Einleitung IV.2

Structures of a MAGNUS Consensus in the secular worldview

(1) A MAGNUS CONSENSUS emerges and grows, it evolves.

A MAGNUS CONSENSUS is not automatically provided. It arises when many cortically thinking people do the preliminary work for it. Reasoning and taking initiative results in the best-case scenario in a shared conviction and thus in ever-greater accord, so to speak a growing MAGNUS CONSENSUS

Accord between critical individuals usually has a long prehistory in which rational thinking has developed fundamental knowledge. Nowadays no one starts from scratch, especially in terms of reasoning without God. Mankind always stands in a long, fascinating tradition of critically thinking people. Thus, it is always necessary to fall back on the intellectual and philosophical history in which significant ground was covered with regard to forward thinking about the world and mankind without God. Shared convictions emerge even today due to their prehistory.

(2) A MAGNUS CONSENSUS is a result of logical thinking.

This historic substance must naturally be realised and updated with constant testing to verify whether or not that which was previously thought still has relevance today and if so what that relevance is.  Thus, a MAGNUS CONSENSUS arises out of tradition when the old obtains new logical validity in the zeitgeist. Current logical thinking decides whether there is consensus from the history of ideas and intellect, or whether the opposite should be thought in specific aspects. However, that which is forward thinking is always an important yardstick for one’s own thought.

– The individual can engage with this thought process, can help to carry and support it with his logical mind. He himself can provide impulses, but can also experience many impulses. Alone the open exchange of thoughts is an enrichment of personal life, especially the experience of jointly finding positive harmonisation in open questions.

– Naturally the individual can also reject it. Then he will specifically find another way, try other thought models. Perhaps he will find his own path that leads him to another consensus. All paths are open.  Even the path that leads back to a forsaken path of thought.

Everyone has and retains the right to think and believe what he will, particularly with regard to reasoning without God.  But those thoughts will only be convincing to others when they can be logically legitimised.

(3) A MAGNUS CONSENSUS is always open in a forward direction in a critical dialogue.

A consensus is only applicable until it is disproved in its reasoning and thus in its level of knowledge. Every secular consensus is therefore subject to criticism that is critical of theoretical knowledge and science, i.e. every instance of reason that as a matter of principle rejects and dispossesses itself of religious and dogmatic claims. The Christian faith phrases it thusly: Credo quia absurdum est – I believe precisely because it is contrary to reason, because it is absurd. Almost all religious truths are built thereupon and are held firmly behind the high walls of this basic principle.

Secular consensus to the contrary is only possible with reason and not against reason.  Therefore, the history of secular thought is in particular also the history of falsification.  Falsification means to officially declare as false knowledge that which was previously thought to be true. Secular reason first recognizes that a previous claim is false.  Thus, it does not desperately cling to the knowledge; rather, it searches with all its power for a new reason-based answer, for new logical knowledge. Therein lies intellectual openness. Reason must search as long as it takes for it to obtain proof of a better understanding. If that takes a long time, then there is simply no new answer in the mean time.  For critical reason, answering and living with a falsified claim regarding an open question is not a solution. It is then better to say: I do not know.

Many, in particular the religious, prefer to continue living with falsified knowledge. They stick to the old, do not have any courage for the new.  That means that from top to bottom their perceptions of reality often are not true. They assert them nevertheless. In contrast, a critical person can live with open questions until proof is provided of a new logical answer. By the way: Even that answer is not necessarily definitive; even it can be falsified, open to forward progression.  The critically thinking person, especially the atheist, in principle lives in a consciousness that is open to forward progression.

(4) A MAGNUS CONSENSUS aims for community.

Shared thinking about consensus naturally creates communities, not necessarily a community of those who have similar or the same levels of knowledge, but rather a community of those who think similarly or the same. Atheism must show here that the modern man and woman can also live as autonomous beings without God in a free community and in solidarity.

Pierre Bayle

Pierre Bayle, one of the first great European philosophers of the Enlightenment, wrote his famous sentence in 1697: I can only image a community of atheists. Back then, he shook the slumbering Christian Western world with this assumption.  He was met with an appalled exclamation: Atheists! The French Enlightenment (Diderot) followed this exclamation in pursuit of a first violent break of the intellectual paternalism of the churches and with it the release of the autonomous individual.

From then on, reason without God changed our world from the ground up. We positively live from the acquisitions of the resulting secular civilisation. Mankind became free to believe or not believe what it wanted. However, over three hundred years later Bayle’s vision continues to shock wide circles of middle-class society: A society of atheists!

Atheists must still prove their positive community skills. In the face of the discord between the Christian confessions and divisive Christian social and world policies, that sounds almost macabre and absurd. However, it is also a sharp exhortation to atheists to finally organise themselves in terms of public spirit, meaning first and foremost searching for the MAGNUS CONSENSUS of their atheistic identity. Only in this way will they find acceptance and have a constructive effect amidst the current rapid social changes.  ATHEODOC offers a basis for implementing such a social ideational realisation process.

(5) Every convincing MAGNUS CONSENSUS therefore provides a chance for a socially competent future.

Liberation is always liberation in a forward direction, always constitutes future chances, the chance to have a future. The atheist can comprehend and realise this chance to have a future, because it is precisely he who moves from the back to the front when he turns away from religion in his intellectual liberation: {ut1Existance is not the life you live. Existence is the life yet to live in all its possibilities. This life yet to live is always forward thinking, directed toward the future.  So live!

This is precisely the goal of the atheists‘ MAGNUS CONSENSUS.