Blurts & Spasms

You would need to narrow that down a bit, IMO, perhaps to a specific area of knowledge. There are so many myths “widely circulated as truth” it would take several pages to list them all. Here is a list that just scratches the surface:

- That hair and finger nails continue growing after death (they don’t)

-That capitalist markets are responsible for our greatest innovations (they aren’t — publicly funded research is)

- That material wealth makes you happy (it doesn’t)

- That atheism isn’t a faith-based religion (it is)

- That humans are the only species to use tools or symbols (we aren’t)

- That Catherine the Great died trying to have sex with a horse (she didn’t)

- That freedom is an individualist construct (it’s not — to actualize “freedom” requires collective agreement, or it can’t exist)

- That love and hate are opposites (they aren’t — indifference is the opposite of both love and hate)

- That cracking your knuckles leads to arthritis (it doesn’t)

- That humans can easily make rational, logic-based choices (we generally can’t — we’re almost always relying on emotion to make our final decisions and act on them, and then we just post-rationalize them)

- That body heat escapes mostly from our head (it doesn’t)

A quick search on the Internet also located this: Which Urban Legends Are True?

From Saifuddin Merchant:

Why would you think that atheism is a faith-based religion? Could you also clarify what do you mean by the term religion and faith.

I disagree with the statement but am curious to know why someone would think that!

Cheers"

It’s a potent myth that atheism isn’t a faith-based religion, and plenty of folks believe it. However, by any definition, atheism exhibits all the characteristics of other faith-based religions — really in all but a few inconsequential things, like showy architecture and elaborate ceremony. But to arrive at this understanding usually requires a specific semantic framing, which goes something like this….

Consider that, objectively, the only rational position a person can hold about deity is agnosticism. One can perhaps lean in one direction or another (towards theism or towards atheism) and still remain rationally fixed in the agnostic spectrum. But once one fully crosses over to either theism or atheism then, to paraphrase Rumi, rationality is left at the door.

To elaborate extensively on this may seem a bit tedious to the uninitiated, but suffice it to say that when I assert that “there is no God” to the degree that I am utterly confident and comfortable ridiculing and scoffing at those who assert there is one, and indeed I actively support propagation of my own beliefs as the only truth, and then seek to create a sort of club of a superior-minded view whose members all share that inviable certainty and propensity to evangelize, well…I have basically created religion.

Why? Because these behaviors exhibit pedantic dogma, a purity test for membership, a desire to “prove” the rightness of one’s position and win others over to the same view, and the maintaining of a persistently blind and irrefutable belief that willfully rejects any additional evidence (i.e. the question of God’s existence is settled). And ALL of this relies on faith (trust) in a faculty of reason that actually isn’t being rationally exercised — because of its rigid investment in the previously enumerated conditions (dogma, purity, imperviousness to evidence, apologetics, group identity, etc.). Ergo, if it looks like a duck….

Now, are there degrees of faith-based religiosity when it comes to atheism? Certainly, just as there are for other religions. We could even say that atheism’s religiosity can intersect with agnosticism (again, an agnostic who leans towards atheism, but who would nevertheless identify as an agnostic)…but atheism’s religiosity can also intersect with religious fundamentalism in its more extreme forms. One need only observe the ludicrous pomposity of some atheist vs. theist debates on social media to confirm this.

In any case, I hope that was helpful.