I expect they reject all other gods, like the Second Commandment tells them to. It is not even necessary to know their names.
If Hitchens is espousing anything right now, it’s probably neither A nor B.
Don’t forget to read your cites. 
A Religion religion is a belief system;.atheism isn’t based on belief, but it is no belief system.
Going up for Communion when you don’t believe it isn’t practicing a Religion. Even many people who profess to a certain belief don’t practice their beliefs but expect others to do so. If they truly practiced their beliefs there would be a more peaceful world. Many Christians call them selves that, but in reality they don’t practice all the beliefs just what they choose and also many Muslims do not practice the teachings of Muhammad.
I disagree completely. I was brought up without religion. Over time, of course I got to know people who were religious. My neighborhood was mostly Jewish and Catholic. I learned some tenets and found them wanting and conflicting and remained without any belief in gods. When did my lack of religion suddenly go from ignorance to belief? I had no belief when I was a child. I continue to have no belief.
The moment when you went from ignorance to belief is when you had a chance to reflect on the ideas–this isn’t complicated.
I have no opinion about thrackerwacks, because I don’t know what they are. I neither believe they exist nor believe they don’t exist. If you tell me thrackerwacks are clumps of sugar in sugar bowls, I’ll have a belief that they exist. If you tell me that they’re tiny invisible hippos that live in my washing machine, I’ll have a belief that they don’t exist. My state before I know what they are is fundamentally different from my state after I know what they are.
Similarly, my state of belief before I knew what God was is fundamentally different from my state of belief now that I know what God is. Earlier, I had no belief. Now, I’ve concluded that God is unlikely to exist.
I truly don’t get the motivation, or rationale, behind conflating these two states. But if you must conflate them, then I want to distinguish your coffee mug atheism from my reflective atheism.
Because it doesn’t make any sense. You’re saying I have a belief that god doesn’t exist. I’m saying I don’t have that belief. I have yet to be convinced that any god exists. I went from having no belief in gods to hearing about gods and continuing to have no belief in gods. My state of belief is unchanged. I have more information, but I continue to lack belief in any gods.
Otherwise, I have to have a new belief for each god I hear about. When I was a teen, you’re saying I had a belief about the Jewish god and a different belief about the Catholic god. As I learned more, I continued to pick up more beliefs, about Hindu gods, Wiccan gods, Islamic god, cargo cult gods. I’m saying, no, I’ve rejected all those propositions and continued with a lack of belief all along.
Ditto this for me and my wife and I think two of my siblings at least, this is not an uncommon situation.
I don’t think my lack of belief is fundamentally different now after having various gods explained to me. There are others out there have never been explained to me and maybe I know them only by a name, doesn’t matter. I have no belief in them now, after they are explained to me I may continue to lack a belief and I may even move further along the spectrum and might take a firm stance on the likelihood of the now-specified deity…the nature of my lack of belief has not changed though. I have no problem in my atheism being the same atheism as a coffee cup.
Question: do you believe that there is a blue coffee mug in my house? Do you believe that there is a tiny invisible hippo in my house? Is there any difference in your evaluation of these two possibilities?
Of course you don’t. General beliefs are possible. I believe that there are no leprechauns. That belief covers myriad possibilities: I believe there are no leprechauns named Spiff, no leprechauns named Madison, no leprechauns with mohawks, no leprechauns with pet dinosaurs, etc. Once the general category is defined, I can have a belief that no entities in this category exist.
Similarly, once the general category of “deity” is defined, I have a belief that no entities in this category exist. This belief of mine has a fairly high level of confidence. Of course I don’t need to come up with new beliefs for each member of this category.
This is a fair point. The statements in question excluded a middle. Instead of
A) “I don’t believe in god”
B) “I am utterly certain there is NO god”
It should be:
A) I don’t believe in god. This is the coffeemug approach.
