Sounds fair to me! Does this mean it’s over between us?
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“There is no Zeus” is absolutely an affirmation of atheism.
Of all the countless possible gods, a Catholic believes in one, and disbelieves in all the rest. Quite the atheistic viewpoint. How is disbelieving in one god any different than disbelieving in any other god? Before the assertion “Such and such a god exists” was first made, the concept of atheism was literally incoherent. Since that time, anyone who has refuted that assertion has been, by definition, an atheist.
Really? I took it to mean that a real atheist wouldn’t be quite so obsessed with the issue. Maybe Val is working on a book. 
okay
IMHO it’s a bit more than my god has the same morals and ethics I do. I believe there is an ultimate truth that is more than just objective fact. In seeking love and truth , which are the essence of god, we are transformed within. As our hearts and minds change our actions change as well.
I think this can at times feel very much like a superior entity that “knows better” but not a separate entity. It’s more like the greater whole that we are all a part of. Regardless, as we work this out we must take full responsibility for our actions .
I’ve been peeking in at this thread and Czarcasm’s point that theists don’t really agree is a bit dishonest IMHO. Theists will agree on creation, which includes us (and includes our life ‘force’), is the work of a supernatural being(s), that supernatural being(s) can be reached by us and watch over us. I beleive most have some form of a afterlife also.
Do you believe that deists are theists, or atheists?
To put my statement a different way, theists agree on we are because God is.
How the HELL do you know how I and the other atheists would react if all religions agreed except for that trivial point? If you are able to read our minds, perhap you should save some electricity an not even bother to come on this board? You already know what we are going to think and say in advance, apparently 
. That is nothing but supposition on your part.
Let me simplify my argument to the point where even you cannot misreport it.
First of all, LA, do you agree that if there is one sentence that sums up Christianity, it is surely this" “For God so loved the world that He gave his only-begotten Son, so that whomsover believed on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” The two doctrines closely related to this one are that “gave” means “gave to be sacrificed on the Cross to redeem humanity”, and that Jesus was in fact God the Son made human, one of three persons in one God. They believe that Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified. They believe that these events are th central and most important facts in all of human history.
Please correct me if I am wrong, Lord Ashtar, but that is my understanding of the bare bones essentials of Christianity.
Islam says “There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Messenger”. They believe God is one person, not three. They believe a prophet named Jesus existed but was NOT the son of God. The Koran is extremely explicit about this. They generally believe that he was not crucified and certainly do not believe he rose from the dead. They believe that the way to salvation is to submit to Islam, the final revelation of God, the Koran as revealed to the final prophet of God, Mohammed, who was fully human and in no way divine.
Chrsitians DO NOT blieve the Koran and Mohammed are the final revlations of God, and while thy may be too polite to say so to a Muslim’s face, they basically CANNOT believe the Koran is the word of God and still remain Christians. If they did, then they would have to believe a whole series of contradictory doctrines, not the least of which concrns the divinity of Jesus.
IF YOU BELIEVE ONE TO BE TRUE, YOU MUST BELIEVE THE OTHER TO BE FALSE.
Yet both the Muslim and the Christian could sit there and criticize Dawkins for not accepting the “truth” about God. What truth??? Even those two theists cannot agree on essential points on what God is like and what his plan for humanity is.
I am not talking about some triviality like the day of the week that you go to church or to mosque and you know very well that I am not, Lord Ashtar.
I ignored Tomndeb’s request for exact times, etc. of the program for two reasons. First, it is irrelevant to the general discussion and secondly I do not remember the precise date. The debate is not about exactly what was said on that program, word for word. It would be ridiculous to have such a debate because I suspect few Americans have access to that program.
If it helps you, I can tell you that it was the program is “Agenda” with Steve Paikin on TVOntario, which comes in on Channel 2, Rogers Cable in the Ottawa area, and no. 353 on StarChoice Satellite service. I do not know if these numbers mean anything in the US.
The problem is that “Agenda” is on five nights a week at 8 p.m. and I sincerely do not remember what night I watched it. For some reason, the contents of my TV listing do not give a preview of the contents of that show, so looking at old TV listings does not help me. My guess is that it was May 8, 10, 14 or 15 because I believe I was home those nights.
For some reason, both you and Tomndebb have made a big deal of the exact details of the pogram.
I must apologize for one thing. As is my wont, I went off on a digression from my principal point, so maybe I am the source of my own problem. I simply observed that the half-hour interview with Dawkins was followed by a “fairness” half-hour of three theists criticizing him.
I then made a digression which I clearly admitted was a digression, namely, to wonder aloud how some news media would react if atheists demanded “fairness” rebuttal time in every instance. Tomndeb jumped all over me for that one, but all I was thinking of was, say, a local radio station that gives free-time 5-minute segment late at night to clergymen of different faiths, including Muslims, Jews and other non-Christians. Imagine a small radio station in Cornhole, Mississippi. The station manager is also a devout member of the local Baptist Church, a creationst and a conservative Republican. And a few atheists walk in one day and ask that their viewpoint be given an occasional sermonette segment, say, one in ten, to explain why there is no God, to read from Dawkins or other excellent atheist authors, etc. I cannot guarantee the station would refuse, but I was just wondering aloud.
