I agree with that sentiment.
I’m a Christian and not an atheist, but I’ve never found the atheist worldview depressing. You don’t need the promise of an afterlife or eternal reward in order to live a good life and be a good person right now, right here.
Really depends on which god you are talking about. There a lot of choices out there that just get drowned out by the concept of the Abrahamic god. In an office discussion about AIDS back in the late Eighties, a “Christian” co worker said it was God’s punishment. I felt like asking why she would pray to such a god. I mean, if I my god sucked that hard, I’d get me a new one. I tell people I’m an atheist for the sake of simplicity; however, my true belief system is borrowed from Star Wars “Force” and Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian “Universal Will to Become”.
Santa Claus is not real?:eek:
The bolder bit is where your definitions are overly narrow.
My stance on “God exists” is entirely different to my belief in God or gods. I don’t believe in any god, quite firmly, I’m not wish washy on the subject. On the other hand, my stance on “God exists” is that I don’t know and can’t know and neither does anybody else.
I am an agnostic atheist.
Depending on one’s definition of God, I think we can know (as well as we know anything, which is not 100%) that a God exists, but we can never know that no god exists.
I think the reason theists are more comfortable with people being agnostics than atheists is that true agnostics accept the lack of evidence for god (him being shy) as a natural result of his unknowability rather than his non-existence.
We’ve had plenty of threads about what evidence would convince people that God did exist.
If the Exodus story had really happened, don’t you think that Moses had good reason to know that God existed?
An IPU agnostic could say that it is impossible to know whether or not the IPU exists, rather than the lack of evidence being good reason she does not. (Forgive me, thou of the holy hooves.)
This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking of when I said “it seems to almost immediately get quite elaborate and ends up tripping over that razor that Occam left lying there.”
I disagree with your definitions - atheism/theism and agnosticism aren’t even on the same continuum. Atheism/theism is about belief. Agnosticism is about evidence and provability.
I’m an agnostic atheist about inactive noninterventionist gods because I recognize that they can’t be disproven, and still don’t harbor beliefs in them. I’m not agnostic about the christian god because I believe that most conceptions of it can and have been disproven.
I think you misunderstand - it’s a different proposition for each god, so you’re atheist for each one, apparently.
The question “Does any god exist” is a different one from “[this god]exists”, and you can have the same stances there, depending of course on what the definition of “a god” is. And it’s also different from “Can any god exist?”, with the same caveats. And depending on the definition of “any god”, I may be variously theistic, atheistic, agnostic OR noncognitivist. But only one for each proposition.
When I say I’m theological noncognitivist, not atheist, I mean for the nebulous god concept currently in vogue with major Western religions.
That you can’t see that evidence and provability is also a statement about belief is, frankly, a bit hard for me to fathom.
It sounds to me like you’re just atheist about them. If you did think the question was unanswerable, you couldn’t have an opinion on the truth value of whether they exist. But you do. That, to me, is agnosticism - not “it’s hard to say, but I’ma take a guess, yo!”, but “It’s impossible to say … yet. Because X evidence is missing.” But when you step from that to “…and X evidence will never be available for Y reasons”, I think you’ve stepped into atheism …for Y reasons.
Of course, in the parameters of your own belief system, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, so call yourself what you want.
Whereas I have yet to hear a coherent conception of that god that I can honestly say I have an opinion about.
They’re still all different questions than “do you believe…?” Any opinion on any of your propositions is making an assertion. You must either agree with the proposition, disagree with it, or say you are undecided. The question “do you believe…?” is different in that it requires no positive assertion to be made, it is simply about whether you believe something, and there is no middle ground. If you haven’t decided whether to believe something or not, then you don’t believe it, simple as that.
My answer to your propositions, all of them, is “I don’t know.” My answer to “do you believe in God, god, gods, a higher power, magic, santa clause, the tooth fairy, etc etc?” is “No.” As far as I’m concerned, I’m an atheist in my beliefs.
I don’t agree with that simplistic definition of belief as a binary. “not believing” is as active a proposition as “believing”, you can only believe or not believe if you think the proposition is one you can have an opinion on.
This goes back to what I said earlier - the ground state regarding a proposition isn’t disbelief, it’s not having an opinion at all.
