Atheism vs. Religion Dead Horse Beating Round 473!

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Oh, but keeping people complacent and easily led is a good thing...

And it still seems to be a well-used argument that the economic success of the States in the late 19th and during the most of the 20th century was due to protestant work-ethics.

I've seen university biologists spouting that rubbish. With sincerity. Even after Jared Diamond was given a honorary academical degree here in Finland...So even if joacqin might not stand behind what he says, his argument still stands (shoddily) by itself in a non-ironical way as well...

 

Sure, but I'd also ask you to think over how you defined "positive side".

Every time religion is involved in helping the poor (charity is part of many religions), helping an individual deal with or overcome a problem (say alcoholism-some people credit a higher power with giving them the strength of will to kick the habit and others pills that modify how alcohol interacts with the body, I'll give it to whichever method currently worked and that may include both), or motivating society to become better and more humane (the history of the USA puts some religious groups at the forefront of the abolitionist movement) I would say that is part of the positive side of religion.

If you look at Haiti right now there are Catholic as well as other religious charity and relief organizations active in helping people trying to recover from the earthquake.

Also the mass by the ruins of the Cathedral, if the newspaper descriptions of it are accurate, helped people emotionally and also gives them a chance to reconnect with each other as a community. Note that Catholics and Protestants were there. If someone is of the mindset that religious differences make only lead to wars, fighting, and bloodshed then he/she would arguably expect close contact between members of different religious groups to involve some. Instead the reality is that there weren't conflicts and members of the different groups likely feel, if anything, more emotionally connected than they did before.

A counter argument could be doesn't a crisis mean people band together? I would say sometimes, or it could provide the pressure needed to break bonds between people. People can bond at non-religious events too but since this mass was a blatantly religious event I'll give at least some of the credit to religion.

Thus religion may not be required for bonding but in this case it was certainly part of it.

That brings me back to your comment that defined "positive side" as only that which has nothing to do with anything else. I think that is an improper definition because someone can do something for list of multiple reasons.

If someone does something good only because of religious thought then I'll religion deserves credit. If someone does something good because of both religious thought/doctrine/ideology and because of a belief in being fair, civil, or whatever then I'll give both religion and that belief credit. Ditto for if the list of reasons is even longer.

Denying religion credit for positive things that happen that it had a hand in simply because it wasn't the only hand strikes as unfair and is arguably unreasonable too.

So I'd ask you to rethink how you define "positive side".

I don't know if you do this as well but some of the same people who try to limit the credit religion gets for good things also overemphasize the credit it deserves for the bad. So if multiple types of thought (including religious) had a hand in some bad they credit the event/thing to religion but not so with good things.

That doesn't try to take a close look at the reasons why things are done and feeds, as well as being fueled by, bias.

You may view everything religion is involved in (good or bad) as simply having alternative reasoning as the true source and this would be somewhat consistent.

But if you credit it with the negative things it has been involved in (inquisition and so on) it is both accurate and fair to credit it with the good.

You can still debate if religion is really responsible for a specific event or not but that isn't the same as assigning only good or bad things to religion.

I think both religion and atheism can be active forces in society so I think good and bad events can be attributed to both. You may or may not agree with me. But even if you don't, please check the person who gave you that definition of "positive side" (which I still disagree with) for consistency or the lack thereof. The latter of which I do attribute to Dawkins.

 

Ah Iku, you didnt even understood so little that you didn't even understand when I was trying to point it out by asking you to re-read my post. I wasn't even being ironic, it is an argument that is put forward by many and you can make it quite a persuasive one. I have read Jared Diamon's work and enjoyed it a lot, I also bought most of his theories as very plausible. That does not detract from the fact that hard work is a strong part of the lutheran creed and that it allowed parts of the world that although they had geographical advantages to pull further ahead than even they might account for. Just look at the comparative wealth between protestant and catholic or orthodox countries in Europe which have all enjoyed more or less the same geographical benefits Diamond explored.

I personally believe religion causes more negatives than positives but there are still a few perks especially on a societial or national level.

What I was presenting was an argument and had nothing to do with China which by the way is still incredibly poor. They have a lot of money but they are also quite a few to share that money. The amount of US debt to China matters little to the Chinese farmer on the rice paddy trying to save enough money to buy himself a TV.

 

Right on the money there. I think that people do good or bad things despite of religion, despite of any ideology and in many cases even despite of any reasoning for that matter.

Empires rise and fall, despite what their holy scriptures say. People are born, live, suffer joy and misery and die. Despite of Religion and despite of rational thought.

Whether there is a plethora of deities or a God or no God at all is personally, to me, utterly insignificant. My life, how I am, and how I feel about it is hardly any different to what it used to be when I was a man of faith (although was I a man of true Faith, is arguable).

The thing what I do object to, specifically with any religion, is when people take hiding behind the cloth, hiding behind a god (or God), hiding behind an ideology and still doing inexcusable things. If one decides to be a bastard, then one definitely should be an honest bastard. (Everybody loves that kind of a bastard more in any case.)

 

There is a difference between "hiding behind" and "devout follower of". And they can apply to ideologies that are religious, anti-religious, or leave religion unaddressed.

Sometimes you can tell if someone is hiding behind ideology X but sometimes the required info (that would make it possible for people to tell) isn't available.

 

I don't know, I always attributed it to our plentiful resources (no pesky 5000 year history of civilization to mine them all out) and all the immigrants who were looking for a 'better life' (be they protestant, catholic, or buddhist).

pplr, I think Iku was talking about the blatant examples of bigotry, such as the pastor stealing money from his church and having an affair, or Christians who want to stone everyone who isn't a Christian. When the religion specifically says X is wrong, evil, vile, and warrants your death if you do it, and the followers (or even leaders) do it anyway and expect to get away with it ("But this is an exception, God never meant it for these heathens"), everyone should object.

 

Okay let me try and clarify some of this:

When seeking to define a word or term in conversation, a definition can be useful, useless, humorous, and/or insulting to various degrees.

In order for a definition to be close to 100% useful, it should be specific to the word or term being defined without(much if any) overlap.

For example, the term "agnostic":

When someone employs the definition of "Not committed to theistic belief or atheistic non-belief.", this is a useless definition because it is impossible to be such. You either HAVE a positive belief in one or more gods or you LACK such.
A useful definition of 'Agnosticism' applies ONLY to knowledge of God("God" being a transcendent supernatural deity, common to monotheistic religions, especially the Abrahamic faiths) and is applicable to BOTH theism AND atheism.

Even more applicable to this discussion would be the definitions of "atheism", including the "strong" and "weak" varieties.

A somewhat useless definition of "strong atheism" for example, is 'Someone who actively believes there are no gods or God'. This is somewhat useless because it ignores the fact that even strong atheists defer to 'weak atheism' when applicable and seems to ultimately try to characterize a negative(lack of belief) as if it were a positive('belief in...').

Some terms themselves(as least given the definitions we are supplied with) are rather useless. For example NOG's "Ultimate/extreme atheist". The reason this is a rather useless TERM is because even conceding that such people exist, their numbers are rather in significant and more often than not relegated to teenagers and such who have no dog in this particular fight.

Nog(and you as well)tries to get around this by re-defining some who MAY be 'strong atheists' as "ultimate/extreme atheists'(i.e. Richard Dawkins) which makes little sense to anyone who has read and understood much of what people like Dawkins actually write or say.

No, I have heard of Hero Worship. My contention is with ANY kind of worship. Worship is a bad idea. It is immoral and demeaning to those who engage in such and does indeed turn "heroes" into GODS.

Eric Clapton would be a good case here. Some musician/guitarist who has great appreciation for Clapton's talent is one thing. But someone who worships Clapton, especially to the degree that they will react emotionally to any criticism of Clapton, is doing something that Clapton himself does not want. They are deifying Clapton(whom IIRC is a Christian).

