Atheists can't hold office in the USA?

It means that people can't be agnostic about belief.
'Do you believe in god? 'Yes' =yes (e.g. Faith)
'Do you believe in god? 'No' =no (e.g. Tangle)
'Do you belive in god? 'Don't know' =no (e.g. nobody)Belief is positive. If you can't say you believe, then you don't. Of course. But:'Does god exist?' 'Yes' =Deluded theist (e.g. Faith)
'Does god exist?' 'No' =Deluded atheist (e.g. never met one)
'Does god exist?' 'Don't know' =agnostic (e.g. Tangle)Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Anyone who is required to justify their atheism but not their a-axemurdererinmyhouse-ism may care for reasons of pure logical consistency.Anyone who wants to hold public office in the US who fears that being branded an atheist will be a barrier to that.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

No one is required to do anything of the sort.And changing terminology isn't going to have any effect on anything.

EvC is full of instances where exactly that is requested.And a more logical use of terminology, devoid of innate fallacies, may well lead to better logical arguments on the subject.One can only hope....

There's not much point debating with people who refuse to read what's written. But heyho - post 241 is a summary.

That's not a case of being required. If you dislike the style of the forum, you are free to leave without consequence. There's no fallacy. It's a word to describe a thing that people often discuss.

Indeed, and that is why agnostic and atheist are two different words to describe two different things, one is about the status of knowledge and the other is a statement of opion\belief and generally a useless distinction that cannot affect reality. That's your belief\opinion. Not acting on the basis of beliefs would be skeptics in my world. Last time I checked skeptics were people. People willing to consider beliefs I would call open-minded. Those that are willing to consider one kind of belief and not willing to consider a contrary belief I would call biased, cherry picking and employing special pleading.Enjoy

And yet you now agree that you are agnostic and have said so several times. So you made a mistake here. check.Now you have also been given several cases that explored the boundaries and you came up with rather silly wiggling around the issue of whether or not a person could know whether or not they believe. The funniest was your response to an hypothetical person who believed sometimes, some days yes and some days no -- you divided that person into two different people to fit your argument. There are psychological conditions that have this kind of quandary.Your claim that someone who does not know is someone who does not believe, is special pleading.Perhaps another example will clear your eyes:A person has been a devout, committed, fundamental believer, but they have a crisis of faith as several tenets that they once held to be true are no longer accepted as true. They are in agony as they wonder whether they still believe in the remaining tenets, or whether they have lost all of their faith ... they do ... not ... know.Cue the special pleading dance to make a pointless point.Enjoy

Someday the grand summary message, but for now... In past messages you've invoked both considerations of belief by evidence and knowledge agnosticism ("god is not and can not be known") AND belief by religious faith agnosticism ("I don't know what I believe"). The above quoted is the second usage.The Moose/Tangle position is for the above example person to ask him/herself a question, and give an honest answer:Do I have any belief in any way to any supernatural influence (aka god)?Yes - TheistNot yes (which includes "no") - AtheistIf one can not honestly tell oneself "Yes", then one is no longer a theist, and not a theist = atheist.One may be confused and madly flipping between theist and atheist, but one is still one or the other.Which in the Moose/Tangle perspective of the type 2 agnostic is that agnostic mean "confused flip/flopping between theist and atheist". I and I presume Tangle will grant you that definition of a type 2 agnostic.MooseEdited by Minnemooseus, : Minor tweek.

And there is the special pleading dancing that just can't admit that said person does not know whether they believe or not.Enjoy

Added by edit: A more specific reply to your message: I see your example as "the special pleading dancing that said (ex-fundie) person does when they can't be honest to themselves, that they've just slipped into being an atheist".*End of added by edit. *Your "agnostic" is not so much a rational alternative position, as it is a slipping into (extra?) irrationality. Hopefully such doesn't last long, or the person will have gone from "theist" to "insane".-----Another perspective from AronRa (Nonreligious Questions ):

quote:

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One of my oldest and dearest friends is this way. He is an atheist in denial. He says he is not convinced there is a god, but he can’t be atheist because he’s not convinced there is NOT a god either. He seriously thought that was a valid argument!

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For my friend, and for the millions of other unaware atheists out there, let me clarify this for you:

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You are either convinced that a god exists, (Theist) or
you are not convinced that any god exists (a-Theist).

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There is no undecided ‘maybe’ middle ground to escape to: You will remain unconvinced until you are convinced, and the whole time you’re not convinced, that’s when you should be saying maybe, but I reserve judgement until you prove your case, which of course theists will never do.

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Much more there, both above and below what I quoted.Although I don't think I'm buying his claim of being a gnostic atheist.Agnostic ("there is no way of knowing god") is the only available scientific position. That "agnostic" is disprovable, but only by "knowing god", which to me means having extracted god from the supernatural into the natural. To know god is to fundamentally redefine what a god is. As such, any supernatural god is still unknowable.A person of science can be a theist, but the science itself must be agnostic. And since considerations of (a supernatural) god is outside the realm of science, that would also make science not theistic (in the other word, atheistic). Which is NOT to say that science is also no-god-istic. Not theistic and "there is no god" is not the same thing.MooseEdited by Minnemooseus, : Added by edit at top of message, 1.5 hours after posting original message. Original message content is unedited.Edited by Minnemooseus, : * Footnote added to previous added by edit.

My variation: Ding - they've gone atheist. Still atheist. Ding - back to being theist.Moose

I think im the last one...not a Biblical Creationist yet I am a Cosmological Creationist and am a Theistic Evolutionist in regards to this planet

Progress of sorts. You could add that one is about the scientific method and the other is about human feelings and emotions. But then you spoil it with..... Without this distinction you can not explain the vast tranches of human history and motivations that affect everyday realities in massive ways. The church(es) in your town where built with knowledge but motivated by belief. It doesn't get realer. No-one - literally no-one - acts only on knowledge. We are not machines, and we lack perfect knowledge. We act emotionally and irrationally all the time but also balance this with knowledge. I would suggest that this more rational side of us has grown over the centuries, particularly following the Enlightenment. Skeptics are not excluded from this mechanism - they fall in love, mourne the dead, pray, make rash bets, hope for improbable outcomes and try to make them happen - and so on. Spock is not real, RAZD.

Humph. I wonder why this really simple and hardly original idea is proving so difficult for otherwise sensible and thoughtful people to grasp?I have not just *now* agreed that I'm an agnostic. From the beginning of this discussion and repeated ad nausium all through it. I've disginguished between belief and knowledge. I am an atheist, because I do not believe in god. Additionally, I am an agnostic regarding knowledge, because I recognise that I can not prove the non-existence of god; I recognise that there is a probability, no matter how small, that god exists.However I claim that this agnostic position is merely a requirement of rational thought - every rational person must be agnostic about knowledge of god. This does not prevent people having beliefs in the absence of knowledge. That's why there is a word called faith (and belief) - which, is what we have when we think something is true in the absence of perfect knowledge.We know this situation to be, your words 'reality' because we have both atheists and theists who claim their beliefs regardless of their full acceptance of this principle.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.