Alex O’Connor. Thanks… but No Thanks

You make me surer than ever of the foundation of spirit, Christianity and God.

New Patronising Atheism and Agnosticism

Thanks and Think Alex. Thanks because the weakness of your foundations when discussing God provides a compelling contrast to the strong foundations you seek to smash or rather dissolve for those who bother to examine them.

Think Alex, if you do become Christian (precisely because of examination of the evidence and philosophy) all the regrets for your work against Him. Ok, presume you won’t, never (or maybe adopt Islam instead). You seem like a personable and polite chap but are you sure your intellectual cleverness and conclusions justify your proud certainty? You do seem to be honestly moving forward in fairness in respectful dialogue. Good manners are always nice. Respect! But you have communicated constant disestablishing doubts that unsurprisingly echo the establishment worldview no matter how mild they were done (to your credit).

Dawkins became somewhat of a liability for New Atheism in the stridency of his fundamentalism and his lack of wisdom outside the domains he is clever in. Recently he said he did not know what transhumanism was exactly for example. God help us. But his crustiness is giving way to a range of other advocates of atheism that seem much more reasonable. Alex O’Connor is one. I don’t follow him but have listened to some of his principal arguments. But when I get fed a consistent diet by the algorithm I can deduce what the system wants to tell me. The Empire of Scientism leads to the empire of the mind and of the made-mind as I have explained in AI-Govnerveance.

Having listened to O’Connor there are some obvious questions that arise apart from the obvious success of such views. Why are atheists so obsessed with God? I believe in God but would not have gone around shouting about it save I am being constantly pestered and prompted by people who are not happy with that. Maybe I should have. I will now. Why did they not leave us alone? Why did people like Alex O’Connor go on for so long promoting atheism and securing hundreds of millions of views if God does not exist? Atheism is not a mere reactionary mode but implicitly regards belief in God as reactionary. My father used say about politics that you can say anything in opposition. Atheism has become not merely a quiet position or strident one but a constant deconstructive technique in the permanent revolution. You are not allowed to believe in God and will not be allowed, save it suits tactical manoeuvring of the military-industrial complex which is intensely materialistic though fed by strange Promethean philosophies in the Empire of Scientism. I cannot surmount the reactionary paradox underlying his obsession with negation by gentle but persistent intellectual fluvial erosion without understanding the new world he is piping us towards. This is not neutral and O’Connor’s anti-foundational foundations should be presented because reason as a tool is insufficient to describe a system he represents. I see the process of permanent critique that Alex is presently amplified in as being part of the mono-revolution.

I listened to Alex O’Connor and saw a clever and coherent rehearsal of the standard arguments advanced by opponents for centuries and indeed millennia. Many were presented more recently by Enlightenment, revolution, communism and anarchism. Yet he presents some arguments that are so incredibly unpersuasive, for example in refuting First Cause arguments, that they can only be described as sophisticated (in its proper meaning) or interesting, but are empty bamboozling in the end. I think he will regret some of his arguments as his views mature

The problem with activist atheism is that it only has to attack and assault perceived weak links in arguments without alternative explanations or full consideration of the context and assemblage of ideas which they undermine. It has cleverly captured the burden of proof. Most of Europe up to a few centuries ago believed in the otherworld, the spirit world, God, an enchanted universe, Christ and so on. What atheism did, often in parallel to violence in revolution, was to say that the believers had the burden of proof. The phenomenological continuity of belief was ignored and the debate was dragged into a domain incapable of providing satisfactory answers. The atheists allied to power walked backwards into a bunker and coaxed many with them. Science never had the methodological power to prove issues beyond the scope of its methodological power. Mathematics could never produce the certainty it claims as good mathematicians know. Yet the demeanour of certainty is confused with the reality thereof. Certainty is a show not a reality. The more the atheists act certain the more the unwary confuse appearance of certainty with its actuality. Alex’s wears his modern epistemic style well as sophisticated casual, even when he bewilders with rapid-fire acausal mumbo-jumbo.

Atheists may then find that the tricks don’t work. They have posed no solutions. Science cannot answer certain questions nor claim certainty. But the fare is poor. Then we get something like the agnostic phase. This disingenuously or ignorantly purports to be more open. But it is worse. If we examine the origin and meaning of the term it is a dreadful progression. It is much more honourable and defensible to be an atheist who just finds it hard to believe. Let me be frank, when a person has been so intensely slow to acknowledge something (like Alex) I can only get a little enthusiastic when they appear to make some little concession towards the obvious. Enthusiastic of course etymologically meant full of the divine but they knocked that out in the constant spiritual sanitisation. Promotion of scepticism especially, as part of a generally deconstructive, counter-hegemonic stance like anarchism, can always appear right somehow. But that is without having any responsibility for the construct or absent any coherent plan for construction or reconstruction in its stead. The promotion of disbelief may have benefits for advocates but has consequences and costs in removing the comforts that even early communists acknowledged. There is a different emphasis in the work of earlier communists than that of Trotsky who melted sacred objects down on the pretext of famine relief after having fomented fake discontent in 1922. Apart from throwing of monks into icy rivers and all the other horrific stuff done by atheism, the true aggression that inspires much was revealed. There is a huge difference between honest intellectual non-belief and activist atheism supported by counter-hegemonic processes trying to create materialist utopia, whether Bolshevik or Big Business, and I argue they are twins. Where did the former come from? London, New York, Geneva, Vienna and Paris.