Honoring and adhering to(what you, IMO erroneously call "following") a principle is not "worship" of any kind. And yes, I can already hear your reply of "Well if millions of people believe that equality is a good principle are they not "following" that?". To which I answer, perhaps, but only in the loosest sense of "following" and certainly not in the sense that worshipers of a person or god would be called "followers".

AGAIN, I am pretty sure this is due to YOUR errant perceptions and not due to atheists actually adhering to any dogma/ideology.

*Chuckle*

Sure it is...

Not really. A straw man often does take things to an 'extremely silly' degree but all that is required of an argument for it to be a straw man is that the characterization be easier to 'knock down' or refute than the actual argument being offered.
And that last part I submit is simply due to your own preconceptions and mis-perceptions.

?!
That makes no sense at all.

Another false analogy fallacy. What I am saying is not at all comparable to what you analogize above. Refer back to my earlier analogy for a correct analogy.

Whatever. Without a reference to whatever discussion you are talking about I have no means to scrutinize the anecdote so it is useless as evidence.

No I am not "assuming" anything at all. Nice try though .

I am not "ducking" ANY points here and am quite perplexed as to how you arrive at such a conclusion!?
I cannot scrutinize your anecdotal evidence, hence why anecdotal evidence is considered the poorest evidence one can offer in such a debate.

Did you mean 'wander'(instead of "wonder")above?

An irrelevant conclusion is a fallacy because, regardless that you might feel about "concepts of karma" and such, they bear no relevance to what I said.

But I have not actually been "dodging" anything and so the error here is in your perception.

Another straw man(ironically enough). Anecdotal evidence cannot be scrutinized so I am right to dismiss it and to correctly identify the (more rational)possible reasons for your thinking such. Occam's razor tells us that if we have no way to rule out these all too common reasons for such then we cannot accept the more improbable explanations you might give.

I cannot scrutinize your anecdotal relationships and such but I CAN say, as someone who has myself been erroneously characterized as "dogmatic" myself, that some atheists are often misunderstood an reacted to irrationally for our very conclusions(i.e. God(with the capital 'G') cannot exist), rather than for HOW we reason to such conclusions.

I will NOT try to go back and search through some previous thousand page thread to look for what you might be talking about(if you would simply quote the discussion here that might help but this itself would no doubt run the risk of not including relevant information). Instead I will simply state that one atheist saying something possibly irrational(for whatever reason he may have been driven to such) does not itself constitute a "subset of atheism".
At best you can say that a particular atheist was driven to saying something irrational or insulting which I would not even contest in the first place!

Correct. I barely manage to respond to multiple posters in THIS thread and I cannot even find the time to view the 15 previous pages of THIS thread, let alone dig through however many pages of some previous thread to look for what is probably irrelevant posts by others in another thread(which I CAN reasonably infer based on your descriptions thus far).

False.

This is a perfect example of the false analogy fallacy!

Again, the analogy is completely false, not only for the reasons you concede above, but for the fact that we are talking about anecdotal accounts AND your whatever biases lead you to how you perceived whatever you may have perceived. Anecdotes(and our evaluations of such) themselves of ANY situation are not analogous to someone standing in front of a stabbing victim and denying he has a stab wound!

False. I have NEVER denied the thread existed or that you had a confrontation with an atheist. I have not even denied that the atheist in question made irrational comments to you. What I am contesting is twofold: 1)That your characterization of this event is necessarily accurate and 2)that this in itself constitutes what you and NOG are calling a "subset of atheism".

I have NEVER denied that (as you admit above, few)atheists have taken irrational actions. Stalin, Mao, the poster you refer to in your anecdotes, etc.

What I am saying is that there is no such thing as 'fanatic ATHEISM'!

See the difference yet? I am contesting this idea that if some few atheists decide to insult or wish harm on theists(in general, as opposed to the sorts of theists who deserve harm such as faith-based terrorists) that this constitutes "atheistic fanaticism".

Many problems with this straw man you offer.

1)Verbally "wishing harm" on someone in an internet post(probably driven to such by numerous irrational posts...which does NOT excuse such but does serve to illustrate WHY and make it more understandable) does not = what you are attempting to characterize here.

2)I have serious doubts about your bald assertion that some atheist did such simply because someone is "not the same because of religious beliefs"(did the atheist in question have a religion that did not conform to your own?), rather than because, for example, you were posting what he(rightly or wrongly) felt was irrational(extremely so?) or insulting?

How so?

I would define a "fanatic" as someone willing to do harm or kill others(or themselves) because others believe differently. You run into major problems trying to tie such to atheism though.

We have gone over this ad nauseum...let's move on unless you have something new to add.

False. You are offering a classic straw man here.

Care to name any known ritualistic genital mutilations that are NOT religious in nature? I used the term "ritualistic" to make clear the difference from, for example, sadistic serial torture/rape and killings of people like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffery Dahmer etc.

Hypothetically, yes. But we are getting WAY off topic here from what Dawkins was talking about. He was not seeking to portray ALL religionists as being akin to genital mutilators or some such. He was identifying one of the many extreme problems that inevitably arise from religious belief. The Muslims in South Africa for example are not psychotic serial-killers. They are mutilating woman's' genitalia out of religious conviction.

Neither. And you can add the False dichotomy to you list of committed fallacies.

False. He was emphatically making a case against religion being a good thing to be sure and one of the things he identified was religious genital mutilation. He probably did so because the horrific nature of this behavior(as opposed to lesser irrational behaviors of the religious such as proselytizing and such) needs to be addressed.

Completely irrelevant to the discussion.

The point he and I and other critics of religion make that you keep missing is that there are NO "positives" you can identify as belonging to religion itself(things that would not occur without religion) and there are many negatives that arise specifically from religion.

Charity would and does exist regardless of or arguably in spite of religion.

Violence occurs regardless of religion as well but the point you seem to miss is that ANY source that motivates violence which can be eliminated SHOULD BE eliminated and religion is a major source of such! Hell, even ignoring religious wars and terrorosim motivated by extreme religious beliefs, watch those forensic documentary shows on television sometimes. I am often amazed at how many people were driven to slay their families out of religious conviction and insanity that was seemingly brought on by religious belief!

False analogy. MLK Jr. was a PERSON, not a systemic belief system. MLF's unfaithfulness was not a result of religious belief or lack thereof and neither was is advocacy of civil liberties.

Belief systems are another matter entirely. Good people would be motivated to do good things regardless of whether religion even existed! Bill Gates and Warren Buffet And and such are people who give immensely to charity and have no religious beliefs. My contention with religion is NOT that it brings violence and irrationality to the table where it would not otherwise exist. My and people like Dawkins' contention is that religion ADDS to this and supplies a powerful motivator for such behavior that does not otherwise exist(There is no comparable justification for violence and irrationality to God).

YOU don't know because YOU obviously have not studied anthropology and psychology and behavioral science in general. Charity arises from us being a social primate. WE are cooperative by nature because otherwise we would not have survived at all as a species.

As would I. I find it rather insulting that you are playing the 'false flattery' card here to try to harangue others into supporting you rather than just trying to rationally justify your conclusions.

I disagree, to say the least.

The quotes are not showing up but I think I recall the discussion well enough to offer an explanation. My earlier agreement with what NOG said was somewhat rushed and was only with the general gist of what I thought he was saying(re: that atheism cannot be blamed for what Syalin and Mao did).

You seem to be either pretty desperate here to find me guilty of...?!

 

Here is your fundamental flaw, and it's one of basic logic. This is why I made an analogy to aliens, because the basic logic is the same. There are not two possible positions, but three:
1.) Certain belief they do exist.
2.) Uncertainty
3.) Certain belief they don't exist.

