I think I partially grasp what Navigator is going on about, and I think Tommy has a piece of it too. It's a so-far vague concept I've been seeing in various places in the past few years, and I plan to start a thread about it soon. The title I have in mind is, "People who don't believe in actual gods but think atheists are missing something."
The something, in Navigator's case, appears to be a certain kind or level of appreciation of the subjective. Skepticism, in general, downplays the importance of the subjective, partly on the basis of doing so being good practice for scientific endeavor. Skeptics, for good reasons, hold that subjective experiences are not to be taken as evidence that, for instance, we have extracorporeal spirits that go zooming around having adventures in another world when we dream. At the same time, few if any skeptics are saying that dreams don't occur, although one has to read carefully sometimes to avoid getting the impression by mistake that they are.
Here's an example of a question that might be used to explore a hypothetical individual subjectiveness-valuation variable: You are administering a treatment sourced in evidence-based medicine (a prescribed pill, let's say) to a patient who lives in a culture in which incantations and prayers have long been associated with medicine. You know, because studies have shown, that in such a case, if you tell the patient to recite an incantation and perform a few hand gestures before taking the pill, he is likely to report more improved health from the treatment. Do you so instruct the patient? Possible answers include:
- Yes, because whatever works.
- Yes if it helps persuade him to take the pill, no if he'd take it anyhow. Reporting improved health, due to the placebo effect, doesn't mean his health would really be any better, so the ritual is pointless as long as the pill goes down.
- No, because encouraging superstitious beliefs is detrimental in the long term.
- No, because cynically pandering to his beliefs in this way would be exploitative or racist.
However, the degree to which skeptics and atheists downplay subjective experience in their own lives is easy to overestimate from an external viewpoint, especially when arguments are going on about what is objectively real. The Spock Fallacy stems from this; so do certain outside views of classical Stoicism, that misinterpret avoiding over-reacting to emotions (while actually striving to experience them fully) with suppressing or not feeling them.
The larger mistake, that appears to be leading to a lot of miscommunication here, is associating this quality that's inimical to some aspect of Navigator's approach to life, having something to do with under-appreciation of the subjective, with atheism. It's not a characteristic of atheists in general, nor limited to atheists. There are legions of theists who do the same thing; they're often the ones claiming the figures and symbols of their religious myths really do exist in the concrete, or insist there is objectively right and wrong dogma, with no room for individual interpretation, abstraction, or judgment.
Consider, for example, the following options that could be added to the list of answers above:
- No, because the patient needs to come to Christ, not do Satanic magic.
- I wouldn't give the patient the pill in the first place, because the only true healing comes from God.
What I think is happening, then, is that Navigator is characterizing something that some people do, as a lifestyle or personality trait, as it were something that specifically atheists do. This is generating a lot of heat and not much light.
Respectfully,
Myriad
