You can’t bring up different so-called witnesses testifying about different supposed events as evidence of any one thing and not call it “co-mingling”.
How would you define “The Divine”, to better understand how all these different witnesses have anything to do with it?
I am of the lawrence krauss school of atheism/agnosticism (call it as you will.)
I cannot prove there is no god, just as I cannot prove there is not a stuffed animal version of Cecil in orbit around Uranus.
What I can prove (or at least, physicists can prove), is that there is no need for a god. That the universe can come into being and evolve and produce little 'ol us with no need for divine inputs.
I do not say that there is no god, I say that if there is a god, he is utterly irrelevant.
It may surprise you, but atheism doesn’t require one to prove a negative. It doesn’t require you to have certainty that there isn’t a god. It merely requires one not to believe in any god.
For a quick example - consider Asdfoiaj4;iuhe;afeurhva. Asdfoiaj4;iuhe;afeurhva is a god. You don’t believe in Asdfoiaj4;iuhe;afeurhva, right? It’s not that you can prove Asdfoiaj4;iuhe;afeurhva doesn’t exist. You simply don’t believe in Asdfoiaj4;iuhe;afeurhva, and that’s that.
That’s all the disbelief that atheism requires.
Also, for the record, the average atheist has gobs of evidence handy to use to disprove various specific gods. For example the Christian god is supposedly infinitely powerful and infinitely benevolent towards humans. All an atheist has to do is look around for a few minutes and say, “Really?”
Here is what I think of the so-called “evidence” for what religionists believe: It’s as if they have discovered or dug a very strangely shaped hole(a symbol for questions, needs and desires, if you must) and established a belief that something exactly shaped like that hole must exist out there.
They then proceed to fill that hole with wet dirt(the so-called evidence) and, when the hole is filled, they declare the contents of that hole to be exactly that singular and special thing they were looking for…purposefully ignoring the fact that that same dirt would have also filled any number of differently shaped holes that other people have dug/found.
Anyone remember what Criswell said at the end of Plan 9 From Outer Space?
“Can you prove it didn’t happen??”
Throughout my life I’ve met people who eventually explained that although they attend church, they don’t really believe in god. They have reasons, though. They were brought up in the church and it is a habit, or it would break their mom’s heart if they didn’t go to church, or I sell real estate and I need connections, or it’s the only activity they have apart from work, or my wife wants the kids to be “normal”, or my husband has a business and not attending church will drive away customers, or . . . .
We atheists are a minority, but truth be told the numbers aren’t what you see reported. (based solely on anecdotal stuff. Sorry)
If you speak of the beliefs of religious people and not necessarily the religion itself people can be quite rational and informed and believe in something that can neither be proved nor disproved, so long as they are some little bit agnostic.
Good question. Part of the problem is that so many people (both religious and nonreligious) think they know what religion is, or what it does, or what religious people are like, based on personal experience. But what they think of when they think of religion is not representative of all of religion.
Except for lack of evidence, NOTHING is representative of “all of religion”-there is no “all of religion”.
The only religious people I have any problem with are those who use their religion to tell me or others how to live my life. And these people are representative of all the religious people that use their religion to tell me or others how to live our lives.
Of course there is - the word “religion” has a meaning, and a certain set of things fall under that definition and others don’t.
Of course it then comes down to, what is that definition? First thing to note is that there’s a clear stratification - religions as institutions, and religion as beliefs. The institutions can be further divided into organizations that are built around a set of religious beliefs, and organizations that are transparent criminal tax dodges primarily focused on collecting money, prestige, and power via manipulation of their membership.
Of the religions that aren’t simply criminal organizations, their legitimacy is partially based on the collection of religious beliefs they embrace - removing those beliefs would be like sawing the leg off a table. Some tables would continue to stand without it, but others won’t. Same goes for the religions. Persons who are primarily interested in the non-religious aspects of their religions are leaning on the other legs of the table and would do as well or better with an equivalent secular organization, except that few or no equivalent secular organizations exist.
On the subject of religious beliefs, they all share the following two common threads: They’re a collection of beliefs that there is little to no objective reason to believe. This is not a subjective opinion based on personal experience; this is objectively true by definition.