The definition we use for agnostic, the definition T.H. Huxley used for it, is "Not committed to theistic belief or atheistic disbelief." Disbelief, in this sense, refering to a positive belief in the non-existence of a thing. You make this logical mistake again and again. To re-inforce this, there is a huge difference between a statement of 'I don't know' and one of 'They don't exist'. Be it aliens, gods, unicorns, or apricots, your belief in their existence can occupy any of these three possibilities. Only evidence can correct your belief if it isn't the right one.

You've made that assumption again and again, even in the face of conflicting evidence, and have even made some insulting assumptions about our honesty and intelligence in an attempt to support this assumption.

There are a couple of points here, but the first one is that you blatantly made a huge mistake and missed the whole point. Worship does not mean deification, which was what pplr was trying to show you. Secondly, I have to ask how you define anything as immoral? What are your standards for morality?

Actually, as long as the god is not currently physically around to be literally followed, 'followers' of a religion or deity are considered to be those who adhere to the principles he/she/it teaches. That means that, yes, they're followers in exactly the same sense. Whether that itself is worship or not is debatable, but I would define it as a simplistic form of it.

Here I just have to step in. I don't know how much pplr has studied these things, but I have, and my wife has studied them even more, and this is total BS. If you believe this, you not only don't know what you're talking about, but are willfully blinding yourself to any contradictory evidence (and it's plentiful). This seems to be a common trait in your posts, though, so it's a real possibility.

Except that you haven't.

Actually, no, that's just a legitimate examination of the kind of thing that regularly happens on these boards. It's a basic requirement for a productive debate. Hell, Ragusa and I do that, and we rarely agree on anything.



Beyond that, though, in a last-ditch desperate effort to break you of your materialistic/naturalistic assumption, let me ask you this:
What is the origin of the Big Bang?

Please, take your time and look into it. Science has come to an actual conclusion on this matter, and I would like you to recognize it on your own (and it's implications) without me spelling it out for you.

 

Nog, I am still working on replying to your previous post as time permits. It is rather difficult for me to be responding to multiple posters and it will get no easier if you keep posting emotional, reactionary nonsense in response to every post I make, directed at you or not.

 

Well, Doc, certainly a "Judas character," having stolen his best friend's wife and all....

You are right about Clapton's reaction to the hero worship, but it was really more his guitar playing, rather than the person himself.

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ian.maclennan/

The Blues Breakers is certainly one of the most influential recordings of the 60s, which inspired that slogan to which you refer. Although the particular tone Eric was perfecting at the time, which evolved into what is often referred to as "The Woman Tone," has been unofficially credited to Jeff Beck, by some, both of whom had just played together in the Yardbirds (more like transitioning out of in Eric's case). Nevertheless, Eric got out in front of Jeff on experimenting with overdriven, distorted tonalities, within the British Blues genre. Some contend that the slogan "Clapton is God" only appeared once, with the picture of the dog peeing on it.

Despite our disagreements, I think your references to the 60s on this thread are interesting. And on this point I agree with you. Despite only one appearance, the slogan added hugely to the Clapton "mythology," even though most don't even understand its true, and rather meager, origins.

 

Actually, Dr, I'd rather not. I've found that, when we do that, the discussion tends to become too compartmentalized; less of a singular open debate and more of a bunch of individual conversations happening at once. It's far more useful when everyone talks to everyone else about everyone else's points. The only reason I'm not chiming in on Eric Clapton is that, well, I know nothing about the man, the myth, or the legend.

As an afterthought, though, when you do get to my posts, could you specify what you see as 'emotional nonsense'? I'll admit a lot of it is reactionary, but that's the nature of these forums: one person starts something and everyone else reacts to reactions to reactions.

 

Nog: Below I ran into several ad hominems in the form of "Do I really have to spell things out for you?". After the second or third time I decided I would not be quoting nor respondiong to such insults when not also accompanied by something substantial. Ergo, many of those were omitted below.

You are still misunderstanding Huxley's definition. He did not advocate that agnosticism was an 'in between' answer to the question of whether God existed. His definition when he was asked to clarify was that agnosticism was indeed "non-committal" to atheism or theism but this is understood to mean that agnosticism is not exclusive to either and can therefore be either atheistic or theistic(though he seemed to be a weak atheist + strong agnostic himself).

Agnosticism(especially the modern, more elaborate usage) does not deny or affirm the existence of God because it pertains only to knowledge, not belief. Most agnostics are atheistic. Theistic agnostics are rare but do exist. Atheism entails no "certainty" about God. Most atheists are weak atheists meaning they simply lack belief and are unconvinced by current theistic rationales for such.

I have done this more times than you could ever imagine. I think it safe to say that my own understanding of these terms is far superior to yours and it is YOU who should cease this closed-minded arrogance that has you convinced that I canno0t be right about anything I say.

So your answer to my point is the ad populum fallacy?! I would be more interested in your telling me what is wrong with my definition, rationally speaking. Millions of people have and DO worship the sun, Kim Jong Il etc. as gods. The fanaticism of a follower of Gaius Casear would be no less dangerous than the fanaticism of a fanatical follower of "God" and the charity of pantheist or a worshiper of Gaius Julius Caesar(whose first two years as emperor of Rome were considered a great boon and he was very popular) is no less heartfelt.

Again, treated as a god IS a god.

false. These things that I accept as true are not "beliefs" at all. They are dictated by logic and rationality no matter how much you do not like it and no matter how often you repeat your mantras.

I mean naturalism in the sense that all that exists is 'natural' and that the supernatural is dismissed in seeking to understand how things work in reality.

I have no idea what this was even about. Will dig through the older posts and edit this one later.

You are dodging again here. Using semantics to avoid answering the point. It does not matter one iota whether you said "Extremist" or "extremes of atheism" or "ultimate atheist", your conception is still wrong. What you are identifying as "extremes of atheism" are not so and your dualistic presupposition that atheism must have something comparable to theism's 'religions' and similarly containing similar 'fanatics' is also wrong. More on this below.

False. "Christ is Lord" IS a tenet of a specific brand of theism. There are no such tenets within atheism. Atheism has no 'sects' or 'denominations'. The 'strong' and 'weak' classifications are utilitarian and used by philosophers to identify the precise distinctions between those who are simply unconvinced and those who say that SOME gods are impossible.

Atheism has no religious dogma. There are no cults arguing with each other about how best to not worship a non-existent deity. You are really stretching things to try and identify whatever irrational acts a particular atheist might have as "tenets of atheism".

The analogy I would use is that atheism is akin to plumbing. Plumbers have only one thing in common; that they make their living repairing our sinks, tubs and toilets and such. There may well be a plumber who is racist but that does not mean that racism is a tenet of "extreme plumbing" and to argue otherwise is absurd.

Same applies to atheism and probably to theism as well which is why I do not have much concern with general theism. At worst theism in general is irrational and wrong. My objections with theistic RELIGION(or ANY religion for that matter) are another matter.

I DO understand your positions. That I do not agree with you can can substantiate my contentions rationally is not good grounds for thinking I do not understand them.

You keep tossing these unqualified assertions-as-insults at me without bothering to try and substantiate them.

?!

Okay, whatever. We both didn't like the film and for some reason you want to argue about it though I cannot for the life of me remember why?

Let's move on...

Okay so you want to limit this to supernatural gods, correct? Like it or not this runs into problems since not all gods are supernatural regardless of how you wish to see the world.
So IF we define "atheism" solely as "Non-belief in the existence of supernatural gods" and further define "strong atheism" as "conviction that supernatural gods do not exist"(as per your rants in this thread), then yes...some atheists, myself included, do try to convince others of the correctness of atheism.

What is your point?

No idea what a "rogue wave" is and have not heard of any "giant apes" being discovered by scientists but you are AGAIN dodging the point I made.

