You mean people who stubbornly demand some actual proof for the existence of psychics and ghosts? How is that “dogmatic” or “cultic?”
That’s it! Thank you, sir, for clarifying something that has bothered me for quite a while.
Oh, and a link to an article that covers quite a lot of what has been said in this thread:
I have to disagree with OP. Atheism is a religion. An Atheist has the positive belief that there is no God.
Not always, but quite often an atheist is a pain in the ass about their positive beleif in much the same way an evangelical is a pain in the ass about their beliefs.
Atheists might object to displays of religion whether personal or public, consider themselves by obnoxious names like “bright,” think other people exercising their religious beleifs are somehow oppressing them, and feel generally convinced about the superiority of their beleif set and be inclined to share or express that feeling to people who feel differently.
An agnostic on the other hand, simply doesn’t beleive in God. It’s not that they actively fervently disbelieve, they just don’t beleive, or particularly care.
Obviously, people differ about the definition here. But even if we define atheists to only include those that positively assert that there is no God, that’s a pretty long way from saying that this constitutes a religion. Merely having an opinion about religious claims just isn’t the same thing as being religious. People have opinions about all sorts of things, including metaphysics, but it would be absurdity to call these all religions. Every person would end up with about 30 or 40 different “religions” each.
That’s not what agnostic means, unfortunately.
That’s a pretty sloppy analogy. It’s not a question of “if christians killed, blame it on christianity, if atheists killed, blame it on atheism.” It is rather something different when you have a christian army wearing a bunch of crosses and taking back the holy land for good christians. In constrast, Stalin killed a bunch of people, not really for their loyalty to god but their lack of loyalty to Stalin.
As Apos says, an agnostic is not defined by “disbelief in God”. Sorry to hijack this a bit, but i’m an agnostic and just as committed to that as you all are to your religions and atheism 
An agnostic believes that there may be a god, or gods - that it’s possible. A theist looks at the evidence, and says, “Yes, I believe there are Deities/a Deity”. An atheist sees that same evidence and says “No, there are no deities”. An agnostic look at the evidence and says “I can’t be sure either way - it’s a possibility”.
I’d class an agnostic as potentially being religious - in my case, for example, if I looked around and came to the conclusion that there was a deity, then i’d believe in it. Vice versa is true, but trickier - I don’t believe it’s actually possible to prove that no deities exist, but I consider the possibility. In my case, I suppose i’m actually closer to being religious - i’m more willing to consider that a deity exists because I don’t believe it’s possible to fully prove one doesn’t.
Just to add to the debate, though, I definetly do not believe in the christian God - I would believe more in Zeus, in fact, than the christian God because I believe it’s possible to logically disprove the cGod exists, whereas, from what we “know” of Zeus, it’s more possible he could.
Kinda illustrates my point about the positive belief set and sense of superiority and mission that I think goes with atheism.
To me, being mildly religious is the best of all possible worlds.
Religion is an extremely useful thing.
I’ll give you an example that I’ve cribbed (tell me where I cribbed it and win a kudo)
A submarine sinks and everybody is lost.
As a religious man I get to say “44 souls were trapped beneath the waves until the air gave out and they passed away. May god have mercy on their souls.” I know what to do. I have a whole context set up for how to deal with the situation, and I have a whole set of expectations for how everybody is else is going to deal with the situation. These expectations are ritualistic, comforting and they give everybody a role and something to do, and all contribute to the process of dealing with the loss.
An atheist gets to say “44 meatpuppets ceased function. Anybody got a smoke?”
And then, I guess we all just around awkwardly.
It also seems to me that religious people are generally more tolerant of the horrible personal failings that we all have and display from time to time. Tolerant may be the wrong word. Maybe I should say that we have a system in place for recognizing and dealing with these failures.
I’m not trying to insult anybody by labelling them, just trying to define my terms. I think religion is one’s beleif set towards God (or Gods as the case my be) If one has a beleifset, one has a religion. Similarly if one has a political beliefset one has politics. If one does not, he is “apolitical.”
If one does not have a beliefset towards God(s) one is agnostic.
Sure it is.
What am I missing?
[Sigh] For about the millionth time on this board, agnosticism is an epistemological position, not a theistic one. Agnosticism is the belief that its is not possible to know whether God exists. It is not (as is so popularly believed) a sort of neutral or undecided position on the existence of Gods. That would be atheism.
Scylla, what are you, new around here? Are you kidding me with those definitions? Have you never entered one of these discussions before? Here’s a hint for you, religion is not defined by a theistic position. Zen Buddhism has no theistic position. Does that mean it’s not a religion? How about Taoism? Janism?
Well, we’ve always had to listen to the fundies tell us about going to hell and all that, maybe it would be a good thing to hear from the other side for a change?
Lol!
I would think an atheist would be more likely to say, “44 people died in a tragic situation”. Why wouldn’t they? Atheists don’t think people are just meat puppets. Well, at least I don’t. The term ‘puppet’ would be far more appropriate to believers, I think.
Yes, ‘burn the witch’, ‘stone the sinner’, ‘behead the infidel’, etc. Real great system you got going there.
I see myself as a true agnostic and I hate atheists with the passion of a thousand suns so I don’t really like to get mixed in with them at all.
