Quoted for truth. I have no certainty there is no god or gods, but no compelling reason to believe in nay, either. If there are supernatural powers, they’re pretty scarce. The evidence for god just isn’t very good. But the bottom line is, certainty lacking or not, I don’t believe in a god or gods, so I’m an atheist. End of story.
Does being a religionist mean you believe with utter certainty that all other religions are false?
I’ve heard it described that being a religionist means you are absolutely, 100% certain there is no other god and all other religions are false. This means a religionist has the same irrational certainty that any other religious person has, they have “faith” that no other such “god-like” entity exists and that what they believe about the natural world is all there is.
100% is a theoretical maximum. It does not exist and it cannot exist. It would, by its definition, encompass knowing everything about a subject or an object. So far, no one has ever demonstrated that capability.
But then again, you don’t need to possess 100% certainty to not believe or believe anything. I don’t know with 100% certainty that I will be alive tomorrow, yet I have already planned out what I’m going to do and when I’m going to do it, I also don’t know with 100% certainty that what I type on this forum will be read by anyone; but that neither stops me from typing it or believing that they will.
I don’t need certainty to know or believe that a god or gods do not exist. The lack of evidence in his/her/their/its existence is fairly well documented and the inner turmoil within religions states pretty clearly to me that even believers have serious issues with the basic tenets of their professed faiths. For me that makes religion a philosophical belief and nothing more.Just as I can reject most or all elements of other philosophical arguments, I can easily do the same to religion as they all have the same intellectual “weight” to me.
As several people have already stated, there are a range of atheistic stances held by people. The only similarity between them is that there is an absence of belief in a deity or deities.
What possible origin of the universe would not be “suspicious” to you ?
If anything exists, then it has to have started existing at some point. At the point just immediately before, it can’t have existed by definition. Since the universe is everything there is, how else could it have begun but spawning from a singularity of nothingness ?
Even our old pal Yahweh spawned itself from absolute nothingness, so it’s not like this ontological issue is dealt away by religion.
Now that’s just ridiculous and ignorant. There were atheistsin Ancient Greece, fer chrissakes. It’s where the word* comes from*. It’s what they charged Socrates with, and forced him to drink poison for it. Which just goes to show that the religious right have been jerks for a long while, too, I suppose :p.
As a philosophy, modern atheism has its roots in the Enlightenment. 16th-17th century. With people who, on the contrary, had quite a large bone to pick with their State, and the Church that came with it. You should be aware of this, since they directly inspired the blokes who founded your bloody country (assuming you’re American, natch).
That’s skirting kind of close the spurious contention that atheism is equivalent to a religion. Penn Jillette is fond of saying (and I think he is paraphrasing somebody else), “Atheism is a religion in the same way not collecting stamps is a hobby.”
I find mysel growing weary of the whole atheist / agnostic distinction. Not that it’s not important philosophically, but as others have pointed out in this thread, it has little bearing on how I live my life. I’m a “level 6” like Dawkins. Sure it’s possible, but I assign a likelihood of there being a deity to be so remote it’s not worth worrying about.
Ok, so in the “Left behind” books, the events in Revelations more or less come to pass. You know, the true believers all disappear, Christ and the Antichrist show up, portals to Hell open up and hordes of demons show up. Etc etc etc. There is now empirical evidence that the events predicted in some old religious texts are more or less accurate.
Anyways, in those books, atheists and people of other religions continue to “disbelieve” in what they are seeing, continuing to believe that it’s all a hoax or aliens or some other stuff. Jesus of course horribly causes them all to be dropped into Hell for their doubting his existence.
Anyways, ignoring the illogical actions taken, it seemed like a rational person would in fact update their beliefs, taking into account the available empirical evidence that in fact some kind of fascist practicall omnipotent being is demanding their allegiance. In this world, atheism no longer fits the evidence - but since atheists actively have faith that they were correct all along, they get massacred and tortured.
I mean, at the end of the books, JC drops into Hell all the people of any other religion besides Christianity, the atheists, the muslims, the Hindus, small children who aren’t aware enough to swear alliegance to him, presumably…everybody. I think he also brings back all the dead and makes them do the same thing.