How ironic that you think that YOU have to spell something out for ME, given your above. Perhaps you forgot what the point was(I sometimes have this problem myself because of the way quoting works in here).

I repeat: using your definitions of "imaginary" and "real", what do we do with a thing that is alleged to be able to impact or affect it's surroundings but has not yet been revealed by science? Does the tooth fairy get the same 'hall pass' that your god gets in this regard?

I am pretty certain you said "it's surroundings", not "our".

Okay so on what grounds do you say God is real(or the imaginary alien for that matter)?

Well, if you are not going to detail those "more concerns" then I guess we are through with that part at least.

As for your problems with "evidence":

1.) And? I am only interested in finding evidence for God, regardless of what else that may also be evidence of.

2.) This is a silly rationalization for the lack of evidence. And beside that we are now left with the question of WHY a sapient being would seek to hide evidence of it's existence and also if it IS doing so then how is it's 'existence' any different than it's non-existence?

You mean at this forum alone or are you saying that most atheists in general are strong atheists? If the latter then you are wrong.

The 'weak atheist = agnostic' arose from a rather common misunderstanding of both atheism and agnosticism. Strong atheists are a small minority of the 15% of total atheists in this country and splitting hairs between a very small percentage and an even smaller percentage(of Nuclear physicists) does us no good and misses the point.

The difference is in your characterization of a non-belief or logical conclusion that some gods are impossible(including most notably the Abrahamic God) as if it were = a positive yet illogical belief that God exists.

You keep insisting on this re-definition because it suits your purposes and is entailed by your straw man.

No...not at all! Why would you even think that?!

Then you are beating a straw man..AGAIN!

Adding more straw? My contention is twofold here:

1)I have a major contention with the 'transcendental God' crowd who argue that God is 'beyond the reach of science and man's perception' and that is why science cannot find evidence for him. This is probably not YOUR position(though you seem to(inadvertently?) infer such at times.

2)Those, yourself included who argue that God MAY exist and be hiding his existence from us or for some other inexplicable reason cannot be detected now but maybe detectable in the future so we should not conclude that he is imaginary(but this does not apply apparently to fairies, gremlins, genies etc.).

False. You see Santa is humble beyond our understanding and he uses his magic powers to 'mind wipe' us so that we think we get our presents from other people and also have magical memories implanted in our heads that we ourselves have bought presents for others.

See now why the burden of proof is not with those advocating for the negative(even a 'strong' negative)?

Funny. I thought that maybe some new discovery or experiment demonstrating the possibility of cold fusion had swayed a bunch of "real scientists" or something so I googled and read a lot of pages about cold fusion but nope! Most scientists still consider cold fusion a fantasy and cite several reasons for doing so. That is not to say that there are not real scientists working on such(for whatever reason) and I think we are in agreement here(that there is not much hope for cold fusion being possible) so I am perplexed as to why you think I don't know what I am talking about?

We are also getting way off topic here and getting away from the relevant points which should be discussed.

But we CAN say that some things are impossible and trying to construct a flimsy escape hatch of "future science" or some such does nothing to help you here. square shaped circles do not exist. Time IS linear and only has a conceptual existence really(and thus time travel is impossible), etc.

This is a common myth that the only way to say anything is impossible is through omniscience. This is B.S. though. I can say with utmost certainty that there are no automobiles made entirely of fog and I do not have to examine every automobile ever made to say this.

Genies do not exist because the supernatural does not exist. This is an axiom of science and has proven to be true at every turn.

False, as I have previously demonstrated. The omniscient God who himself has free will(or whom exists along with ANYONE who has free will) is logically inconsistent and you have done nothing to refute my arguments demonstrating such. The 'multiple timelines'/non-linear time speculations are nonsensical and do not conform with reality.

?!
Are you actually saying, with a straight face, that there is nothing logically inconsistent with believing in one extraordinary claim(re: God exists)arbitrarily, because of evidence which you rightly dismiss as being not compelling or valid for other extraordinary claims(re: fairies etc.)?!

And whether this is "perfectly natural" or not(whatever you may mean by that) is irrelevant as to whether it is logically consistent.

If they believe in sapient alien life(which is not really an extraordinary claim and so is not analogous to belief in God) for reasons which they dismiss as being unpersuasive for other claims then yes, they are being logically inconsistent.

OMFG! That is NOT a straw man guy and you obviously misunderstood what I was saying(or you are attempting a "complex dodge" here as I believe pplr called it). The fact that you were not arguing for Santa or fairies is precisely the POINT I was contending!

A straw man is a logical fallacy that occurs when one person in a debate constructs a false(and usually more absurd) position he assigns to the opposition and then 'knocks down' that dummy.

An analogy illustrating the straw man in action:

Senator George and Senator John are debating abortion.

George: "I am pro-choice because ultimately we are talking about the civil liberties of a a full human being and their own body vs. the "rights" of a fetus in it's first trimester which has no feelings or consciousness. As an addendum we also have to consider things like overpopulation. "

John: "Well...my esteemed colleague may believe that the right way to solve all the world's problem is by killing defenseless babies but I disagree!"


John above has committed the straw man.

And ironically my problem with you is that you ASSUME way too much about me without any apparent grounds for doing so and all too often you do this thing(as in the above paragraph) where you refuse to consider you may be wrong about me and then somehow try to characterize this as ME being unable to recognize your claims as being true and therefore I am dogmatic or some such.
Points in a debate have to be earned guy. I am not obligated to concede things which you are unable to substantiate.

You know good and damn well I am not a troll and this is an obvious attempt to wriggle away from your defeat here by making absurd implications about my character. A troll would just copy/paste something to get people riled. he would not read and respond to every point directed his way in such a manner as I have.

let's try and be mature here guys.

 

Negative and Positives are both active forces. You seem to be defining Negative as non-force, which it isn't. Different electromagnetic charges or chemical atoms and so on interact based on charge. Also a positive force for a society or city helps it grow while a negative one damages it.

Moreover you claim to be trying to avoiding "agnostic" because it may overlap with other terms that have their own understood definitions.

Yet you attempt to use "atheism" in a way that overlaps as well. Your argument on language use isn't sound and seems to be based on a willingness to ignore how much of the rest of this society uses a language to communicate when it suits you.

Why do you have this issue with teenagers?

Oh, thats right, you like to downplay things these people said that way.

I believe some of the people I referred to were very much not teenagers. And if such people (not referring teenagers) exist in enough numbers that members of this forum have communicated with them then they are significant enough to be worthy of discussing here.

Also a question had been at hand was if they existed at all, not if they were a significant (notable) group or force in society.

This answered that question.

Or is that you have such a strong bias in favor of Dawkins (remembering how you dismissed criticism of him as absurd without even reading it) that you would rather, for emotional reasons, engage in willful disbelief and ignorance than even ask if there is a possibility the criticism is valid.

Like you reacted emotionally to criticism of Dawkins?

Granted that is a rather sharp comparison to make between your relationship to Dawkins and a hypothetical someone else to Clapton but based on a couple of your earlier comments is worth at least thinking about.

Now on the practical side you do have a general and/or practical point where people can treat others like gods (not different from how someone can turn a desire to have some money or item X into an obsession).

But there is still a general and practical counterpoint in that people still expect gods to have various powers and abilities that even very capable and admired human beings do not.

Also the way you use the term "worship" defines it as bad without ever, even once, asking what the results are. This ought to be questioned because while obsessions definitely can and have ruined lives and wrought much damage there are also people who followed through on positive things with a determination that is arguably obsessive itself and the rest of society actually benefited as a result.

Actually you have gone way out in terms of bad language use and/or defining there. It is common usage of the word "followers" to refer to people that belong to a certain religion or deeply admire various leaders/individuals.

