The fact u told me 1000 giraffes drowned in the Atlantic made me believe. The fact ppl need to say they’re aetheist proves that they feel the need to disprove the existence of nothing.
Next you’ll be telling me whales are taking over the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Because we’re discussing it, which was exactly the caveat I made!
Your logic is odd. We talk about stuff that doesn’t exist all the time. By your logic, since I like talking about Archer or the characters on Arrested Development or Santa Claus or whatnot, that means I think they might actually exist? Huh?
No - he thinks that at that point they leap into existence - scotland now has tigers - there are giraffes floating in the atlantic, whales have taken over the congo.
I really hope this special guy never reads Lovecraft…
Can this god be a glowing speck of carbon that passed near Earth a loooong time ago?? Could a god be dust carried by solar winds that happens to make galaxies? Does the god in question have to do anything consciously? Must it have emotions? Arms? A functional anus? And why can’t it be a combination of these horrid examples I made up plus thousands of others anyone else can come up with?
I feel that if anyone puts human aspects into a possibility of a god, then they’re a believer, period. Just not the Yahweh/Apollo/Loki kind.
This thread is amusing though. Just like I say “replace ‘God’ with ‘Zeus’ and see how it sounds,” if we replace agnostic/atheist/agnostic atheist/apatheist with baptist/catholic/Jew, it’s a very familiar conversation. And it goes nowhere in either direction.
I haven’t once mentioned that I believe in God yet u seem to feel the need to say your an aetheist and disprove the existence of God. It’s u who’s giving him existence.
Yes, this god thingy has no arms, emotions, not even the functional anus I mentioned and makes all it’s creations by being dust carried by solar wind.
Sorry, Wee, you fell into it. I said people who give the possibility of a god human characteristics are believers in such a being. Why did you say this creature is male? Your male god has long hair, short hair, biceps? In a body cast??
What’s your favorite prayer? It’s a psalm, isn’t it?
I’m only using the examples I hear from other people and posters about this creature which absolutely does not exist.
A word gets coined to serve a purpose not to generate reality.
If the Scottish government started passing laws based on the belief that tigers were roaming the alleyways of Anstruther then I suspect “atigerist” would come into use by those opposed to said laws. note - this says nothing about whether such massive, stripy, caledonian felines actually exist.
Plus, your analogy fails at the first hurdle because you are referring to a creature that is already well defined and known to exist. Princhester nailed it perfectly elsewhere on this thread when noting that the inability of theist to even define what their gods are is a major problem for them. Not a problem for us atheists of course. We can just take the default position of not believing in that ill-defined and nebulous concept along with the infinite number of other potential and as-yet-unstated theistic constructs.
At the point when their god* is *defined well enough to take a view on it I will do so. (you’ll note however that theists typically fail to be specific…in fact theology is pretty much the art of non-specific specificity)
This is something that has shifted for me. I’m atheist and used to stay quieter about it. But, staying silent cedes the conversation to people who people who don’t. Some theists broadcast very loudly, and in the US the conventional wisdom is pretty much theist. I agree with Hitchens that “religion poisons everything”, and I don’t want others, particularly young people whose beliefs tend to be more fluid, to think that all of us in general, or I in particular, endorse theism.
What do you do when your government decides to mount a rescue operation for those poor giraffes? I think you might want to mention the fact that they don’t exist.
The reality is that a massive number of things that happen in the world are predicated on the actual, for realsies existence of God. We constantly alter our public policy based on the Bible, which kind of requires God to actually exist in order for it to have any value.