And it’s a plenty good reason to dismiss them all.
“Even” Jewish people?
Jews have been a huge force in the world towards tolerance, and making it safe to be irreligious, maybe the biggest influence of them all. Usually they live within christian societies.
I don’t understand why would be a form of ignorance. It’s orthogonal to ignorance. You can be extremely knowledgeable about any subject you can name and still have faith in some religion. Where’s the ignorance?
Ignorance is about knowledge and faith is about belief, and they are on different axes. For example, I know a fair amount about religion, a fair amount about science, and many other subjects. I’m certainly ignorant about many things, but I think most of my friends wouldn’t classify me as ignorant about the world. However, I have no faith in any religion, so I’m not religious.
Likewise, there are many people here who have all kinds of knowledge (cmkeller, Bricker, tomndebb, and RTFirefly spring immediately to mind) and yet are religious. I don’t consider any of them to be ignorant. They know more about religion than I do and more about their respective specialties than I do, as well.
However, if this thread is just meant to be “atheism is a belief/no it’s not”, then I’m happy to bow out.
As mentioned above, it’s mostly the same sort of ignorance as believing in ghosts or horoscopes - it’s a gross overstatement of the credibility of the claims in question. Or an ignorance of how poor the evidence actually is, if you want to put it that way.
And it’s certainly not the case that only stupid or uneducated people can hold some stupid beliefs. There’s lots of reasons why (otherwise) smart people can hold stupid beliefs. It’s pretty easy to see that it happens all the time.
That is why my first post said that it is not ignorance, but willful ignorance.
And it comes in many levels. Like I also said, I know many christians who are not ignorant at all, they kinda believe, but it doesn’t inform their “beliefs” about secular matters.
There are others, however, who do allow the bible to supersede secular knowledge. There are those who allow the bible to dictate morality. Those are the people who are willfully ignorant.
I don’t think it’s evidence-based at all. Just because something isn’t evidence-based doesn’t mean it’s ignorant. Faith non-evidence-based by definition. If someone claims they believe their is life after death, something basically non-testable, that’s not ignorance, it’s faith. There’s no evidence for or against and their many never be.
Faith is neither ignorance nor willful ignorance. If someone kinda believes, maybe they are ignorant about their own religion or something, but I don’t think that’s the point that the OP is making.
Someone could have a PhD in ethics and morality, with several more PhDs in sociology, psychology, you name it. Is that person ignorant about morality? No. Could that person still allow the bible to dictate morality? Sure. Because the person has faith that following the bible will lead to <insert eternal reward here>. Where’s the ignorance?
It’s also a massive con game. And it is one of the most dangerous things that we humans have ever invented to inflict upon ourselves.
Faith is synonymous with unjustified belief.
One may quibble with whether “unjustified belief” is ignorance. Of course this is the Straight Dope Message Board, where “fighting ignorance” includes kicking believers in horoscopes in the nuts. So yeah, around here faith can reasonably called a type of ignorance - an ignorance of the likelihood you’re wrong.
Honestly one of the masterstrokes by religion -and masterstrokes against humanity in general- was how it managed to present faith as a good thing. What the hell? Believing stuff for no reason is a good thing? There goes humanity…
OK, one more example and then I’ve probably said my fill.
In our countless (countless!!) threads here about atheism and religion, someone pops in and says, “hey, I’m agnostic.” Then, everyone dutifully explains that agnostic is a statement about knowledge, not a statement about belief. You can be an agnostic atheist (you don’t believe, but you don’t think the real answer is knowable) or an agnostic theist (you do believe, but you don’t think the real answer is knowable)
Less belief --> More belief:
Atheist Theist
(I’m sure that will look terrible)
Less knowledge --> More knowledge:
Ignorant Educated
They are on different axes, just like atheism/theism and agosticism are on different axes.
begbert2, not all beliefs have to be justified, and I don’t think that unjustified belief means ignorance anyway. If someone makes a claim that there is evidence that horoscopes work, we can easily show them the claim is nonsense. If someone believes that horoscopes work and adjusts his day because of that, it’s not really ignorance. That person may have all kinds of knowledge of the stars, astronomy, etc., but still retain that faith.