So you are so sure about your chosen theories and assumptions that you refuse to test them?

I'm quite sure that isn't how the "scientific method" works.

Also since you don't check (due to your refusal to) you don't really have a sound way of determining if my perceptions are wrong or spot on.

Coming from someone that ignores rather than examines evidence when it is available it isn't hard to see that as arrogance or supreme level of bias slipping through.

Actually it is quite understandable. It may help if you weren't engaged in willful ignorance but I referred to followers of a couple different dogmas and compared them to other people to see if these other people also seemed to follow a dogma. Not the same dogma, but a dogma nonetheless.

I even provided you with a way of looking at some of the comments made by dogmatic atheists as examples or as evidence to support a point I made.

Straw man arguments have been defined by their being easy to refute. It is in this manner they make the opposing argument seem stronger than it really is.

I made a point and backed it up with evidence. You, it seems, wrote both off and tried to claim strawman improperly in your attempt to do so.

Which is another example of you having bias rather than addressing the point made.


As a side point, your definition confuses perfectly intelligent arguments that are simply overtaken by stronger ones with straw man arguments that are purposefully weak and meant to be refuted.

Your allusion to racism? You didn't define it as such directly but that is what it commonly is when people associate skin color inappropriately with given things such as purse snatching.

My argument was that people like X exist and I've met some. And ___ even did this. I provided a way you could check my claim and you choose to ignore both it and my claim.

My analogy about you was apt, it pointed to your willful and chosen ignorance to anything that may conflict with your current conclusions and assumptions.

Including avoiding evidence even if it was right in front of you.

This thread, page 1, comment 9.

Moreover I'm certain both I and someone else pointed this out to you (I brought up page 1 to you last time). Your claim references weren't there is dishonest.

Ever heard a "legend in his own mind"? You're drifting towards that. You assert knowing without anything but your current theories while dodging any attempt to question or verify them.

I suspect this is more dishonesty on your part. Do you seriously have the ability to go online to comment on this thread but lack the ability to go to its first page? There is no page 1 for you?

Yes, it was a typo but it seemed to still bring out an understanding close enough to work/be functional.

You expanded the discussion to include your own theories of which you refuse to test the soundness while ignoring things that had already been part of the discussion. It seemed a bit hypocritical on your part to be critical of others expanding the discussion-even if it was mental wandering.

Ignoring issues and evidence relating to them rather than addressing them counts as dodging and you have managed to do that multiple times by now.

That you may confuse discussion about other issues in an attempt to duck them too is something that it isn't irrational to be suspicious of either.

That you wouldn't admit you've been "dodging" is not surprising by this point.

That you blame someone who caught you doing it (perhaps as another attempt at distraction) is, sadly, not surprising by this point either.

First, that is a rule of thumb which means it may work much of the time but not all of the time.

Second, you seem to be ignoring, again, that I provided you with a way to look at one of the discussions I have been part of.

Third, Occam's razor may indicate the theories you are subscribing to or your usage of them in this case are/is flawed.

Fourth, your asserting that what I said happened in a discussion didn't happen and your backing it up with obscure theories rather than the actual discussion itself could be more accurately described as using Occam's "dull butterknife" (more convoluted explanations) rather than Occam's "razor" (more simple explanations) to analyze a situation.

I think NOG already used some rational points to put holes in your theory God or gods "cannot" exist. That doesn't mean you *have to* or *must* join a religion, but your theory is able to be reasonably doubted.

Moreover maybe you are being irrational.

I have no doubt that some people (seen videos) have reacted emotionally and irrationally to atheists (perhaps even including yourself at times). But at this time and in this situation maybe you are being emotional and irrational.

It happens to many people and perhaps it is to you at this time.

You don't have to look through thousands of pages. You are exaggerating, greatly, the effort involved for you to look.

Each comment on this thread has a number (look at the corners of comments). The link is in comment 9 on page 1 of this thread. And it shouldn't be hard to reach page 1 of this discussion even if this was a "thousand page thread".

Also I'm sure I can say better than the "best" you claim I can. I can say that he was a driven follower of an ideology or dogma.

If nothing else that means you should take back whatever assertions (and definitely the almost totally, if not completely, baseless insistence they are correct beyond doubt) you have made about my understanding of the discussion because you acknowledge you have decided to put yourself in a poor place to judge them and their accuracy.

You have been sticking to poorly based conclusions and have no idea if my situations fit a trend.

Moreover, from your logic thus far I have suspicions that if there is a trend you may not be in a position to read it accurately.

Apt. You claimed both that there wan't a reference when it was given to you and now seem to be implying you cannot look at it when your ability to comment here indicates otherwise.

For a definition and example of what false analogies are.
http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/falsean.htm

I compared you to an emergency room worker or police officer who did not (maybe I should have said "refused to") examine someone's body for wounds (something that would provide evidence one way or the other) after that person claimed to be stabbed.

Considering how long you have been avoiding looking at evidence I've referred to, or the comments of other people here, the analogy of a the worker/officer not looking is comparable to your not doing so.

And that the officer/ER worker would postulate and downplay rather than check for evidence of the claim also accurately reflects that you have theorized and said much here (often downplaying or trying to claim my point is discredited) without checking.

Fair analogy, just not one that is comfortable for you at the present time.

Please change your pattern of action so in the future the analogy is no longer true for you but for the time being it is.

Not false (and definitely not "completely" so), the decision to postulate but not examine is very accurate when describing what you had done recently.

I noticed how you kept calling my discussion an ancedote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Your usage of the term may not be proper. I have referred you to a link to one of my discussions already. Thus my description of the comments made can be tested. So its trustworthiness can be verified (separating it from definition 1). If I simply use it to prove that dogmatic atheists do exist, not that they are many or few but that they simply exist (some sort of statistics would help determine the former) then is is sufficient evidence because I am not using it to find an improper, excessive, or generalized conclusion (separating it from definition 2).

You probably have been too quick to call my account anecdotal.

I think I've already addressed 1 pretty well. With 2 it by itself may not define a subset of atheism (at least beyond the number of people that can fit in a small room). But combine it with the list of atheists who have done harm to others (Communism would come back into the discussion at this point) and it adds credibility to the argument that there is subset(s) of atheism that will do harm. Ditto for the argument there are subsets atheism that are dogmatic (which could involve discussions and analysis of "New Atheists" a term which I did not invent but seems to classify a type of atheist as well as the term born again classifies or refers to a type of Christian.

Actually I've referred to Communism and would say it is much larger than the individuals of Stalin and Mao. They may have had influences on some branches or subsets of it as they were leaders of organizations with thousands of members and those organizations serve as a better example of a subset than Stalin or Mao do as individuals.

Then there is no such thing a an atheist fanatic.... but I arguably have already disproven that.

Then you may be moving away from what we have already used as a criteria to define a fanatic by.

And since you mentioned faith-based terrorists (perhaps alluding to the fact that we agree they are religious fanatics) it appears you are only moving away from that criteria in a way that is inconsistent.

Not a straw man argument and I think I've already pointed out that you seem to be using that accusation as an excuse to dodge issue you would prefer not to address.

Maybe I'm wrong but, given the amount of anger Bobby expressed, I would have a certain level of expectation that harm, or an attempt at thereof, would come if Bobby came across me in the real, non internet, world. At the very least I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to start a fight.

Also you are again trying to justify someone who tried to bully someone else right off the bat with your "probably" remark. Bobby's hostility was there very rapidly (not after a long discussion though it seemed to rise and fall over the weeks) so your comment is inaccurate.

It is also uncalled for unless you think it is justifiable to place blame on the victim of a crime-say arguing a woman was asking to be raped by saying she dressing to show off her body or was going through the wrong part of town-for the crime happening.

I believe if someone made the same types of comments on the boards here that were made by some of the individuals there they would be kicked off.