Wikipedia has a nice section on the historical etymology of the term, if that’s what you’re asking.
Responding more directly, you seem to have your terms reversed (as far as I remember being taught): A-theist (adherent of no deities) means you do not believe in deities; Agnostic means you {have chosen} not to believe in {or worship} the god of monotheistic traditions. I use the curly-braces parenthetically because some people have argued to me that, “strictly speaking, an Agnostic still believes in God but has turned his/her back.”
Note that even an Atheist can attend services and conform to a culture including rituals, proscriptions, etcetera. Buddhists ultimately believe that what humans have come to call “reality” is an illusion and the construct of deities is yet another falsehood. Its roots are in the Hindu tradition, but its primary concern is with the question of reincarnation. And Confucianism and Taoism are concerned more with the prescriptions and proscriptions of daily behavior, even though (like Buddhism) they tend to get enmired in folk variants that include demons, saints, and deities. Shinto, for that matter, is really geared more toward appreciating the beauty of nature and a totemistic respect for ancestors. These four are more correctly termed philosophies. Westerners mislabel them ‘religions’ because they figure anything that has a structure like Christianity – services, leaders, scriptures, a cosmological paradigm, proscriptions and rituals – must be a religion. Not only is that incorrect, but a further mistake is made by concluding “therefore it must have some kind of deity involved” and point to The Buddha, Confucius, or Lao Tzu as the respective deity-in-charge.
And Bushido, which is more of an approach-to-life than a philosophy (and certainly not a religion) is a very pragmatic set of guidelines for conducting one’s daily affairs with both a respect for others and an understanding of the ephemerality of individual existence. It’s a deeply-held sense of honor and legacy which is a fine foundation for positive morals and ethics, without the implied duress of being handed down by a deity.
My studies were in Asian cultures, so the above is where my knowledge is stronger; I suspect there are belief systems from the rest of the world that lack deities, as well.
As for the attempt to equate the belief of atheists with the belief of theists, it’s a poor argument that has been discussed in other threads (most recently in Mr. Kobayashi’s surveys). Essentially, the belief of atheists is supported objectively by the results of tests and either a decent grounding in mathematics up to the level of algebra, and/or a basic understanding of the scientific method, scientific principles, the applicability and interoperability of the sciences, and proof of the applicability and interoperability of those sciences as leveraged in the engineering which has made our modern world so technologically advanced. In contrast, a belief in a deity is not merely unsupported, it leaves the world at the mercy of unpredictable, irrational, capricious entities. Granted, there’s a lot of vocal (and quiet) people who are quite willing to dismiss all that math and science stuff as hogwash but if they were right we would not be having this conversation in 2014 of the Common Era. Instead, an unpredictable divinity would have intervened and the world would have ended in 2012 when the Mayan calendar showed there were no more dates to predict, or in 2000 with the Rapture and Y2K apocalypse, or with the passing of the comet Halle Bopp in 1997 or…
–G!
A phrase I learned in Japan was “We are usually Shinto when we’re alive and Buddhist when we die.”
Again, I just don’t agree with your premise that atheism entails faith similar, or equal to, religion.
But you do bring up what I find a more interesting question: What would be compelling evidence of supernatural, religiously based occurrences? I really don’t know because I can think of more reasonable explanations for most of what you postulate.
The antichrist turns up, eh? Does he have ID? How do we know he’s really THE antichrist, and not some other supernatural being? And is he routinely performing supernatural acts to prove it to us? Does James Randi give him a million dollars for it?
Some predictions from the Bible come to pass, eh? If they don’t involve clear supernatural intervention, who cares? And if they do, I for one would want to spend some time studying them. Maybe it’s just a guy from the future showing off trinkets you can buy in the next century’s 7-11. That theory seems at least equivalent to the proposition that it’s the God of the bible.
The Left Behind books are fiction, written by a particularly out-there believer about beliefs he specifically wants to demonize. Why is this an argument for anything?
The whole “atheists would continue to be atheists in a world that obviously had God in it” meme is pretty stupid on it’s face: the main reason there are atheists is that it’s not obvious that our world is the one described by the Bible – there’s no actual sign of that God fellow hanging around or doing any of the things you’d expect him to do.
