My Beliefs- GDR

Well, like I say, there are nuances that try to get the concept over in a more sophisticated way, but that shouldn't detract from the base idea. Atheists simply believe that there is (probably or, rarer, certainly) no god.The best argument - by a very long way - is Jonathon Miller's rejection of the very term atheism.He rightly says that we don't have a word for people who don't believe in fairies or elves or goblins or witches or even Bigfoot because society doesn't take those beliefs seriously enough to create a word to describe a disbelief in them.'Atheist' is an unnecessary word. It only exists because you believe in something that I don't. It's not a belief itself, it's not a belief at all, it's an absence of a belief.Bed time, i may get round to your other comments tomorrow.

But that makes it an active belief and is the cause of all this confusion. I personally don't say (and I don't think you do either, Tangle) "I declare my belief to be that there are no gods". No, instead we say "I don't believe the god exists that you just told me about". It can ultimately boil down to the transposition of 2 words. English is a fickle bitch. And the statements of ones beliefs (or lack thereof) is the worst showcasing of it.

That's why I prefer the 'no need for the word' argument that Jonathan Miller uses.The problem is that we find ourselves forced to deny a belief that we don't ourselves consider worthy of denial. What we're actually doing is saying "You believe that? Yikes, that's weird, I have to be somewhere else now, bye.'The acceptance of the word atheist is a logical error. It says that people with no belief need to explain their disbelief. Which is just daft - it's for those who believe in the implausible to explain themselves to the rest of us.The error is historical; it's based on a majority view of several centuries ago. Today the atheist is the majority view in many parts of Western Europe and the term is largely redundant there.

I get all that and largely agree. All I meant was your usage of "Atheists simply believe that there is..." is something that GDR and his ilk latch on to and is the verbiage that caused this line of discussion. It's such a minor quibble that I feel silly blathering on about, but it causes huge amounts of headache.

Not at all, it's an important distinction but it's probaly impossible to get across to a believer and seems to just confuse them. There's probably an analogy somewhere that works but the pixies one is the best I know.Part of the problem is that not only do we not believe what they believe, we deny that there is a requirement to provide an explanation for our disbelief. Just like we don't need to explain our disbelieve in pixies - there's no need to not believe, it's redundant. It's passive not active, as you say. But that, to a believer is inexplicable and maybe insulting.I give a belief in pixies pretty much the same credence as a belief in Thor- to pick a random god - just as, I assume, GDR would. But oddly, that same logic seems not to apply to Christianity or Islam or Buddism or whatever the believer's belief is that we're discussing.None here believe in Thor so I assume we are all atheists as far as he goes. We're left with the unanswerable cliche that everyone is almost an atheist, it's just that real atheists believe in one less god than theists and deists.

Not even. GDR thinks Thor belief is just a different way of believing in god, so he isn't even an atheist as far as Thor is concerned.

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Actually I see other gods, at least of mainline religions as all recognizing God but having different, and sometimes very different, understandings of the nature of God.

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Message 624Atheism to believers is such a dirty, foul word, that they are deathly afraid of even coming close to acknowledging themselves as one even for gods they don't even know about.

It seems to me that disbelief is a belief but I understand your point.

Well you would be wrong.

I've quite literally reached the end of my rope with this shit. You're just making words mean what the fuck ever you want and homie don't play that shit.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.

OK. Fine by me.

And not collecting stamps is a hobby?Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

By his statement, not having a hobby is a hobby.

Well those that don't believe in your, or anyone else's God, are telling you that atheism is NOT a belief so you should take that on face value and try to properly understand it - it might help you understand why we disagree over and over again on the same issues of evidence.And it’s really simple. Atheism is an absence of a belief in god(s). When we say we don't believe in god, we're not saying that we believe in something else instead, we mean it in EXACTLY the same way that you mean it when you say you don't believe in hobgoblins.And when we say that we require evidence before we'll re-consider our position on the God hypothesis, it requires the same kind of evidence that you would demand to change your mind about the hobgoblin hypothesis. You don't start by saying 'I believe in hobgoblins, I must now label those that don't believe in hobgoblins agoblinists, accuse them of having agoblinist beliefs and force them to disprove the existence of hobgoblins.'Theists assume that because a lot of people have believed what they believe in for such a long time that the burden of proof has shifted to those that do not believe - but it hasn't, the standard of proof is exactly the same as for the hobgoblins. Believers have simply got used to being surrounded by others with the same beliefs and because they can't defend their beliefs with actual evidence, they attempt to turn the argument around which creates the repeated fallacies.

What did you think of the evidence I gave here: Evidence for the Resurrection

Sure. But there is no evidence of natural laws being suspended or of dead people coming back to life as a result of that.Whether the laws are proclaimed to be suspended by an immaterial unicorn, a tribe of meditating Bigfoot shamen or the Biblical Yahweh is really neither here nor there with regard to that.