And I would support such an action regardless of it if was from someone that agreed or disagreed with me on the topic of religion, only in this case I refer to someone who does not.

Your, maybe I should call it straw man, analogy involved assuming whiskey lead to a group of plumbers who did terrible things. With the terrible things bit being tacked on at the end. This is an individual who directly (himself) supported terrible things that if carried out would likely have landed him (or whomever carried them out directly) in prison and possibly on death row depending on the state the action(s) were carried out in.

You used assumption or inference upon assumption or inference upon assumption or inference in your example which ends with X or terrible things. Mine, which was specifically referred to in this discussion as something that happened in reality, has an individual pointedly saying he supports X or terrible things.

A lot less is there in terms of the level of inference or assumption.

If is good to see you are moving back to the definition of fanatic.

It doesn't fit all atheists but certainly some of those discussed.

I'm willing to, or at least consolidate this to one point in a reply. Except it is fair to ask if you are willing to stop dodging issues.

Disagree. I think the political sphere and some of the practices therein provide an especially apt place to find comparisons to Dawkins. He has defined his enemy and makes speeches, books, claims and so on against it in way that mirrors propaganda and its use in politics.

I don't know if I have any speeches and/or speaking events of Pat Buchanan or other political figureheads lying around at the moment (sure youtube has some) but I think similarities could be drawn between at least a couple of those and the Dawkins speaking event which I already provided a link to.

I think I already referred to the possibility of if some of the female genital mutilations were done as part of a "right of passage" ritual.

Though I'm still concerned you may have added the world "ritualistic" to the issue of female genital mutilations to distract from the point would they happen without religious backing and already have.

 

Part 2 (possibly the first time I have had to split a reply.)

You may be trying to do a straw man here. I didn't say he was claiming "all" religions or religious people supported genital mutilations.

I did say that he was improperly blaming religion for them and deceptively implying that they would stop if said people (often African) became atheists.

Moreover he is against religion as a whole so he uses them as a part of list with which he tries to tarnish religion as a whole. Not each religion with each item on the list but that the list as a whole implies religion as a whole is bad.

The survey I directly provided you with a link to already indicates that most of the genital mutilations do not happen due to "religious conviction". It is statistical evidence that notion is a falsehood.

You should rethink how sound Dawkins may be, and maybe if you've bought into some inaccurate notions on top of that.

Also the whole bit about that "extreme problems inevitably arise from religious belief". May be a hidden tenet of some types of atheism but is certainly a falsehood in itself.

If religious belief "inevitably" lead to extreme problems than every major city in the world likely be tearing itself apart by now as religion, probably in multiple forms, is present in each.

Also you brought up an inconsistency I've pointed out to others before. The thought that all types of religion must be held different from all types of atheism in that only the types of religion can thought to lead to bad things or be taken to an extreme but not atheism.

At least you added the inevitability part on to this inconsistency to put it deeper in the realm of falsehood. I didn't realize there were worse and more illogical versions of it out there the last time I heard it.

Or should I add it to the list of excuses used? You've dodged quite a bit and at times used nothing but accusations as excuses/reasoning in your attempts to do so.

I know I'm being harsh here but you have dodged a lot and I don't know if this is just another means.

So you do see his mentioning of genital mutilations (as inaccurately based as it was) as part of an attack on the character of religion in general, that is "all" religion.

Also if someone has a belief or belief system that they honestly think is right (be it about religion, ethical values, who would be the better mayor out of a list of candidates, or even what type of soda tastes best) it is hardly irrational to do proselytizing about it.

It may be in some situations or beyond a certain point but saying it it irrational is itself is to ignore what the word "irrational" actually means and try to cast an act which in itself involves doing no harm to anyone in a negative light.

If someone is forced to listen and has his or her freedom thus removed that is different and very likely to be bad. But you have bit into what I would say is a propagandized point that redefines what is harmless into something bad.

That is not dealing with reality.

If you found that written in a book of Dawkin's or someone else it should at least raise red flags or questions about the author.

Very relevant.

I pointed out how "tradition" and "religion" do not have to be one and the same. And managed to do so without wandering.

I think I already dealt with this point in one of my last comments to someone else.

Moreover you are drawing yourself out as someone who fell into the belief that religion can be an active force, but never for anything good. That is illogical and an inconsistency.

Either religion deserves credit for those things good and bad it has been involved in or credit for neither.

To say X is bad and must be attributed to religion (even if there is at least as compelling a case to attribute it to something else) but not the same for Y which is good is very unfair and illogical.

It would, but would it exist in to the same level? That is a question that remains unanswered. It may be that religions, especially since many emphasize and encourage charity, bring more charity than would exist without them.

Ayn Rand, an atheist writer and perhaps the founder (or one of the important members of) a subset of atheism that joined itself to free market fundamentalism is againts religion for, among other things, helping people who she argues haven't earned, and don't deserve, it.

Now you are ignoring that there are many religious people who and belief systems that have little to do with violence (some even promote outright pacifism).

Is it logical to punish the innocent as well as the guilty?

Moreover there are atheists alive today that felt putting their atheism into practice meant going out and committing crimes, mostly vandalism but if any are similar to Bobby then perhaps flat out violence. Moreover there were communists (of a certain vein of atheism) who tortured religious people in an attempt to get them to give up the beliefs and killed ones who either would not or were too notable and thus were viewed as promoting it on a whole. This was undoubtably violence.

You've managed to encourage punishing the innocent with that statement and ignore some of the guilty. Not logical, fair, reasonable and so on.

Run, don't walk, away from people and leaders that encourage this as a general principle.

I count religious wars and religious terrorism as parts of a negative or bad.

My problem is when others don't count the good.

Like I said, counting only one type of action is inconsistent, inaccurate, illogical, and unfair.

Also I have nothing against CSI, or any spin offs, but you should *really* not take them as reality.

They may illustrate some events that are very real but also some that are very much not.

My example was accurate in that I talked about how limited what I would know and understand about him would be if a misleading presentation of him was made, such as one that only talked about the negative aspects of the man and not the positive.

We don't know that for all "good" things or all "good" people.

Good for Gates and perhaps, if she was a motivating factor, his wife.

Just because a non-religious person gives to charity doesn't mean that religious people would or would not without their religion.

I think that is a fallacy.... maybe false conclusion if I remember the term/descriptor right.

I've actually had some classes in each back in college so that is both an assumption on your part, and an inaccurate one, about me.

I already pointed out how we don't know if the cooperation, charity, and so on would be at the same level or not.

I also pointed out that the system you used (thought I doubt you thought it up) of judging the actions of religion was strongly biased and inaccurate in addition to being unfair.

Actually I was comparing them to you. I'm sorry I didn't include Chandos too (though I guess I just did). And if it is flattery for them than it isn't false.

Chandos strikes me as someone both intelligent and well researched-including on bits of history to a degree that matches or surpasses my own.

T2Bruno was a Mormon who left the group (which means he can think about things and change his mind) that I have seen make an effort to try to be consistent on this very thread.

Aldeth is thoughtful and with at least willing to point out where he agrees with someone even if he disagrees on that topic in a broader way and/or many others (note one of his last comments to NOG).

NOG studied as an engineer and even if I disagree with him I recognize that he has tried to research topics more than other people would.

Probably because your on the receiving and also because you don't want to examine or question some of the points you've put down-which I doubt you came up with but suspect you have now bought into to a least a sizable degree.

I say I doubt you came up with them because I have seen them in other people before. I've seen the same thing said by people in different places-not just 2 or even 4 but 10 or 12, thus I get the impression this is an ideology that has been going around sort of like how a lot of born again Christians will tell you the only way to really be Christian is to be "born again" or how many free market fundamentalists will tell you that letting making the market more "free" is always the solution.

