Ahem. I quote myself: “Of course, if you define “God” as something that evidently exists, then you can tell atheists they don’t really disbelieve in God…” Many, many atheists care about others and do not wish to hurt them, yet do not believe in the existence of some ultimate, objective Love or Creator or Deity or Supernatural or Metaphysical Being. If you, personally, wish to define God as “caring about others” and them tell atheists that they believe in God, well, have fun. I think I’ll define “faeries” as “caring about others”; therefore moral people are all faerie believers. Oh, and I’ll define “Santa Claus” as “bluebirds”, so obviously Santa Claus exists. And I’ll define “Thor” as “lighting”, so obviously you’re all Thor-believers. Then I’ll go rip every page of my dictionary and redefine so many words that no one ever knows what I am talking about ever again.
All the atheists I know, save you (and I do not personally consider you an atheist since you believe in God, although I’ll call you whatever you wish), believe in caring for your fellow man. Therefore I do not think I am taking anything away from them; we all agree that we are atheists since we do not believe in any sort of Supreme Being. Nearly every single theist also agrees that we are atheists since we do not believe in any sort of supreme being. You are the one who is warping the tradtional meaning of “atheist” to mean “a person who believes in the existence of God but doesn’t give a crap about his fellow man.” You may call yourself whatever you wish, but I think that I have a right to demand that if you are going to call me anything, you stick to the commonly accepted defintion. By just about everybody’s defintion of the word, I am an atheist, a “soft atheist” if you wish to get specific, and I prefer to not be called a theist when I am not one.
Well, if you ask me, “do you care about others?” I will say “yes.” There is nothing magic about it, and it is not a being that lives inside me. I care, I hate, I love, I yearn, I wonder, I fear, I joy, etc., because I am human. By the standard defintions of “empathy” or “hate” or “love” I can say they exist, and specifically, that they metaphorically exist inside me. The terms are definitions of emotions/actions/perceptions. If empathy is “God” to you, why aren’t “hate” and “fear” and “love” Gods too? Why pick and choose which emotions/actions/perceptions are metaphysical deities and which are not?
Another wrinkle. This same guy advanced the theory that the particular image of God someone has or rejects is more important than whether or not they believe in a God. For example, he said if someone says they are an atheist, he wantsa to know what image of God they reject. If an atheist rejects the Christian God, in some ways he shares something with a believing Christian, more than the believing Christian shares with some believer in a different God.
I apologize fr the lack of clarity and depth, but these are not my views, merely the briefly stated views of another, and the setting in which they were expressed was not appropriate for me to try to draw more explanation out of him. I am not sure how it applies to a nonbeliever who rejects all of the versions of God he has encountered, with the exception that he believes some people define as God something that already has a perfectly fine name, say nature, goodness, etc.
gaudere - try situps, and you can become a hard atheist.
Really, Gaudere, you are just disembling. You don’t think love/empathy is metaphysical because you don’t think people have souls. But, even though you don’t think people have souls you think morality is good, and you should be moral to others, even though other people are just bags of chemicals and you don’t hold cake mix in the same regard. But, you think this chemical generated love/empathy is important, can be learned, developed, and nurtured, and you think, without any reason I can concieve of, that empathy/love can lead to the discerning of a universal morality. You also apparently think this chemical generated love is more powerful than chemical generated hate without any chemical formulae to back up your claims.
This ties in perfectly with the whole odious image of atheists as petulent children rebelling from their parents. So if our background is Christian, then we are part of Christianity no matter what we say? Do you see how frustrating it is when someone isn’t allowed the benifit of doubt about their own motivations?
jmullaney is basically saying atheists do not know their own mind.
Shit, couldn’t stay away. Whence comes “Love=[the christian] God”? I think that represents the sort of meaningless statements christians advance when their ridiculous beliefs are up against the wall and they want wriggle room. Yeah, that God that loves me so much he’s gonna damn me and my heathen kids to hell. What a sweetheart!
I think many Christians believe God is all-loving. But I think if someone says God is love, nothing more and nothing less, they are not what I commonly understand to be a Christian.
It seems to me that some general idea of what constitutes many if not most G/gods has been around for some time, and people have been able to discuss matters based on use of a common definition. Similarly, people can agree on some of what is meant by emotions such as “love”, and can tease out any nuances they want. But why go and confuse things by attributing to one thing with a perfectly good name, the name already assigned to something else?
Cake mix apparently cannot think or feel, nor is it conscious. People can and are, and as a fellow person it behooves me to encourage the belief that persons are valuable and to treat them as valuable my own self. Besides, I like people. Makes sense to me, and nowhere implies a belief in God.
Yes, I do think it can be learned, developed and nurtured; remember my example of a mother teaching morality to her children? Since you agreed with me on that point previously, are you just being disingenous here or what? And again, what does this have to do with whether I believe in God?
Love is not neccessarily stronger than hate; sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. As to whether it is generally stronger, we don’t need to get into chemical formulae, particlarly since we have yet to understand the mechanisms of human consciousness and emotions fully; simply look at a bunch of people and see whether love wins out over hate more often, or whether it doesn’t. Of course, then you have to factor in environmental and genetic and cultural influences, so good luck with winnowing out which is actually “stronger”. Since most people seem to love more people than they hate, perhaps love is stronger. ::shrug:: And what difference does it make as to which I think is stronger as to whether I believe in the existence of a Supreme Being?
What, so “any metaphysic”==“belief in God”? Wow, everyone’s a theist, then! Heck, I suppose my defintion of “Art” is a metaphysical belief, but it doesn’t say anything about the existence/nonexistence of God.