And what belief or lack of belief have I wrongly attributed to you?
I’ve had no problem in engaging in other discussions as well.
Saying that you are not exactly an atheist (your italics there) is an open invitation to ask questions, heck, as others have said, anything you post on here is open to question. The only mistake I can see in you position is that you refuse to admit that having a lack of belief in a god or gods means one is an atheist. I don’t know why you persist in asserting that, especially seeing as it makes no difference at all to the rest of what you have (very sensibly) said.
I didn’t know I was a “stripe” of atheist. What sort am I?
Well, you’re not the one being bullied about your belief system, so … nice for you, I guess?
I qualified it to point out* to the OP* that I was participating even though I didn’t meet his poll criterion. And I had no problem answering the initial question. That’s just asking a question, not what I meant by “questioning my religious thought”. That’s not what I have a problem with. It’s the subsequent attempted erasure of my religious identity and assigning of an unasked, unwanted one, that I don’t want.
I answered your question. The polite thing to do would be to go “Oh, OK.” and then drop it. Not tell me that I’m mistaken about my own identity.
Believing the truth value of “God exists” is negative is what makes one an atheist.
I don’t share that belief. So I’m not an atheist.
Asserting what, exactly? I mean, we’ve already seen that you’ve been mistaken in what I have “clearly stated” before in this thread (“multiple times” at that), so tell me, exactly what have I persisted in asserting?
Gosh, where’ve I heard that stupid argument before? Oh, yes, “You have a telephone, therefore you want telemarketers to call you”. Gosh, let’s see how well that argumentgoes.
Which is exactly where you’ve been mistaken all along.
To be an atheist one simply does not accept that the truth value of “god exists” is positive.
That’s it. No negative belief of the truth value required at all.
If I grab a handful of rice and tell you that there an even number of grains in that handful I suspect you will not agree with my claim. You will not have a positive belief in the truth value of that statement. And yet, you are not holding a negative belief in the truth value of that statement are you? You are simply witholding your agreement. That’s the status of an atheist in respect of theistic claims.
But I’ve repeated this to you so many times that you clearly aren’t going to accept it and there’s little value in stating it again.
Mr Dibble, no one has challenged what your beliefs are. The side discussion is about language not beliefs. For some reason you refuse to accept the word “atheist” to describe your beliefs. Personally, given what you have said in this thread, I would describe you as an atheist. That doesn’t mean I think you have a mindset that you don’t in fact have, this just means that I think “atheist” means something different from what you do.
I find it difficult to understand your specific issue with it, I can only suspect it is similar to the distinction some people make between “believing god/s don’t exist”, and “not believing god/s exists”. The first statement is stronger than the second but both are a form of atheism.
Sure, but for the question “do you believe in a god?” there are only two answers.
I only ever said that, despite what you claim, you are an atheist. I’m assigning you “atheism” in addition to the other philosophical positions you take, not instead of. I made no attempt to erase your religious identity and couldn’t if I tried. I even stated that the other things you said were sensible and so they are.
Good point. Though atheists tend to be skeptics and don’t believe in an afterlife, there is no reason that an atheist cannot believe in a godless afterlife. Or reincarnation for that matter.
Yeah, see, I actually know what the words mean (and how logic works, for that matter), and there is no conflict here.
The number zero is neither positive nor negative - but it is non-positive. Atheism means “lack of positive belief.” You claim you’re a zero? Sure! I will cheerfully accept that you’re a zero. Guess what that makes you.
Atheists in general seem to be pretty picky about terminology. This is probably partly because the demographic leans analytical, and partly because atheism has been conflated with things like satanism - so we’d rather not let the definition slip, thanks.
I’m not sure many actually do, though. The kind of thinking that makes one skeptical of the existence of gods would apply equally well to disbelieving souls, and if you’re not positing some sort of handy inexplicable spirit to carry your mind around for you you have to posit some other mechanism by which your consciousness can be extracted/copied out of your dying brain and placed into something else that can keep it going.
Which is not to say that I can’t theorize such a mechanism, but it seems to almost immediately get quite elaborate and ends up tripping over that razor that Occam left lying there.
Since I did not describe this god at all, I wonder how you get to call it silly. That I think belief in it (or disbelief in it) is silly has nothing to do with incoherence. Lack of belief in it is not silly.
Exactly what do you think I mean by belief which you are rejecting? Do you think that it is a bad idea to believe based on at least some evidence? Notice I am not claiming that people do this.
You do seem to have your own private vocabulary. Not the first time this has been noted in this thread.
I was active in alt.atheism when the IPU was invented, and I can tell you it was named such specifically to be self-contradictory and incoherent. But not more self-contradictory and incoherent than the concept of the Trinity or the tri-omni god.
It was originally used to attack special pleading. If someone gives Jesus a special position which does not have to be argued for or demonstrated, why not the IPU? People believe in sillier things, after all.
Well, if I say I hate the color yellow, and when giving examples of what I hate I point to red things, people will get confused. People in this thread are confused about what you believe in, what you lack belief in, and what things you neither believe or lack belief in. And when someone tries to pin you down, you go to existence.
I could conceive of a setup where this is all virtual reality and when you die it’s “game over” and you get to try again or perhaps do whatever it is you do when you’re not wasting time at an arcade parlour playing a VR game. I don’t believe it, but it is a theoretical scenario where you could believe there was more than just this life while also not believing in gods. I agree though that, in general, atheists would not typically be believing anything that doesn’t have reasonable supporting evidence. Which puts life after death out of the picture.