One or more people came up with a set of ideas and spread it around. That happens and I don't have a problem with it because it is how an ideological group grows rather than a measure of what they or it does. But when they, or it, cannot acknowledge it is an ideology or belief that avoiding reason.

Not desperate but pointing out earlier comments you made. What I suspect happened is that NOG made a reasonable point and you looked at it and agreed. Only later when you were reminded of the ideology you've been sold and that one of its tenets was under question (the one that no part of atheism can be involved in bad things) you had an emotional reaction.

To pull apart the tenets of a belief system can sometimes illicit an emotional response rather than a reasonable one that actually asks is the tenet reasonable/rational or not. You got emotional and ignored what NOG said and were not fair to it and, perhaps by extension, to him as well.

 

Hope I have been dmc, I'll be sure to try to do so.

And thank you in general for trying to make sure things are orderly/friendly.

 

Brown Noser....

 

As more serious way of replying I have been to a blog (referred to repeatedly already) where there wasn't a moderator who tried to make sure things were civil. So I have seen how they can be a plus in a pretty real way.

 

You'll have to cite your source for this claim. The link I provided seemed to indicate he was specifically linking his term to a position of uncertainty or ignorance.

Here's the problem: in our context belief and knowledge are interchangable. No one knows, by scientific standards, anything about anything about the supernatural, therefore everyone would be agnostic in that sense. That's a useless definition, however. Instead, the only useful distinction that can be obtained is by differentiating between certain belief ("I know there is/is not a god") and uncertain belief/disbelief ("I don't know, maybe, maybe not"). In that sense, the typical distinction between 'strong' and 'weak' becomes useless for agnosticism (since the entire idea is that they're uncertain/weak). There is, however, a more concrete (pseudo-certain) agnostic position, saying that "no one can possibly know", which is usually called strong agnosticism. Still, that means that as agnostic, whether atheistic of theistic, strong or weak, cannot possibly be a strong atheist or a strong theist, since that would require certainty. Thus my parallel between the term 'weak' in such arguements and 'agnostic'.

Let me start at the beginning of my point to make sure you follow. The purpose of all communication, be it verbal, textual, or symbolic, is to communicate ideas. In such communication, the only purpose of any word is to be symbolic of an idea. In that sense, if a particular discussion is using one word one way, it is unproductive and even destructive to introduce an alternative definition which is not useful to the discussion. You have done so. This is not an ad populum fallacy because the ad populum arguement is legitimate in this area. The definition of a term in a particular context is determined by how people use it in that context. Yes, people do worship the sun, and one definition of a god is a thing that is worshiped. That's not the kind of god anyone else is talking about in this thread, however, and the injection of that definition cannot possibly add anything useful to the discussion. Therefore, you should use the definition everyone else is using, not your own personal favorite.

Here, again, I fear we may be running into different definitions. By 'belief' I'm talking about any acceptance of a claim to be true, whether supported by evidence or not. Looking here, that seems to be the common usage of the term:

Spoiler

any cognitive content held as true

impression: a vague idea in which some confidence is placed; "his impression of her was favorable"; "what are your feelings about the crisis?"; "it strengthened my belief in his sincerity"; "I had a feeling that she was lying"

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

Mental acceptance of a claim as truth; Something believed; The quality or state of believing; Religious faith; One's religious or moral ...

believing - the cognitive process that leads to convictions; "seeing is believing"

a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing; a tenet or body of tenets held by a group; conviction of ...

The degree to which an individual believes in conventional values, morality, and the legitimacy of law. ...

A statement you say to yourself about someone, or something that you hold true. It is a feeling, or energy that is subjective, and is necessary for manifesting goals. It can be enhanced through repetition, and through programming during meditation. ...

The subjective assessment of uncertainty. In the Bayesian paradigm, quantified by probability. In the statistical domain.

in the psychological sense, is a representational mental state that takes the form of a propositional attitude. ...

The willing acceptance of the fiction created within dramatic situations and plays, and the student's commitment to it.

You appear to be using it in a religious context. I'll grant that your beliefs aren't religious beliefs (except the belief that there are no gods, as that concerns religious matters).

So are you arguing that Maoism isn't atheistic, or that it isn't equivalent to a religion? And, to be clear, I wasn't equating Ultimate Atheism to a religion. It's more like halfway between Atheism in general and the equivalent of a religion. In terms of whether it was legitimate or not, I described a particular subset of atheistic belief, the application of the strong atheist principle to all examples, and I gave it a label. You may argue that the label isn't useful, though I disagree (typically any label defining a group which applies anything to everything is 'ultimate' or 'extreme').

There are groups of beliefs and schools of philosophy that are based on, and radically expand on, the basic idea of atheism. These can be called 'sects', 'denominations', 'examples', or anything else, but they do exist and they are as dependant on atheism as religions are on theism.

No, but if the National Plumber's Association declares that plumbers should be paid more, that becomes a tennet of the NPA, which is a plumbing organization.

I said that in response to you're statement:

I may have misread that, but it seems to me that you were saying you don't understand it, and now you say you do understand it.

My problem is not that you don't agree, but that you don't rationally criticize the arguements. Instead, you just say they're false, that they're various forms of fallacies (which they aren't), or you attack semantic points in them or analogies in ways that don't discredit the analogy. These are all indicative of not understanding the point being made.

The issue was that it was an example of an irrational but extreme support of atheism, which you said couldn't happen.

The point was where I said

Some atheists try to convince others of their beliefs. Some nutcase atheists even try to kill others who won't believe. You said this cannot happen, yet history shows it can.

We call it a belief, and an unproven one, much like the belief in alien life or deities. The credibility of such beliefs is determined not by evidence (as there is none), but by how plausible it seems and how many people believe it. If we find out it actually has the potential to impact our surroundings, then we call it real. It has been real the whole time, though. We just didn't know it.

No, I said 'our'. Later on I talked about a neutrino affecting 'it's surroundings', which may have confused you, but a neutrino's surroundings are our surroundings (and us), so it worked.

IFF God can affect our surroundings, and IFF that potential alien in the Alpha Centauri system can affect anything in Alpha Centauri system (part of our surroundings), then they are real. IFF they cannot, they are not real.

This is what I mean when I say you don't read and/or don't understand. This was just a simple application of my latest point (the defintion of surroundings) to my previous point (the definition of real, using surroundings as one of the critera). This is something you should be able to do on your own without asking me.

The problem is that theists cite one thing as evidence of God (circumstantial, but still evidence) and atheists dismiss it as evidence of something else. The remarkable 'coincidences' that are required for life to survive in the universe? That's evidence that life can survive in our universe, not evidence of anything beyond. Except that it can be both at the same time.

The first is answered by a desire to be found, not to force itself on all around it. If God is a God who wants people to choose Him, then incontrovertable proof of His existence is counterproductive, because only an idiot would deny Him. The second get's back to the 'real' definition. If such a God can impact our surroundings, even subtly, then His reality is very important, whether we notice it or not.

I'm saying that in common conversation in America (not among the philosophically educated elite, necessarily) most people define 'atheist' as someone who denies the existence of gods, who says they don't exist, while they define 'agnostic' as someone who is unconvinced either way, uncertain, or just doesn't care. These are the common usages of the terms. This means that most people who call themselves atheists are using the common definition(as it is a common belief these days, not just for the philosophically educated), which is what we're calling a 'strong atheist'.

Again, support your claim (about the strong atheists being a small minority). So far, you've done nothing but claim it. Of all the people I've talked to, though, far more have been certain one way or another than have claimed uncertainty.