As I say, it was a digression, and if it is going to be used to hijack the whole thread, I happily withdraw it.
Once again, I will repeat the gist of my argument: Here are two theists who believe mutually cointradictory, essential and fundamental doctrines about God, both sitting there and castigating Dawkins for not accepting the “truth” when they themselves have two very diffrent version of what that truth is. This makes no sense to me.
Now I have stated my argument over and over again as clearly as I possibly can. You can certainly continue to disagree with it, but if if you continue to misintrept it, I will have to conclude that you are either malicious or lacking in understanding of basic logic and English.
Or maybe to put it a little more accurately, most theists agree that we are because the god they believe in is. Not all theists believe in the same god you do, and not all theists even called that entity “God.”
And not all theists believe in a creator god.
I didn’t mean it as an insult. An observation. Sorry if it came across that way.
I never said it was anything other than supposition. I made an educated guess about how you, Czarcasm, and Der Trihs would react based on your history on this board. Just for funsies, how would you react if that were the final difference between theists?
If you were to condense two of the largest religions on the face of the Earth down to an abstract, then yes, I’d say your descriptions are fairly apt.
The reason why the name of the program is important, at least to me, is because I’d like to know who these theists are. If the show had brought on Fred Phelps, Osama bin Laden, and a Jewish supremacist (sorry, can’t think of a prominent one off the top of my head), would you still be arguing that they spoke for the people who follow their religions? I think even you would agree that’s not really a fair sample.
Since this is Great Debates, if you’re going to cite a TV program as a source, you damn well better back it up if you want to be taken seriously.
Well, thank you finally. Through the magic of the intarwebs, I have found this blog which happens to have a link to the show if anyone is interested. I find the blog’s author’s comments interesting, especially this part:
Kind of makes me wonder how fair an impartial this panel of three theists was.
I would have the same questions of someone who started a thread which said, “So I was reading this magazine article the other day. I don’t remember which magazine it was or which issue it was, but that’s not important.”
This statement is false. I have explicitly not made a big deal about the exact details of the program. Very early on in the thread I asked a couple of questions about the set-up you provided because you made a couple of silly claims in your OP that sounded invented. However, once the thread got its “legs” and took on a specific direction, my only comment on the original show was to ask posters to not return (after eight pages) to discussing what was purportedly said on the show since we had no accurate information about it and such a discussion would derail the thread.
For someone who wanders around petulantly demanding that other posters show where he said this or that, you appear to have no compunction about misrepresenting what other posters have said.
Nope, I still disagree. “There is no Zeus” for me would be an affirmation of disbelief in Zeus, but not necessarily in all gods. And that’s how i’d define atheism, as a lack of belief in any and all gods. You can’t be both and atheist and believe in a god/gods - at least under my own definition. And it seems like a pretty reasonble definition to me; at least, i’ve never come across anyone else that’s claimed you can be both a believer in gods and an atheist at the same time. Popularity of a definition of course means nothing as far as the validity of it, but i’m really not seeing your argument. Could you possibly state it a bit more simply? It could just be going over my head.
What does “final difference” mean? Does it mean the only difference, the largest difference or something else entirely?
It looks as though this is the show in question, and that you can listen to it as an mp3 through the page I’ve linked to.
Lets say you set up two columns, (like on a sheet of paper) and at the head of one column there is a YES, and the other a NO. Down the left hand side of the paper is a list of the multitudinous gods. You are asked to check YES or NO depending upon whether you believe in each particular god.
Any monotheist will check YES for her god, and NO for all the others.
How can such a person *not *be an atheist?
A monotheist is not “a believer in gods.” A monotheist is a believer in only one god.
An atheist does not profess disbelief in all gods, only in those gods that have been asserted. If you assert that such and such a god does not exist, then you are, by definition, an atheist.
It makes no sense to say that the concept of god is impossible. God must be defined before a refutation can be coherent.
Consider this conversation:
A) God does not exist.
B) What do you mean by “God?”
A) I don’t know.
There can be no refutation of god until god is defined. It is really that simple. Once god is defined, any refutation is atheism. By definition.
Aha. I think I spot the problem. An atheist professes disbelief in all gods that have been asserted. Thus, the monotheist is not an atheist because they do profess belief in one god that has been asserted. They don’t fulfil the criteria. Better?
Anyone who states “Such and such a god does not exist” is an atheist. A monotheist would only qualify as “not an atheist” if he had never encountered an assertion of existence for any god but his own. It seems to me to be the crux of the OP. If two gods are *necessarily **contradictory *and mutually exclusive, then it is *impossible *to believe in both of them, and *necessary *to disbelieve in one of them, if an assertion of belief has been made about the other.
Anyone who states “All gods that I know of do not exist” is an athiest. Anyone who states “Such and such a god does not exist” is merely expressing disbelief in a particular god.
What makes your definition superior to mine? I can think of a reason why mine is better; under your system, every person is an atheist (bar those people who have only ever heard of one god and believe in it). The definition of athiest under your view is thus pretty much redundant. We’d also need to come up with a new term to describe those people who do not believe in any gods. How would you refer to such a person to differentiate them from a Christian, for example?
I agree with this, though.