Why are all Christians atheists?

The logic goes something like this:

Is there a God?
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No    Yes
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What does He look like?

You seem to be incorrectly conflating "No" with "What does He look like?"

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What I'm saying is that those questions may not be relevant until after they have decided there is a God of some sort. Don't most fundies claim they have considered other religions and picked the right/best one?

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It's true that in "real life" they pick a religion first. ("Oh, look. By sheer coincidence, it's my parents' religion.") And then they "consider" other religions. ("Oh, look. By sheer coincidence I picked the right one on the first try.")But I think their own thought process often makes the consideration retroactive. ("Oh, look. Not only did I make the right choice, but I made it in a completely fair and rational way.")My original point to Nuggin was that the decision to be a theist comes first and then the flavour of theist is chosen - to their way of thinking, anyway. So, what the OP suggests isn't going to make much sense from the fundie point of view.

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Depends on how you define "praying".

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Well, you've demonstrated in this very thread that you make assumptions about "all" Christians that don't really apply to all Christians. I'm just suggesting that you should be careful about assuming that you know what "prayer" means to "all" Christians.For some people, there's a fine line between prayer and meditation. And for some people, meditation has nothing to do with God. So if you're going to use "prayer" to distinguish between theists and atheists, you'd better have a pretty clear idea of what constitutes prayer. You don't seem to.

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And I'm simply saying that you can't distinguish atheists from theists on the basis of prayer.(As far as the OP is concerned, I sorta halfway agree with it. I just think you're doing a really bad job of defending it. Maybe you're just out of your depth, like you are with your attempts at sarcasm. )

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My, you do have a short memory, don't you?In Message 57, Phat said:

quote:

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We could well ask why all atheists are theists

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to which you replied, in Message 59:

quote:

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This would be a great question, if Atheists were constantly praying.

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You brought up prayer, not me. I just pointed out that you don't seem to have much of an understanding of prayer.Please, at least read your own posts if you won't read mine.

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I made a small comment about the nature of prayer in response to your reference. You proceded to deny that you ever mentioned prayer and I posted the proof that you did.No need to throw a hissy-fit just because you got caught in a mistake. I made a mistake myself the other day and I'm still alive.By all means, move on. If you have something to salvage this thread, by all means present it.

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Now who's flailing?FYI, there are no fundies on this thread.Substance, please.

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I would say that a superstition hangs on a false causal agent - for example, all the superstitions involving bad luck, as if breaking a mirror or seeing a black cat "causes" future events.So, to my mind, belief in God is not a superstition in itself. But believing that God causes famine and pestilence to punish us is superstition.Similarly, belief in the vague "power of prayer" is not necessarily superstition. But belief in the power of prayer to "make stuff happen" is.

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I was thinking of "false" in terms of being unverifiable by empirical means. That's backwards thinking again. It's innocent until proven guilty, remember? The accusation is false until "proven" true by weight of evidence. I'm limiting the term "superstition" to events that can not be linked causally (and empirically) to God, etc. I'm saying that "answered prayers" are superstition because we can not know whether or not God actually intervened. We can not know that there was no (coincidental) natural cause.

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Funny, a Protestant fundy would say the same thing about the statues in Catholic churches. Is your God different from the Protestant God? Or is your conception of Hinduism no more accurate than the fundy conception of Catholicism?

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No need to ask a fundy. I grew up surrounded by them, so I know what they'll say (some of them, at least). They'll say the Catholic "God" is no more "real" than Thor or Zeus or Allah. I don't think there's much difference, actually. As I mentioned in an early post, I think the first question is, "God(s) or no god(s)." Only when that question is answered does "Which God?" even come up. **shrug**A Trinity is "They", no matter if you paint it in pretty colours and glue sparkles to it. I don't see that the trappings of doctrine have anything to do with "Which God?" either. Reincarnation is fundamentally (for want of a better word) no different from "salvation".Now, a religion that concentrated on this life instead of the next - that would be different.

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I'm just saying that to some people, the Catholic religion is more like the Hindu religion than it is like the Protestant religion. I'm lumping all theists together and separating them only from athests. Remember? Is that what the topic is about, though? We don't really care "Which one?" or "Which three?" That's farther down the diagram than we need to go. I agree, which is why I say there is no fundamental ( ) difference between mono-God and poly-God. The fundamental difference is between any-God and not-any-God. The trappings have nothing to do with "what God does or doesn't do". The trappings are what humans do.

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But the topic would be, "How did you get to one God?" If you get God-or-no-God from your upbringing (mostly), don't you get which-God from your upbringing too?If you go to the Big Pile o' Gods at all, you go there to pick one (or more). If you go there to pick one, does it really matter if you pick one-of-a kind or a matched set? The trappings of a religion are what humans do to appease their gods. It makes little difference if they sacrifice virgins or if they sacrifice wine and wafers. It's for a human need, not a godly one.Buildings are for a human need. Singing hymns is for a human need. Prayer is for a human need. In the long run, religion has little or nothing to do with God at all.So what difference does it make "Which God?" Even less difference how many.

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