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Morer Questions For The Atheist [W:839]

What's the question?

And why should I accept anything Craig says about what atheists.

And one thing I noticed about Mike Lupca's article on Pew Research is he doesn't show the source for those claims. Looking for the source for those claims means a heck of a lot.
 
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No one can prove that god does, or does not exist.

I strongly disagree. One could easily prove the existence of a god. All they'd need to do is have that god publicly reveal themselves. Climb Mt. Olympus and talk to Zeus, except he's not there. Proving the existence of a god that exists would be easy. Prayer would actually have an affect on people's health. There's lots of ways. That they aren't offered is, as we both know, one of the main reasons to think that it's all nonsense.

However, disproving a god is also pretty easy. We disprove Zeus by going up Mt. Olympus and him not being there. We also disprove him by showing that lightning isn't thrown by someone up in the clouds, but is a natural phenomenon. Any god that has specific attributes or has specific actions attributed to them can be disproved by disproving those attributes. If it is inherent to the monotheistic god to have created the world six thousand years ago, a world that is billions of years old disproves any gods who created the world before that. The only way that we have reached a god that cannot be disproved is by stripping it of all attributes. We have created a nebulous, amorphous thing that is then used to justify whatever attributes a religious organization wants. The only gods that cannot be disproved are the ones that don't do anything and don't matter. Gods who bring natural disasters? Gods who suspend the laws of nature or of physics? Gods who afflict some people with disease and cure others? Those gods are easily disproved.

If anyone is wondering, this is an example of two atheists discussing gnosticism. RapidAlpaca is taking the agnostic position, while I am arguing for the gnostic one. They are positions on knowledge, not on belief.

belief in the existence of a god or gods,

You're putting the "not" in the wrong place. Atheists don't believe in the nonexistence of gods. Atheists don't believe in the existence. We don't believe differently than you, we don't do the believing thing at all.

"I don't believe" vs "I believe there isn't". We do the former. You seem to think we do the latter.

Who said you were dishonest and hypocritical (I admit, I didn't watch the video)? There's a difference between "I don't believe there is a God" and "There is no God". The second is an affirmative statement of belief (actually presented as fact). Those who espouse the second tend to be the most evangelical of atheists seemingly taking personal offense that others do believe in God.

As always, we do not and have not ever given a crap about what anyone else believes. We care what people do, and when people do horrible things because of their beliefs, and those beliefs cannot be rationally discussed because they rely on appeals to authority to justify, there's no recourse but to oppose the beliefs. All of this pushback agaisnt religion, you brought it on yourself by working yourself into a corner by relying on an appeal to authority.

So tedious and boring.
The title of this thread says something about questions for atheists, yet the OP contains no questions.

More of the same gibberish.

I suspect that the OP isn't actually interested in any answers that we might provide.
 
For the record;

My version of atheism is the straight forward one of I think that there is no god or gods.

Sam as I think Santa Claus is not real.

If you have another version of atheism I think you are not an atheist you are something else.

It might be confusing but generally only to very stupid Americans.
 
Either you believe that God or gods exist, or you don't!

The rest is just cockamamie b**** simply because, common sense dictates that you'd have to be agnostic - that is, IF YOU RELY ON SCIENCE!


You can't have it both ways.

lol as if no one ever waivers in their faith or god forbid (pun intended), doesn't even reflect on this crap often at all

so yes, we can have it as many ways as we want. Not sure the point of your rant other than to antagonize

look, religion is so often taken as synonymous with belief in a deity that *atheism* can be construed as either disavowal of religion (5000 year earth and all that bull****), or disbelief in a god itself
 
The best part about "Verificationism" is its close ties to logical positivism, the effort to make philosophy (call it a movement in the early 1900's) more guided to conclusive statements that were verifiable by some means. The range of verifiable statements at origin included everything from logical determination (mental exercise) up to empirical determination (actual numeric or conclusive observation of truth or falsehood.) The further they went the further they leaned towards empirical determination, which caused a rift among those considering life's purpose especially when it comes to... ironically... theism.

What makes the video so comical is the assumption that Atheism has anything to do with Verificationism, as in later stages of logical positivism there was little respect for the mental exercise that took someone from observation level thinking to atheism as a conclusion. And again, ironically, agnosticism became the more plausible conclusion in that one could not make the determinations that Theism and Atheism make without a system of belief to base them on. Raw observation in the determination of truth today cannot take one to atheism or theism. Truth being defined without the qualifier of belief, or the old Fact vs. Truth debate.