From my long ago Eastern Religions class, it seemed that Buddhists originally believed in no gods and in an after life/ reincarnation. But I agree, it is not very common these days for atheists to believe in this. Though I think Heinlein believed in an afterlife, so there is one example.
No. It is to think you can have a truth value, think you have enough evidence to decide, and think it’s not positive. Your definition, for instance, subsumes all agnostics under atheists. Which is how we know it’s wrong.
No, that’s an agnostic.
…yet here you are.
Oh but they have. “Theological noncognitivists are not the same as atheists” is a fairly core tenet of my beliefs.
NO, there are at least 4. “Yes”, No", “Can’t say yet” and “What do you mean?” are all valid answers. Also, apparently “Yawn!” is a valid answer too.
…despite me emphatically telling you I am not.
…and it’s still wrong.
You are very definitely denying me the part of my religious identity that says I am not an atheist.
I am not claiming to be a zero. I am claiming to not even be on that numberline.
A…and you think theological noncognitivists are* more* sloppy? That makes me laugh.
Using it for things it doesn’t apply to is the opposite of conflating it with things it isn’t. TN introduces more clarity about what atheism is and isn’t, not less.
Whereas applying atheism to TN is expansionist evangelism - I thought that’s the kind of thing most atheists disliked about theistic religions. It was for me when I thought I was an atheist.
Because I find the idea of a “god” of one distant planet inherently silly. It’s an idea from bad Sword-and-Planet SF, so I laugh at it.
:rolleyes: Not the first time I’ve had to address this strawman in this thread, either. Not my private vocabulary. Here, read someone else on the subject and tell me I’m speaking my own language…
I agree. But like I said before, it isn’t coherence that renders those gods non-silly.
That’s odd, because I’ve been quite explicit in all of those.
Perhaps if people were less invested in pinning their own beliefs on me, as if they were counting coup for their side, they could go back and read what I actually wrote about what I believe.
Because “Deity exists” is the central proposition under consideration. Are you arguing that’s not the case?
No, to be clear. I have *not *decided. I just remain unconvinced and thus free of any belief in a god.
The definition of atheist I’m using makes no reference to knowledge at all. A theist can be an agnostic.
But not only an agnostic. As long as they remain unconvinced that the number is even, they are an atheist. They can say
“I won’t agree that it is even. I don’t know how many grains there are and I don’t think you do either and I’m not sure it is possible to know”
That person is agnostic (to do with the limits of knowledge) and atheist (to do with an absence of belief in the claim of “even”). Notice, at no point is it necessary to hold the opinion that the claim is false, that the opposite is true and that the number is odd.
Now they may also believe that you are right, i.e. that the number really is even. They may believe that because it feels right to them, or they like even numbers, or they trust you. But at the same time they do not have the necessary knowledge of the number of grains and may think that it is never possible to accurately count the grains. Hey presto! an agnostic theist.
That’s just a simplified analogy of course. As it happens, a discrete number of grains in the real world is something about which it is possible to have definite knowledge which is why, in my humble opinion, Religions often shy away from couching their god hypothesis in quite such tangible and empirical terms. Agnosticism is the correct response to many of those because as described we may see no way of gathering any knowledge about them at all. That does rather raise the question of how the religious come to be so certain of the nature and qualities of their gods but hey, such is faith I guess.
Theist, atheist and agnostic are all mutually exclusive viewpoints.They are all stances on the truth value of “God exists” as a proposition. You can’t be an atheist and an agnostic at the same time.
If you’re undecided because you believe the current evidence is insufficient, you’re an agnostic, not an atheist. But unconvinced is not the same as undecided. If you’re unconvinced by the current evidence, rather than saying you can’t make a decision, then you’re an atheist.
I don’t find the atheist viewpoint depressing, at least not for what it says about what we are, or our place in the universe, or what kind of world we can/should create for ourselves. Atheists can and do find great meaning in their lives, just as surely as religious people do. We form fulfilling relationships with individuals and communities, we appreciate natural and artificial beauty in its many forms, and we experience great wonderment at the seemingly boundless complexities and capabilities of the bags of chemical reactions that are our bodies. Our experiences of love, hate, anger, sadness, humor, pride are no less compelling for us than they are for believers. We can be (and typically are) moral creatures; as many animals demonstrate, belief in the supernatural is not a requirement for the development of a moral code. With no belief in an afterlife, I suspect most atheists would place a greater value on physical existence than believers; we believe this existence is our only existence, and to have it taken away prematurely by disease, misadventure or misdeed is much more tragic than if one believes that the departed has merely moved on to another plane of existence.
However, there is one depressing aspect, described in this Cracked article, as point #8. It’s one thing to be in the minority (90% of Americans believe in God), but it’s worse than that. Most people do not like or trust atheists, to the extent that (for example) a whole lot of them would never consider voting one into office. The tagline is this:
Being an atheist in the present day means you’re very much an outsider, to the point of being regarded with hostility and suspicion by the majority. That is indeed rather depressing.
I think there is a case to be made that the meaning found by atheists carries even *greater *importance because it is what we make for ourselves, we don’t think there is any greater force imposing in on us and dictating what meaning we must find.
If there is an omipotent being guiding it then none of it is our own work.