There are a number of problems with this. One, you have yet to show that any gods are logically impossible (though I'll grant it in some cases). Second, you lump together nonbelief and disbelief, which is what I'm trying to seperate. Lastly, I'm not making any claims about credibility or proof, just with the claims they make. Both the belief in gods and the disbelief in gods make strong claims about the nature of the universe. One claims a universe with supernatural deities, the other claims a universe totally devoid of them. Both are extreme claims and need to be proven if you expect to convince someone of them. Whether or not you can prove them is another issue.

It's simple. You claim that if something cannot be examined by science, then it doesn't exist. You also claim that science is a conceptual tool for the examination of things percievable by man. If something cannot be percieved by man, it cannot be examined by science, and therefore it cannot exist. That is the natural conclusion of the logic you presented. That you don't believe it, as you just said, only means you didn't follow the logic to it's natural conclusion.

It is not my position, but it is a legitimate one. As I showed earlier, you either have to assume a perfect state where man can percieve everything that is, or you have to assume the possibility that there are things science can never reach. If you attribute intelligence to a powerful force, that just increases the odds that science will never reach it (as it may actively avoid such perception by man if it so chooses). There is no problem with this claim unless you assume a perfect state of man/science.

This is the strawman. I claim that, since God cannot be disproven, one cannot expect to convince another that God doesn't exist. To say you doubt is fine. Even to say that you firmly believe He doesn't exist is fine. To expect everyone to agree with you is faulty. Since there is no proof (many attempts have been widely accepted as absolute failures), the credibility of the claim must be examined on how plausible it is (largely influenced by personal bias) and how many people believe it. The vast majority of adults believes in gods of some kind, with about 1 billion believing in the Christian God (1/6 of all humanity), while almost no adults geniunely believe in faeries, gremlins, or genies. UFOs and Bigfoot are believed by more people, and the claims are (slightly) more credible, so such claims are treated with more doubt than distain.

You see, I beat even that. I said I get no presents, none. Not none from Santa, just none.

Actually, since the same can and has been done by those advocating the nonexistence of gods... no, I don't. The burden of proof lies on both extremes, strong atheism or strong theism. It is only the middle ground of uncertainty that needs no proof to support it.

Well, for one thing you said it was impossible, when even you now admit scientists are working on it (suggesting it's not impossible, improbable maybe, but not impossible). For another thing, the information provided above your 'doubts' section indicates sporadic and inconsistent defeat of those doubts. The latest research I saw (in 2006, though I don't have it any more) cited examples of massive heat production, massive radiation production, and massive helium production, though none were consistent. Furthermore, the likelyhood of each appeared to alter with the isolation of various atomic parameters of the paladium. This suggests that the results are not artifacts of error, but genuine results of a system more complex than we understand. At least one of the runs produced the exactly predicted results of fusion (proportional amounts of heat, radiation, and helium produced). Others produced really odd things, like decreased mass with no heavier elements and many times the expected radiation.

Some things with high certainty, yes. You have yet to show that gods are one of them.

If you want to say it with absolute certainty, you do. That's a problem of absolute certainty, though, and gets into the 'am I a man or am I a butterfly dreaming I'm a man' stuff. If you want to prove it to your own satisfaction, the more cars you examine and the more you know about cars and fog, the more certain you can become. To apply that to genies, since no one has reported a genie popping up out of their lamp recently, and no creadible historical sources survive of such events, it is creadible to say genies don't exist.

The supernatural has never been proven or disproven and, in fact, by the very nature of science, cannot be examined. You previously used this very point to say that the supernatural can't be real (since science can't examine it), but that failed. Now, you claim science has examined the proposition and found it false? That's simply not true.

You obviously don't know enough about science. This and your claim that time only has a conceptual existence prove that. Time is a critical and inescapable factor of science. That time is real is the axiom of science, not that the supernatural isn't. Furtermore, more and more scientists, especially in fields like cosmology and quantum physics, are more and more commonly building their theories around multi-dimensional space (5 or more dimensions), multiple realities, and flexible/non-linear time. The majority of them now recognize such ideas as plausible. It really started with Einstein and Special Relativity, but it really took off with String Theory, Superstring Theory, and M-Theory.

Yes, that's it exactly. You see, the logic behind these is inductive, not deductive. In inductive reasoning, you take a set of propositions and generalize an overarching conclusion. This conclusion is never absolute, and other explanations often abound, but one is accepted and others are dismissed. At the same time, each explanation has to be examined not just on the supporting evidence, but also on the likelyhood of the explanation. As an example, let's say I frequently see a co-worker bringing Banquet frozen meals to lunch at work. I may conclude from that that the co-worker likes Banquet frozen meals. This is logical, but unproven. I could also conclude that the co-worker doesn't have much money, and so only buys cheap meals like the Banquet frozen meals. This is also logical, also unproven, and also supported by the same evidence. I could even conclude that no store anywhere near this co-worker's house sell anything other than Banquet frozen lunches, and thus this is all he has access to. All of these are logical, all supported by the same evidence, yet each of them must be considered independantly. They may all be true, or none of them, or only one or two. Having had Banquet frozen meals myself, I'd guess #2 is the most likely, and I'd believe it. I'd dismiss #3 is utterly unlikely, even though it is possible. I'd rate #1 as quite plausible, but unlikely, because Banquet frozen lunches are not very well made, so I find it unlikely that he'd like them, but it's easily possible.

The same evidence supports all three conclusions, and the three conclusions are even mutually possible. I don't have to accept all or none of them, though. I can logically accept none, one, two, or all three.

... That's exactly my point. You were presenting it as though I were arguing that all un-dis-proven things should be believed. To attack that point, you say that I don't believe in Santa or faeries, therefore I contradict my own claim. The problem with that is, it wasn't my claim. It was a strawman. If that's not what you intended, then there was no logical reason to bring up Santa or faeries.

An analogy illustrating the straw man in action:

Nog and Dr. Scepticus are debating abortion.

Nog: "I believe in God, and you can't disprove God, therefore it's a legitimate belief."

Dr. Scepticus: "Well...my esteemed colleague may believe that all un-disproven things are real, but he also says he doesn't believe in faeries or Santa. His beliefs are inconsistent."


Dr. Scepticus above has committed the straw man.

... Ok, first off, stop using 'guy' like that. It makes you sound less intelligent. I realize it's a popular form of talking in some circles, but they aren't professional ones.

Secondly, my problem with you is when you claim things like materialism are axioms when they are not self-evident. There is no reason to believe that only matter and energy exist. The ultimate proof of this is that, not that long ago, the materialist position was that only matter existed, and that even energy was a percieved quality of matter, much like how you claim time is a conseptual thing only. Since energy wasn't even originally included in the discussion, you can't say energy is part of a self-evident limited universe, since it wasn't evident earlier. On top of that, since there's nothing new that has supported any restriction to just matter and energy since then, there's no reason to suppose that only those two exist now. Thirdly, quantum physics is regularly delving into the possibilities of other things, such as extra-dimentional 'quantum energy' (really a very different thing from what physics calls energy), dimensional strings, and more. Since fields of science propose the existence of stuff beyond matter and energy, it is unreasonable to call materialism an axiom. It is an assumption, and one that is being discarded in the stranger fields of science as it looses it's usefulness.

There's more to this related to the Big Bang, but I really want you to get to it yourself, so I'll wait for your next response to me (which should be to the post where I ask you to look for the origin of the Big Bang).

This is why I said I almost wanted to, but you put so much effort into the posts. Your tendency to miss blatant logical connections, your tendency to object without evidence, and your tendency to quesiton others' claims without any reason to do so are all indicative of a troll. Your tendency to post thorough responces to posts is distinctly not, however. It's confusing.

 

I think the last few pages of this thread can basically be condensed to this. The extreme on one side is making a claim and should thus support it; the extreme on the other side is making a claim and should thus support it; the middle is making no claim.

I'm not especially interested in the topic itself but the veracity of NOG's basic point here should be acknowledged.