When empirical evidence for the existence of God manifests itself, I will be happy to reconsider my position.
Are you willing to say the same thing about your religious beliefs? What empirical evidence would cause you to become an atheist?
Of course. The Left Behind books are poorly written Christian torture/murder porn. MurderJesus shows up and slaughters all the people the Christians hate. The character in the books have nothing to do with real people actually act; they are there just to be killed.
Now, in a scenario like that the most likely result is that most of the nonreligious and non-Christians switch from disbelief in the Christian god, to hating him.
I do not “believe”. I am as certain as a person can be, based on all forms of empirical evidence known to me.
You’re attempting to accuse an atheist of “faith/belief”: well, that is an old trick that doesn’t get any further now than it did centuries ago.
This is the problem with the popular definitions of “atheist” (someone who is certain there is no god) and “agnostic” (on the fence, shrugging his shoulders).
There’s a vast excluded middle there, where many skeptics, and many Dopers would place themselves.
I don’t rule out the existence of a god (well, the self-consistent ones anyway). But there is no empirical support, and so right now it belongs to the (infinite) set of baseless claims.
I don’t believe in a supreme being, for the same reason that I don’t believe in Santa Claus or unicorns or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. I don’t see any reason to believe in any of them. That has nothing to do with faith.
Actually I’m more of a “Shrugnostic.” I no longer care whether or not there’s a god. I’ve been an atheist over 55 years, and I can no longer waste time pondering the question.
It is not!
Porn is much better written than those books are.
CS Lewis used this same dishonest trick in The Last Battle. Inventing a situation where atheists reject god even with evidence makes it seem that we do so now without having to present any evidence. Believers in bullshit things do this all the time - The X Files was full of it, as are many ghost stories or stories where the aliens visit.
I could write a book where the leaders of religion kill those who don’t believe in a god or believe in a wrong god. Oh, but I don’t have to, because that is history.
In the made up world Jesus comes back. In the real world he hasn’t. In the real world religion has blown just about any prophecy it made, and it has been wrong on just about any verifiable statement it has made about the natural world. Maybe you shouldn’t worry about how characters react in this novel and worry about how you react to reality.
Atheism is to religion as “I don’t watch football” is to “What’s your favorite football team”. To claim that “I don’t watch football” is the same sort of answer as “the Bengals” when asked what my favorite football team is, is to misunderstand the answer given.
Atheism requires no active belief, no choice to even become atheist. It is what people are when they come into this world, and remain that way when told stories of the supernatural, simply because they aren’t convinced it is real.
If I told you I had a 900 foot long seven-headed dragon in my house, your reaction to that claim is likely to be similar to my reaction when I am told about your personal god. More than likely, you will disbelieve such a claim unless presented with some very strong evidence. And it will require no conscious effort on your part, and for the rest of your life, you will most likely disbelieve in my seven-headed dragon, without having a fancy label for your non-belief.
There will be no holy books written denouncing the seven headed dragon.
There will be no meetings to discuss the lack of the seven headed dragon’s existence.
It simply isn’t that important enough to even realistically be considered part of your identity as a person.
However, if billions of people on the planet believed I had a seven-headed dragon living in my house, all of a sudden, you need a label signifying your non-belief.
That’s the crazy world we live in.
Alright, I’m beginning to see it. If I say “well you might have a 900 foot dragon with 7 heads but I don’t know…” that’s Agnostic.
If you say “it is virtually certain that a 900 foot dragon cannot fit in your house. Also, it is virtually certain that no such living creature exists or ever existed”, that’s Atheist (or simpler put : you just call bs or ignore it).
Nevertheless, if you step into his house, and, sure enough, there seems to be a 900 foot dragon…would an atheist believe that what he is seeing is untrue, no matter the evidence? (maybe he pets the dragon or feeds it, etc).
If it’s bigger than the house, the logical conclusion is that it’s some kind of special effect. Miracles always turn out to be either fakes or misunderstood natural phenomena.
As an atheist I question only the existence of a god. I’m neutral with religion. It’s a human invention and I’m not about to question other people’s right to live as they would.