So when someone today suggests Atheism encompasses Verificationism they are speaking from an extreme minority position within philosophy with little respect from those practicing logical positivism using the observance empirical standard.

Too deep for me. Faith is much easier than trying to deny God
 
Too deep for me. Faith is much easier than trying to deny God

That is the thing, it is not always about denial. Agnostics and to an extent logical positivism philosophers are not out to deny God, but also they are not out to design the next system of belief to support the notion either.

If anything what philosophy and other critical thinking gave us is an evolutionary pivot point in human history. A condition where humanity has almost achieved a point of no longer making up a new God (or Gods) but at the same time has not evolved enough to let go of all the systems of belief created to date. Which is similar to what the discovery of science did for human history. Unfortunately the consequence is looking at anyone outside of systems of belief as being a denier, or something of adversary. You have to keep in context that systems of belief do not like competition or question, even if the point of the challenge is discovery over trying disprove some belief.

Atheists get that title already making their statements based on their system of belief. Those are the outright deniers. Others though can engage in the context of what is an observation of truth or an observation of falsehood. And taking on the God existence question does not qualify, just as it is improbable that systems of science or critical thought will directly validate some system of belief. One that generally has no interest in the standards of "observational truth" or scientific method. The question in the video is the biggest give away, just as the majority of tosca1's posts do as well. That "deniers" have the obligation to prove something on a standard that systems of belief cannot themselves ever achieve. It is a logical fallacy that many engage in way too often.

You follow? The main point is the video could not be any more wrong about what atheism does and does not encompass. To your point faith is easier than being an outright denier (atheist) or being a practical thinker and/or logical positivism leaning philosopher (probably agnostic but does not have to be.)
 
You're probably not much into the wonders of.nature either.

Wrong. I find nature, the universe and reality wonderous enough, without the need of an imaginary being.
 
agnostic-v-gnostic-v-atheist-v-theist.png
 
All religions are the creation of humans and the chances they have any relation to some real god like entity is right around zero. Now, could a god like entity exist? Sure, it's possible, but there is zero evidence of it.
 
Too deep for me. Faith is much easier than trying to deny God


Easier does not mean true. And 'Deny God' assumes there is something there to 'deny'. I do not think that atheists 'deny god'.. they just don't see evidence that there is anything there do deny to begin with.
 
Easier does not mean true. And 'Deny God' assumes there is something there to 'deny'. I do not think that atheists 'deny god'.. they just don't see evidence that there is anything there do deny to begin with.

That was my point, one cannot deny something that does not exist. Apparently that means that I do not appreciate the beauty of nature. Go figure.
 
That was my point, one cannot deny something that does not exist. Apparently that means that I do not appreciate the beauty of nature. Go figure.

Which of course can easily be shown to exist unlike this god of theirs.
 
Which of course can easily be shown to exist unlike this god of theirs.

Or any other god. Thousands of years of people believing in a multitude of gods, and not one shred of evidence.
 

No. Gnosticism is not about whether or not you do know. It's about whether or not you can know. Agnostics make the claim that you can't know. Which is absurd, because if there was a god interacting with us, we'd know it. All the people who claim to feel god in their emotional experiences, they claim to know. People talk about their "personal relationship" with their god. They claim to know. A lot of gnostic theists fall back on agnosticism when confronted with criticism, and a lot of gnostic atheists fall back on agnosticism when trying to be completely accurate and not fall into some kind of semantic trap. Sure, we can't prove that no gods of any kind exist. But we can prove that Zeus doesn't exist. We went up Mt. Olympus and he wasn't there. We can prove that the Aztec god Tonatiuh doesn't exist, because the sacrifices stopped and the sun kept shining. We can prove that the god of the bible doesn't exist, because the world isn't a few thousand years old, and because dinosaurs and evolution are real. Also because natural disasters don't happen in correlation to "sinful" behavior, and praying for someone to get over an illness doesn't make a difference. These are all attributes of that god and when you strip away the attributes, there's no god left, just a nebulous concept. The moment a god is claimed to have done something, we can check and see if a god did it, or if it just happened naturally.

