You completely missed the whole point of that section by cutting away the last paragraph.
Do you really believe in intelligent design? We’ve seen organic molecules form in labs. We’ve seen evolution take place. The case for evolution has been made. What evidence do you have that evolution is not happening?
Intelligent design is a faith-based position because it ignores evidence and logic and posits the existence of something we have no evidence for; to wit, the designer.
Define the term ‘belief’ as you use it here, if you can. I think you’re defining it differently from everyone else.
I really don’t think we need a government office that watches video from everyone’s bedrooms and bathrooms and then sends out Men in Black armed with electroejaculators if you don’t jack off frequently enough.
What more do you want though? That’s really all it is. There’s millions upon millions of pages (and now electronic data that makes it easy to read) written about God and a huge, wide, incredibly interwoven history going back thousands of years that religious scholars are still untangling. But it all boils down to faith in God (at least WRT Christianity). What more do you want from atheists than ‘no’.
We don’t have that kind of history. We don’t have thousands of years of conflicts over which version of atheism is more right. We don’t have a rich sense of community from weekly meetings, and probably most importantly, since atheism and faith don’t really overlap, there’s not much else to say unless you want to get into a “why/why don’t you believe”. It’s not like two people from different religious backgrounds having a discussion or debate.
I’d have to see one of these lectures or book tours, I’m really not familiar with them. I’d assume they’re basically echo chamber/preaching to the choir type things. Of course, someone like Bill Nye speaks on this topic from time to time. You might want to go check that out, it’s on youtube and only a few minutes long. It’s about the importance of raising your children as atheists, at least WRT (IIRC) science.
Okay, first of all “my condition”, what would my condition be, exactly? I’m not the one that believes in God. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything else that one could believe in like that and everyone would just accept that. “Hey, see this rock, yup, it was made by an invisible person”.
It really doesn’t matter that me being an atheist won’t change your mind. All we’re trying to get you to understand is that you (people of faith in general) made the claim that God exists, the onus is on you to prove it. Typically “we’d” be happy to disprove something, but “you” made a pretty outrageous claim and it was set up in such a way that it can’t be proven false which means you have to bring forth evidence. Till then, even though they will, no one can tell me I’m wrong for saying “no”.
TLDR
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What bothers me is when atheists then turn around and refer to atheism as a mere “lack of belief.”
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What would you like me to say?
The science fiction author H. Beam Piper wrote a book Lone Star Planet in which settlers from Texas mainly had developed a political system on their world that was, shall we say, unique. Elected politicians did not recieve protection under the law that ordinary citizens did. They were fair game. You could shoot them, stab them whatever, and it was not a crime as it would have been with anyone else. Of course, they were free to fight back. Seperate courts handled cases in which a politician had been killed or injured, and the only real charges that could be brough against assailants was “endangering bystanders” or something of the sort.
New Texans figured this kept government from becoming too big or entrenched, that it would make elected officials work for what they truly believed to be the best interests of the public. One scene early in the book has a young man being given back his knife after having killed a politician who had introduced, in the legislature, a measure for shudder an income tax!
I guess I did, and on re-reading it, I’m still a little fuzzy on what exactly you are asking; whether my faith in my bank statement is the “same kind of faith” as a belief in God. I guess there can be a range of different things we call “faith.” But in most applications, the term “faith” equates to “trust.” I trust my bank statement because it’s always been right before, and because I know that computers are generally reliable for accounting-type tasks. I may also believe that there is good reason for me to trust in God; even, perhaps, evidence from the physical realm, such as the amount of information in the aforementioned DNA molecule. Is that the “same kind of faith?” Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t think it qualifies as credulity.
You are wrongly equating intelligent design with creationism. They aren’t the same thing. There are people who believe in both evolution and ID. ID merely looks at the evidence (again, sticking with my example of the vast amount of information in DNA) and concludes that it is more likely that there is intelligence behind this particular phenomenon than that it arose through random processes. ID is compatible with creationism, but it does not imply creationism. The “designer” could very well have used evolution as a tool.
And, by the way, it’s a very, very large gap from forming organic molecules to producing something containing the amount of information in a DNA molecule. If you are suggesting that, because intelligent scientists working in a lab environment can produce an organic molecule, that proves that vastly more complex DNA molecules can arise through utterly unguided random processes, then I must respectfully suggest that you are the one operating on faith.
Again, you are confusing ID with creationism. The whole point of ID is that it relies on evidence and logic; it looks at something that appears to be designed by an intelligence, and concludes that, gee, maybe it really was designed by an intelligence. The evidence for the designer is in the thing designed - or that strongly appears to be designed. That’s why I said that, in my opinion, the burden of proof shifts to the atheist at this point. You have a thing that looks for all the world to be designed, yet you claim that it has not been designed, but arose through random processes. Now the evidential ball is in your court.
Hmmm, now, I used the word “belief” there exactly because I thought it would be a word we could all understand without confusion or conflict. I avoided the word “faith” to avoid confusion or offense. I guess I’d define “belief” in that context as something like “what one thinks to be true of the way the real world is.” Numerous best-selling books have been written by the so-called “new atheists” in recent years. What would you call the content of those books if not the “beliefs” of the atheists writing them? When atheists form associations, or even “atheist churches” that I previously cited, on what are these associations based? Wouldn’t it be their commonly held “beliefs?” That’s pretty much what I meant. Is that somehow different from the way you understand the word?