B) I am pretty certain there is NO god. This is the Dawkins/Dorkness approach. It is a statement about the nature of the universe (that is, that it is a universe devoid of divine supernatural powerful entities), made with a high degree of certainty but admitting that it may be wrong.
The quotes I offered involved active dismissals of claims, something that babies and coffeemugs cannot do. Most atheists I know, including myself, make such active dismissals with a reasonable degree of confidence: we consider and reject claims about supernatural divine powers. That’s different from my belief about intelligent insectile aliens from the Betelgeuse system: while I don’t actively believe such aliens exist, I don’t dismiss claims about them, nor do I feel reasonably confident that our universe is devoid of them.
What is a majority of society thought the did exist (without any evidence) and insisted that public schools use taxpayer money to teach all children that they do exist?
What if they argued that vampires were against homosexuals and insisted that we pass laws preventing them from being married?
Would you still argue that the a-vampirists who fought against such measures were “just being dicks” rather than allowing such moves without arguing against them?
Even then, I dimly recall reading Dawkins making a claim equivalent to Dillahunty up above, i.e. that a non-interactive god is indistinguishable from a nonexistant god. That isn’t a statement of certainty against; that’s a statement of certainty that there can’t be a certainty. That we can’t know either way for such theoretical gods.
There’s more options. Of the top of my head, here are four positions that could all reasonably be called atheist:
- I’ve never become aware of the idea of gods/considered the idea of gods, so I lack any belief in them.
- I know how the concept of god or god is defined, but see no evidence for such beings; as a result, I believe with a reasonably/extremely high degree of certainly that they do not exist.
- I know how the concept of god or god is defined, and find it internally logically inconsistent and disproved by all available evidence; I believe that the existence of gods is provably impossible.
- I believe in the universal consciousness/Buddhist enlightenment/the Matrix, and on the basis of that sincerely held faith I reject the notion of a god.
For the record, I never said otherwise. I presented those as being two different types of atheism. I did not claim that they are the only two.
However, by changing it, LHOD seems to imply that *nobody *says “I am pretty certain there is NO god.” There are plenty of people who hold that view.
What? No, that’s the opposite of what I’m implying. I, and all the atheists I know apart from some on this board, say that. I even called that the Dawkins/Dorkness approach.
I made a mistake. It should have read:
However, by changing it, LHOD seems to imply that nobody says “I am **utterly **certain there is NO god.” There are plenty of people who hold that view.
But the Second Commandment implies that other gods exist, and that we should reject them as opposed to not believing in them.
Well, babies mentally developed enough to have a concept of god believe in several - those who appear and disappear, move it to different places magically, and feed it.
We don’t have to worry about aliens. There are many, many gods we have never heard of. We can start with the default position of not believing in them - more, with believing they don’t exist because a real god would make itself known - and then come up with reasons when someone gives supposed evidence for it.
A standard theist attack on atheism is that we can’t prove there is no god - but they seldom are able to define god precisely enough to prove anything at all about it. And they often keep changing the definition as its characteristics become more and more untenable.
Anyhow, my point, which you seem to agree with, is that the Dawkins position is quite reasonable. The absolutely certain stuff is a distortion of it made by theists unable to address the real argument.
One quibble. It is possible to lack belief in gods despite good evidence. This is what some theists accuse us of. Consider “The Last Battle” where the atheists see Aslan but refuse to see him. Or there is the sunsets are beautiful, so god exists argument.
We actually have much better reasons for lacking belief in the gods we’ve heard about.
For me, anyhow, when I’ve rejected n gods for very similar reasons, it was time to switch from simple lack of belief in any god to an active though tentative belief that no gods exist. It is provisional - give me good evidence and I might change my mind, but given the lack of evidence for any of our zillions of gods and the history of god belief, I think a belief in no gods is quite well justified.
I’ve been talking about this for nearly 40 years on various on-line discussion boards, and I’ve run into exactly one person who said that. And he was a nutter. Even fellow atheists said that.
I have heard plenty of theists accuse atheists of having this view though. Perhaps that is what you remember.