That’s “lack of belief” to you, it isn’t to me.
There is no belief to be had either way when you don’t know the proposition exists. Like I said, rocks aren’t atheists.
Only entities that are capable of having an opinion on the truth value of a proposition can be said to believe *or *not believe.
Ignorance isn’t lack of belief. It’s a category error to combine the two states.
I’m sure this has been brought up in the conversation, but there’s some comfort that comes with religion and some comfort that comes with secularism, while there’s also some discomfort that comes with religion and some discomfort that comes with secularism. But what you like doesn’t make it true.
I just wanted to say that’s how I would independently answer the OP’s question without influence. I’ll read some of the the thread now
That statement looks to me like it’s the binary. It reads to me that you’re seeing “not believing” as the binary opposite of “believing.” It’s not, it’s a different sort of thing.
I don’t, ah, believe that ““not believing” is as active a proposition as “believing””. If someone believes something, they believe it. If they don’t believe it, then they don’t believe it – and the state of not believing covers every bit of ground that’s not covered by “believing”, whereas 'believing" covers only a specific narrow territory.
I think there are some people who have strong religious belief who have trouble realizing that not everyone has such beliefs, and they may only be able to frame the idea in their minds as ‘they must believe something else, then!’
As I recall, believers believe that belief (theirs) is correct and therefore any alternative would be incorrect. Whatever is in the heads of unbelievers – some other belief or absence of belief – is in error.
Not “disbelief”, just “not belief”, a lack of belief, all possible states that exist if you don’t actively believe something. Not a positive decision to disbelieve but a lack of a decision to believe.
The key point though, is that when you describe your stance and someone describes you as an atheist, they are not disagreeing with your self-described stance, they are using a broader meaning to the word “atheist”.
You can only lack the decision if the decision is there to be made.
That’s fine and all, but when I *then *say “I am not an atheist” *with *clear reasoning why to rule out that I’m not just being contrary, I expect that statement to be respected. It’s not like I haven’t thought about this for years, and it’s not that I’m distancing my self from atheism - I happily side with all my fellow nontheists in discussions and other online fora. I just have definite views on deity, and calling me an atheist misrepresents those views. It does nothing to clarify, only obscure. So I don’t like it applied to me.
You are not an atheist[MrDibble] but you are an atheist[EveryoneElse].
Atheist means only lack of belief and says nothing about any other views, including which gods are incoherent, so I’m having a hard time seeing how calling you an atheist[EveryoneElse] is misrepresenting your views, unless your view includes belief in some god.
This thread has gotten very confusing.
The most depressing thing I can think of is that everything humanity has built - our civilization, our art, our cities, science and technology, culture and all the rest, is all meaningless - just a way to pass the time until God comes and sweeps us up and takes us ‘home’.
It’s depressing to think that the wondrous glory of the universe is just a parlor trick ginned up by a celestial being to amuse/confuse/frighten us.
It’s depressing to think that our future is not one of constant expansion and learning and exploration, but one where ‘Dad’ is going to come back and pick up his children and take us to his place where we can just sit around in eternal bliss or something.
I like the fact that I exist as an independent being who can experience life based on his own choosing for his own reasons, rather than being the child of a superior being who will judge my acts and determine if they are worthy of me being allowed into his special place.
As for death, I assume that when I die I will no longer experience anything at all. That’s not even remotely frightening, since that was the state that existed for the 13.8 billion years before I was born, and I didn’t seem to mind it. From that standpoint, I am eternal - for me, the universe popped into existence the day I could perceive it, and it will pop out of existence the day I die. There is nothing else.
The only regret I have about death is that there’s a whole lot of stuff I would like to see play out - my child’s life, discoveries that will be made after I’m gone, exploration of new worlds I’ll never see, etc. But that’s an emotion of the living - when I die I won’t have that regret. So, no big deal. And dying is part of the human condition, and everyone so far has gone through it. So it’s just one more thing to experience before it all shuts off.
The Christian, Muslim, polytheistic etc world views are depressing in that anyone can buy into such bullshit.
I don’t see it that way, because I don’t see the truth value of “God exists” as binary.