563. Where Are The Apistics?

563.   Where Are The Apistics?

In entry 432 (APISTIA Is More Than Atheism Plus Skepticism) I explained, why the correct label for my complete absence of any belief is apistia, which is more than atheism plus skepticism, as compared in entry 365.  

There are many web pages, forums and groups of and for either atheists or skeptics.   But when I googled apistia and forum, I found nothing.    There are lots of Greek language pages containing this word, there is even a beautiful Greek song called apistia.   

But I found no forum of people, who are so free from any belief, that they consider apistia as their shared common ground of similarity.    

The clearer someone including myself gets aware of who one really is, the less often one finds likeminded people.   Knowing oneself well can be an ingredient of intellectual loneliness.  

 

When skepticism is used to evaluate the belief in a specific deity or set of deities, it leads a rational person to atheism.   But there are atheists, who are no skeptics, and there are skeptics, who are no atheists.  

An atheist is literally just someone without a god, without the belief in any deity, which is defined as an entity with clearly described attributes of traits and powers.    This does not include any information, why someone is nor how he has become an atheist. 

Atheism can be the result of someone's maturing rationality overrides the child's belief in an elusive deity.    But it can also coexist with irrationality:

• Someone may have grown up in a culture, where irrational beliefs do not include deities.  
• Someone may have experienced a personal disappointment of how the deity has treated him.   Discarding this specific deity as unfit to rely upon is not a general rejection of the possibility of a replacement deity.
• Someone may imitate an admired role model's atheism without any real comprehension of this concept.  

Such varieties of atheism do not preclude irrational beliefs like those in homeopathy, dowsing, astrology, reincarnation and chi.  

 

Some skeptics restrict the application of their skepticism as a method to the prospective scrutiny of whatever claim they encounter.    But they do not automatically apply it also retrospectively upon those beliefs, which they had been brought up into, before their maturing brain was rational enough to learn scientific thinking.   

Therefore there are skeptics doing excellent work debunking fraud and woo-woo while they have never given up their religious beliefs.    There are even those fervent religious people, who claim to be skeptics, by applying pseudo-skeptical methods on atheism.   

I am wondering, why there are so many non-skeptical atheists and non-atheistic skeptics, while real apistics are so rare.     

I can think of one possible explanation:   

Non-skeptical atheists and non-atheistic skeptics seem to me as if they are people attempting to get the best of two worlds, even though the worlds are incongruent.

They want to continue to benefit from the emotional and mental crutches supplied by irrational beliefs acquired by their residual gullibility.    But they also want to feel good about themselves based upon a self concept as being rational and of acting in accordance with it.   By discarding and fighting some especially weird beliefs they can have the illusion of being sufficiently rational, while they are in denial of their never overcome gullibility.