To me, atheism is all about expressing confidence in a problem that we know extremely little about and may never know. That problem is creation and the origin and the fate of the universe. I believe it has been stated elsewhere as the “creator” problem. Atheists tend to state that there are no miracles and yet I see our very existence as the ultimate miracle. Where did it come from? The creator problem states that a creation must have a creator. I see the universe and I see a miracle. I read about relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory and then humbly realize that not only don’t I know everything but maybe no human may be able to understand it. We are just a few evolutionary steps out of the jungle after all. What makes us think that we can confidently understand the origin and the fate of the universe?
I open God up to a much more liberal interpretation than most people do. I try to understand it through physics mainly. Atheists tend to focus on issues with existing religions and that doesn’t seem that relevant to the problem at all to me. We are still sitting on a miracle and there is some explanation other than “You just are, you die, that’s it”. I am not going to let someone tell me that my antique house “just is and always was” because they couldn’t find the original records for it. That is something that an ant in an ant farm might think and I lump atheists into the same intellectual category as that.
I don’t know the answer. Nobody does, but there definitely are things that are fundamental to the universe that we don’t understand and I don’t like dense anti-intellectual pricks glossing that over simply by criticizing what existing religions do or think. That is a lot of confidence from a glorified ape who may never be able to understand the whole story at all.
;j (sorry, we seem to lack a “rolling on the floor speaking in tongues” smiley.
Why yes, we do.
The claim that rationalism and an evidence-based mindset constitutes “religion” was drawn, quartered and put out of its misery in another quite recent thread.
But I see it has been resurrected. :dubious:
How about this, then;
As a religious man, you are able to say “44 souls were trapped beneath the waves until the air gave out and they passed away. May god have mercy on their souls”. They go to heaven, and things continue from there.
An atheist would be able to say “44 souls were trapped beneath the waves until the air gave out and they passed away.”. They would not go to heaven. They are dead, and gone. Their souls do not continue to exist.
So, who is it that’s going to be more sympathetic, here? The people who believe they’ve gone on to a nicer, happier place, or the people who think they’re gone, and thats it?
Pretty fucking weak argument you have there.
Well, I think most words can be picked apart till they lose precise meaning, but Iike the OP, I’m not accepting atheism as a religion.
Shodan (and now Scylla) wants to define religion as having an opinion about God, and boy, that sounds like a definition devised purely to support the position that atheism is a religion.
I have trouble believing that a belief system is a religion if it does none of the following:
Place emphasis on leading a morally correct life.
Offer supernatural explanations for earthly events.
Promote feelings of revence or personal peace.
None of those are a requirement for someone professing atheism.
And as has been asked several times, does having a very strong opinion that Zeus is completely imaginary and being willing to discuss it for hours with a (hypothetical) believer constitute a religion? God, I don’t think so. But I do think that anyone who says it does is just kidding himself (or lying) to score debate points.
I’m mostly atheist (there are a lot of deities I don’t know enough about to specifically rule out) and when I discuss stupid religious beliefs (such as, saying “under God” isn’t state sponsored religion) it doesn’t feel any different than determinedly denouncing any other type of idiocy. Call me a sentimental fool, but I think religion should be more than just arguing vigorously about god stuff.
It should be a more special than that. ;j
~Baal~
I think of them more as philosophies.
Your definition is probably more accurate than mine.
Its not about Zeus. It is not about any existing religion. Both groups are staring at a problem, the origin and the fate of the universe and everything in it. No one has the answer to that.
Now let me turn to you:
Where did the universe come from and what is going to happen to it? Was it always “just there” like “turtles all the way down”? Are there multi-verses? String theory is pretty strange. What do you think of that? Infinite universes present all kinds of interesting problems including reincarnation.
It doesn’t speak well to a person’s intellect to just declare one day, “that’s all there is, I have solved the problem in my own mind.” based on nothing but intellectual laziness and false confidence. Any idiot can walk away from a complex problem saying there is no solution or simply picking apart other seemingly incorrect solutions from others without any elaboration.
Atheism is a lazy intellectual approach to shooting down other people’s interpretation of a complex problem and then somehow concluding that you have solved it yourself based on that.
Not really. I’m just Catholic, and my religion tells me that it’s neither nice nor proper to presume such knowledge, nor share such judgements if we’re unfortunate enough to make them.
Evangelicals fundies make me as uncomfortable as evangelical atheists.
Well, if you’re an atheist, than why is it tragic?
As opposed to say, communism under Stalin?
Frankly I think we make a fallacy when we attribute this shit to religion, or lack thereof. We’re human beings. We suck. We do these things no matter what.
But in the meantime, we recover the bodies, we get to have a wake, a service, the consoling of the families, the discussion, the mourning, the burial…
and then we all go to a bar and get drunk.
Why are you sympathetic? If they’re gone, what the fuck does it matter?
I was trying to be humorous, too. It’s a new discussion topic for me, and I don’t have extremely evolved ideas, so I’m just throwing stuff out there.
Because they’re dead? Because their families will miss them? Because, as we have but one life to live, it is very precious?
Before you reply on this line of argument, look at it like this;
People die, and live on.
People just die.
Which is the worst out of these scenarios?
Now tell me why you think it matters that they’re dead.
Fair enough. Sorry I got a bit carried away.