Not at all. I rather enjoy them under the right circumstances (though I hardly ever find internet discussion boards to be the right circumstances; no offense intended to those here). I just question what the point is of all the hoopla involved with the aggressive anti-God campaign waged by atheists if all we are talking about is a mere “lack of belief.” I lack belief in fairies, but I don’t write books about it, I don’t give lectures about it, I don’t put anti-fairy advertising on billboards, and I don’t try to get all mention of fairies removed from public venues. Atheism often seems to take the form of anti-theism, and that seems to me like an extreme response from people who claim to have a mere “lack of belief.”
How in the heck, did this thread get from federally-guaranteed orgasms and politician stonings to religious discourse? (I clearly need to check in more often on weekends )
OK, I guess that’s fair enough. But I was raised in a time when the person who simply “lacked belief” in God, and was, in theory at least, open to further evidence, would be classified as an agnostic. The atheist was one who held a positive belief that there was no God (or gods, if you prefer). That, in my mind, seems like a more honest set of definitions. As I pointed out in my response to **Derleth **above, atheists conduct very aggressive campaigns against theism, and especially against any public expression of theism. Billboards at Christmas saying things like “You know it’s a myth.” That’s taking a positive position on the issue, and in my opinion, it lays the responsibility of proof at the feet of the atheist. If you are willing to assert that what has been regarded for centuries as one of the most important events in human history is actually a myth, and, further, that I know it to be a myth, but am presumably engaged in some elaborate self-deception, then the burden of proof is definitely upon you to back up that statement with evidence, not upon me to disprove it. Citing your own personal “lack of belief” isn’t sufficient under those circumstances.
I’m talking about people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and formerly Christopher Hitchens, who are/were very aggressive in their anti-theistic statements. All have written books, participated in debates, gone on speaking tours and the like. Very aggressive behavior for someone who merely “lacks belief.” One would think, given such behavior, that they actually had a positive point to make, but if that were the case, then they could be expected to prove their arguments. Claiming a mere “lack of belief” serves rhetorically to relieve them of the burden of proof, and that was the whole point of my original comment in this thread.
By your “condition,” what I mean is that saying that you “lack belief” tells me nothing about anything outside your own mind. Great, you “lack belief” in God. That has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether God exists, any more than believing in a flat earth somehow prevents the earth from being round. All you’ve done is to tell me what is inside your own head, and that statement tells me nothing at all about the way the universe really is. If, on the other hand, you came out and said, “I believe that there is no God/are no gods,” then at least you’ve made a claim. It strikes me as a semantic game that atheists play to avoid any burden of proof on themselves, especially given the subtle shift in the meaning of atheism that has occurred over my lifetime that I noted above. I’m 64 years old, and have been talking with atheists for much of my life, but I don’t think I ever heard anyone refer to atheism as a mere “lack of belief” until maybe 10 years ago.
And forget the rock; why not stick with my example of a DNA molecule. It contains massive amounts of information. Is it really such a stretch to think that so much information might have come from an intelligent source?
Well, this is where it gets into the question of what counts as evidence, and that’s another whole issue. Refer again to the DNA example I’ve been using. Lots of information in a single molecule. Information generally comes from intelligence. Complex information, even more so. Is it really that unreasonable to look at a DNA molecule and conclude that there was likely an intelligence behind this thing? If not, then that *is *evidence for the existence of a designer. But the atheist rejects that evidence on the basis that such a conclusion implies a supernatural agency, and supernatural agencies are ruled out a priori. But that’s just circular reasoning. One doesn’t believe in supernatural entities, so when evidence arises of the operation of what appears to be a supernatural agent, he rejects that evidence because he believes that supernatural agents don’t exist.
After being told by atheists that they see no evidence for the existence of God, I’ve asked them on a number of occasions what sort of evidence would persuade them that God exists. Surprisingly often, the answer is that there could never be any sort of evidence that would persuade them, and I think that’s a pretty revealing answer. What that says to me is that it’s not a matter of evidence, it’s a matter of the will. What would your answer to that question be?
You aren’t required to have one orgasm a year, but are guaranteed one if you want.
Sort of like an all you-can-eat buffet meaning you can stop when *you *want to (I think there was an SNL skit on this, but I can’t find), and John Pinette at the Chinese buffet (“You go home now! You here four hours!”).
It’s been discussed several times on this board already: People with certain severe disabilities are given neither the “right” nor a “guarantee” of orgasms.
See this thread which, like most such discussions here, was entirely hypothetical, until this guy chimed in at Post #79. From that point on, much of the remaining thread got a whole lot less hypothetical.
Sorry, no hijack intended. It just sort of fell together that way. But I think I’ll let it rest here rather than start a new thread. I’m within my constitutional rights to do that, right?
The Constitutional Right to vote if you are a citizen of legal age-NO EXCEPTIONS.
The Constitutional Right to randomly pick State and Federal Representatives via voluntary lottery.
I meant just the Representatives, not the Senators or President. I think at least one of the bodies of government should represent a cross-section of our country, to give them power.
