Yes, absolutely. I’ve believed this going back even before COVID. So many of the antivax excuses are about as coherent as the ones my kid uses to get dessert before dinner.
I think it’s just the same thing that attracts people to horror movies - people like a good scaring.
Firmly believing things with no evidence is one of the reasons our country got itself into such a divisive mess.
Excellent work, everyone. Once a subject says this, our charàde has succeeded.
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I base a lot of my beliefs on what Jesus is reported to have said (and he covered the vice-versa: “If it were not so, wouldn’t I have told you about that?”).
But I really hope my “Kerouac Buddhist” son is right. He thinks that when you die, you end up in whatever you picture heaven as being.
So I’ve been picturing dying and ending up in my favorite Belgian biertaverne. The bar is all beautifully-oiled wood, and lit so warmly… especially on snowy nights, it’s SO cozy.
That’s what a loving god would concoct… oh, and the bartenders would rotate: Ernest Hemingway, Richard Feynman, Betty White and Jack Kerouac (with Neil Degrasse Tyson and Tupac when they die…).
So like I told my son "When you die, ask where the Belgian bar is, and stop by for a pint!
30-plus years ago, I dated a man who owned a record store, and whenever he had troublesome-looking customers, or closing time approached, he would put on classical music.
He never failed to be amazed at how many of these people knew what it was.
Conversely, grocery stores often play some really good music, to keep people in there longer.
Here’s Hans (Dana Carvey) and Franz (Kevin Nealon) with Ahnold, who shows up at 1:36.
I have an unsupported suspicion that i live in a solipsistic universe. I choose not to debate this belief, beause it is pointless to argue with myself.
I’m sorry to inform you, you all cease to exist when i die.
I believe conspiracy theorists are wacky, deluded nuts.
But, I must say, I do think there’s a bit more to the JFK assassination than what the Warren Commission report concludes.
My working theory: LBJ, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby were obviously mind-controlled by the aliens headquartered at Roswell. They groomed Bigfoot to be the second assassin in the event Lee Harvey didn’t make the kill shot. They trained him to be an alien ninja with cloaking ability so he wasn’t seen on the grassy knoll. Marilyn Monroe and Jack Ruby were enlisted to do the wet work. The aliens used Disney Studios to fabricate the moon landing as a diversionary tactic and to keep their massive colony on the dark side of the moon hidden. They “killed” Walt Disney and froze his head, un-freezing it whenever they needed his Studio for a host of other fabrications like 9-11, killer bees and the Covid pandemic. A coincidence that both Walt Disney and Paul McCartney died in 1966? I think not! I’m pretty sure the Knights Templar were also involved in the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Tupac Shakur, but I’m still piecing that together.
This is all completely plausible, and exactly the conspiracy theory that the Illuminati want you to believe so that you don’t figure out what is really going on.
Indeed! What’s really going on is that the Illuminati, in cahoots with the aliens are implanting zombifying micro-chips into Covid vaccines to make us all their sex slaves.
An atheist is not necessarily a sceptic. Stating that there is absolutely no god means, pretty much by definition, that you are not a sceptic. A sceptic would not hold a rigid belief, just a provisional one.
And I disagree with your second point. It is trivially easy to find many, many believers who are absolutely 100% convinced of their beliefs and it simply isn’t possible to hold a belief more strongly than that.
You are right in the sense that the “natural” is the only realm that we have ever been shown to exist. There is no good evidence for gods however and such a concept can be safely dismissed out of hand until such time as evidence is put forward that suggests otherwise.
Firstly even taking your comment about atheists as true I don’t think this is correct. There are plenty of people who express an absolute belief in their deity, vehemently and repeatedly. Atheists could be as rigid as that, but I don’t see how they could be more rigid than that, let alone “a lot” more rigid than that.
Secondly, your comment contains an obvious logical clanger - you use a comment about what you have heard atheists defend to support a contention that “skeptics are” something. If you’ve seen a bird that is red does that mean birds are red?
An atheist is a person without a belief in a deity. That’s a broad umbrella that covers everything from people who have no positive view there is a deity through to people who have a very definite view there is no deity.
That’s what I thought, but in another thread I was informed it was perfectly OK for atheists to believe in ghosts. But wait, aren’t ghosts and deities endemic to the afterlife? Doesn’t disbelief in God equate to disbelief in the afterlife, where ghosts roam? Oh NOOOOOO!!! That’s the type of rigidity Thelma Lou was referring to.
So in those cases, atheists choose not to believe in God because of rebellion (I guess), but that doesn’t carry over to other mythical creatures.
There is no all-encompassing and agreed-upon definition of an afterlife, ghosts, or deities that logically requires them all to be connected or interdependent.
They can be, they don’t have to be. As such, an atheist can believe in ghosts or an afterlife without it conflicting with their base state of “atheism”. As long as they don’t accept a belief in god, they remain an atheist, no matter what other unfounded and irrational beliefs they may hold.
I’ve never come across an atheist who held that position because of rebellion. What is the logic there? What are you rebelling against? a god you don’t believe in? Such people may exist but they are vanishingly rare in my experience.
And, just so I’m not posting only on side-issues or responses, I’ve thought about this and I can’t honestly say that I firmly believe in anything for which there is zero evidence.
The closest I get is probably extraterrestrial life. I’m 90% convinced that some form of (what we would define as) life exists somewhere else or somewhen else in our universe.
I wouldn’t say that there is zero evidence for that though. We have incontrovertible evidence that life can arise at least once, very strong evidence that suitable conditions and precursors exists elsewhere and certainty that there is a massive experimental space in which it could happen.
Your post is so confused I can’t even…
Is this an example of you believing something with zero evidence?
That’s the part I have trouble agreeing with. If you don’t believe in God, the main basis of the afterlife, how can you believe in the afterlife?
To keep on topic, I believe without actual evidence, that atheism includes disbelief in all things supernatural, which includes supreme beings.
The “rebellion” I refer to is against the atheist’s religious upbringing.
There could be many definitions of an afterlife that do not rely upon a god or gods.
If you believe in the afterlife as described within Christianity, which indeed only exists because a god exists and within which a god is a necessity, then that would implicitly require a belief in a god and that would negate a claim of atheism.
However, there are as many potential definitions of an afterlife as there are people on the planet and a god is not a prerequisite for all of them.
It merely represents a lack of belief in a god or gods. That really is it. It may correlate with other philosophical viewpoints but it doesn’t necessarily require or demand them.
I see, that may happen but in my experience (UK) Most people I know are atheist and very few had any religious up bringing and so there is absolutely nothing to rebel against. By far the most common reason for atheism is some variety of “no reason to think otherwise”
And even in a case of atheism in someone with an extensive religious background, such as me, I also had an extensive secular upbringing, which came into conflict with my former religious beliefs and won out over them in the end, definitively. No rebellion needed, just logic and reason.