not supernatural forces.
> These are higher powers that are said to exist beyond any individual, and to be propagated subconsciously and perhaps even unwillingly by people?
Again, this is _society_. When people use the term "higher power" in the context of religion, they're generally talking about something supernatural, not just "large groups of people do weird stuff sometimes".
The word "supernatural" is such a worn-out rut of a word. It invokes paranormal movies or Caspar the friendly ghost. The very dichotomy of supernatural/natural is a recent, post-Enlightenment invention.
What I'm trying to do in this conversation is take something that exists in many people's mental framework, and use it to point to something outside that framework.
"Large groups doing weird things" must have a cause, right? And in an example like Patriarchy, no one claims that there is some king Patriarch sitting on a throne somewhere calling the shots. No, the story goes, Patriarchy is in all of us, even in women, perhaps even professing feminists. Patriarchy has real world effects, it isn't consciously controlled by any one person or group, it lives beyond any individual. According to some versions, Patriarchy is more than an impersonal force, it almost has some kind of malicious agency or intent. So much so that we gave it a name, like we do for conscious agents such as dogs or people.
I'm not trying to suggest that Patriarchy is a spirit, or that religious views of spirituality are exactly the same as feminist interpretations of Patriarchy.
I'm just using something from inside your framework to try to explain something outside your framework, because all the words designed for this purpose are worn out and no longer convey the meaning that they once did.
I can prove that institutional racism exists and patriarchy exist in modern society. The same cannot be said for a god.
Patriarchy and institutional racism are even ascribed agency, they "want" to hurt people, rather than merely being general forces such as gravity or a fluid flow.
If we are digging into the bedrock of "can a thought exist" then you are not worth talking to.