Agnosticism is the opposite of gnosticism (not Gnosticism) and is thus wider. It is opposition to spiritual knowledge as well as God, despite misrepresentations of the term. It was coined by Darwin’s Bulldog Thomas H. Huxley, teacher of Wells (founder of the New World Order). It was defined by Huxley. He said it was used in contradistinction to the way ‘Gnostic’ was used in the Church. But Gnosticism was a heresy. So he must have meant the narrower idea of knowing. However all such knowing in the Church must be supported by doctrine and has never been so limited. If you follow his descriptions he was saying that you are not entitled to believe in anything you don’t experience or for which you don’t have evidence. By that he clearly meant scientific evidence. So it amounts to this. You must prove God exists scientifically first. People say - but we mean this now, i.e. I am just waiting for more proof, like a bus or a date or a letter. It ends up being the same thing. The definition is defiled by its origin. Huxley was a constant critic of God, Christ, belief and the Church without demonstrating a scientific basis for his arguments and relying on scepticism. At the same time his scientific studies contributed to scientific racism. He set out to eradicate the spiritual dimension in science. His hypocritical and logically inconsistent scientific gnosis was political more than philosophical. He was fighting for power. What is so admirable about this politicised, illogical position? How is it an advance? In reality it is a further movement away.

Then I see Alex described as an agnostic atheist. I know about the provenance of that term. But logically it must mean that I cannot believe something I don’t have evidence for or experience of and I don’t believe in God. Or I don’t believe in God and also I won’t believe in God unless I can know God by experience or evidence. But because I have accepted scientific proof is the standard of knowing and believe in the authority of science, I keep on believing in it instead, knowing its method will never suffice to prove God exists, when it has worked so hard to excise that hypothesis and all other conceptual building-blocks that would make such a foundation exist. You effectively say I do not believe. I do not know. Furthermore I never will when I join those stances together. Self-sealed into this bunker, only certain about about my infidelity and incredulity, the only thing I am willing to be definitive and certain about is that other people’s fidelity and credulity is not only unbelievable and unknowable but they too must equally have no good grounds for believing or knowing. Even if they derive comfort therefrom, my certainty of my uncertainty makes me certain of my entitlement to undermine and attack their position or certainty relentlessly lest my unbelief and persistence of the enclosing method that supports it is threatened. Are you sure you know who the dogmatic one is?

Like with enthusiasm you can say that the word means something different because it is misrepresented by people who sound like you. But why are you agnostic/atheists such sticklers for how everyone else (who were minding their own business) thinks, but cavalier about what you believe in - especially when you won’t really tell us? Then we are meant to respect your certain worldview as you realise materialism like God for you is a cod.

Agnosticism firstly rejects experience as others noticed at the time. Then it forces people to defend their claim with tools that cannot answer the question. It is asking someone to prove they are warm with only a wind-vane. The tool is epistemologically, ontologically, methodologically and metaphysically inadequate to perform the philosophical or practical function autocratically assigned to it by activists who have a pre-determined position. It is not an honest position of saying I don’t know but a redefinition of knowing with an impossible transitional demand of proof. It’s a rigged game. The table tells lies. The dice is loaded. The deck is stacked. The house and the Man wins before man loses.

Alex would have inspired many, no doubt, with his atheistic certainty. But politeness and questions does not a philosophy make. Presumably if he is more agnostic he will go down a darker bunker and lead others. But he also seems to be citing more religious texts recently. You can’t have it both ways. You know Shakespeare said that the devil can cite scripture for his purpose. I do not impute imps to Alex. But I do feel sorry for him even if he stands in a reflected glow from the sacred instead to suit his aims. One day he will realise that the system does not care about him or virtually any human. It does care about God because belief in God impedes control of people. I hope by the time he realises this that the fabric of Christian culture is not so utterly corroded it does not matter anymore, even if he has realised that matter is not all that matters.

It seems to be intellectually permissible and respectable then to shift in a post-materialist world to a respectable position of panpsychism. I believe, or am fairly sure, that this is merely a prelude to AI-posthumanism. It may prove worse in its unintentional or intentional philosophical deception. It is a product of an inability to explain away the spiritual world with a fundamentalist materialist position whilst providing an intellectual holey substitute or simulacrum for God. Having found a hard problem of consciousness through cutting off spiritual consciousness, philosophers must now also find a pseudo-scientific, physicalist, vague, philosophical, stop-gap substitute for God of the gaps they claimed was left after success of their science.

Misusing anthropological knowledge from imperial expeditions calculated to better manage aboriginal people, atheistic materialists found a projection of gods and projected that observation onto monotheists who did not think in the same way. Then they projected a limited scientific world onto the universe in an unsatisfactory way instead. There is a certain left-brained insanity in the philosophical reductionism that is useful for satisfying military needs, but not for human minds. Materialists gouge our eyes out and wonder why we have a problem with seeing. Then they tell us they can picture the world they have erased subject to the limitations they have induced. Their projection is self-reflection and re-produces the deadly emptiness of the mind-set which got them there. When you are cut in a Procrustean way into a reduced redux of humanity they tell you (having severed your feet) that you are unable to run as fast as the machine they have made and this proves your inherent inferiority and correctness of their assumption.

I kind of miss the obvious smouldering spitting hatred that Dawkins showed when he was annoyed about issues such as The Virgin Birth, particularly when Hinton presents a cold calculated dismissal of God and significance of humans under the pretext of presenting a protection for us non-special entities from the force he promoted whilst apparently blissfully unaware of the obvious precarious nature of the system he profited from.

You can say, there - that was my purpose. Honest debate. Stress-testing. Unfortunately many less familiar with the game of philosophy will have been taken in by the shell game. No thanks mate.