We are all very gnostic about a lot of gods. We are only agnostic about the possibility of the concept of gods.

And, of course, because this question always follows, "why do you atheists care so much about what people believe?" We don't. We care what people do because of their beliefs, and since beliefs invoke an appeal to an authority instead of rational debate to support them, our only recourse to stop the terrible things people do because of their beliefs is to dispel the beliefs.

As is the case with the majority of her threads in this specific forum.

Which is kind of funny because the atheist position is astoundingly simple. The god stories are too absurd to be true, too internally contradictory to be true, and don't square with observable reality. And so they're probably not true. So it's stupid to make decisions as if they were.
 
No. Gnosticism is not about whether or not you do know. It's about whether or not you can know. Agnostics make the claim that you can't know. Which is absurd, because if there was a god interacting with us, we'd know it. All the people who claim to feel god in their emotional experiences, they claim to know. People talk about their "personal relationship" with their god. They claim to know. A lot of gnostic theists fall back on agnosticism when confronted with criticism, and a lot of gnostic atheists fall back on agnosticism when trying to be completely accurate and not fall into some kind of semantic trap. Sure, we can't prove that no gods of any kind exist. But we can prove that Zeus doesn't exist. We went up Mt. Olympus and he wasn't there. We can prove that the Aztec god Tonatiuh doesn't exist, because the sacrifices stopped and the sun kept shining. We can prove that the god of the bible doesn't exist, because the world isn't a few thousand years old, and because dinosaurs and evolution are real. Also because natural disasters don't happen in correlation to "sinful" behavior, and praying for someone to get over an illness doesn't make a difference. These are all attributes of that god and when you strip away the attributes, there's no god left, just a nebulous concept. The moment a god is claimed to have done something, we can check and see if a god did it, or if it just happened naturally.

We are all very gnostic about a lot of gods. We are only agnostic about the possibility of the concept of gods.

And, of course, because this question always follows, "why do you atheists care so much about what people believe?" We don't. We care what people do because of their beliefs, and since beliefs invoke an appeal to an authority instead of rational debate to support them, our only recourse to stop the terrible things people do because of their beliefs is to dispel the beliefs.
I agree with every point you made except about the chart disagreeing with either of us. I think the wording it uses is a touch ambiguous, but I don't think it conflicts with our views.
 
That is the thing, it is not always about denial. Agnostics and to an extent logical positivism philosophers are not out to deny God, but also they are not out to design the next system of belief to support the notion either.

If anything what philosophy and other critical thinking gave us is an evolutionary pivot point in human history. A condition where humanity has almost achieved a point of no longer making up a new God (or Gods) but at the same time has not evolved enough to let go of all the systems of belief created to date. Which is similar to what the discovery of science did for human history. Unfortunately the consequence is looking at anyone outside of systems of belief as being a denier, or something of adversary. You have to keep in context that systems of belief do not like competition or question, even if the point of the challenge is discovery over trying disprove some belief.

Atheists get that title already making their statements based on their system of belief. Those are the outright deniers. Others though can engage in the context of what is an observation of truth or an observation of falsehood. And taking on the God existence question does not qualify, just as it is improbable that systems of science or critical thought will directly validate some system of belief. One that generally has no interest in the standards of "observational truth" or scientific method. The question in the video is the biggest give away, just as the majority of tosca1's posts do as well. That "deniers" have the obligation to prove something on a standard that systems of belief cannot themselves ever achieve. It is a logical fallacy that many engage in way too often.

You follow? The main point is the video could not be any more wrong about what atheism does and does not encompass. To your point faith is easier than being an outright denier (atheist) or being a practical thinker and/or logical positivism leaning philosopher (probably agnostic but does not have to be.)

I couldn't get the video to works so, I'm just going on what you're saying here.

I'm not interested in trying to make anyone believe in God, they have to find faith/God on their own.

I've always had a very scientific and curious mind to go along with the religious upbringing I was given. No one was more skeptical of existence of a higher power than I was in my youth but, I never let the possibility escape my psyche.

As I have grown older, it has become clearer and clearer with each passing day that there is a loving God whom everyone needs to find a relationship.

I suspect many of the non-believers, [whatever they be called] will see the same light I have, sooner or later
 
I suspect many of the non-believers, [whatever they be called] will see the same light I have, sooner or later

And of course many believers will stop believing. It works both ways.
 
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