Atheists can't hold office in the USA?

That's pretty much the case I think. Huxley's parachute gave a lot of people an socially acceptable excuse to be a non-believer.

Do you love your wife? Do you support the Jets? Do you like cats? Do you want fries with that? Do you believe in god?

Ffs, how many times. I have to think that you are now deliberately misrepresenting the argument. Belief and knowledge are NOT the same.This is not a belief position, this is a knowledge-based, not belief-based position. This situation is agnostic. Because you've misrepresented the argument. Ergo, for some reason you can't make yourself think through this. At least have the grace not to misrepresent it.

I wish it was. I'm actually quite angry and also disappointed. You are normally capable of understanding contrary arguments. You claim to be a skeptic and pontificate regularly about cognitive dissonance as though it was your own invention. And yet you are portraying all the signs of dissonance - denial, misrepresentation, partial reading and lack of self-awareness that is the norm in dogmatic thought.Here's the evidence. Apart from ignoring all my previous posts about how people actually think and behave instead of the automaton you imagine is the way we are, you have edited the phrase I quoted to make it mean what you want it to mean, rather than what it actually says. becomes Totally ignoring the qualifier that "the case has not been made for this" - which is the knowledge based, rational case and therefore absolutely the opposite of belief. You continues to use knowledge and belief as synonyms, which is the source of all your confusion.The following is entirely beside the point and gives me some hope that you are still misunderstanding the argument and not just behaving like an arse. Why do you insist on attempting to logically explain belief? It is obviously not logical or rational. That's why it's called belief and not fact. And why the two are different and why it is possible to be atheistic about belief in god and agnostic about knowledge of god's existence.

But this rational/irrational human split is the entire point.It explains why belief exists in spite of evidence or lack of. Denying its existence is denying the way we are and why we behave. Changing the meaning of words to hand wave away an important distinction is intellectually dishonest.

Well I doubt that's a truthful answer, but if it is, I'd recommend not testing it on the wife. In any case, when you do, you do, when you don't you don't. There isn't a don't know. It doesn't matter - if you don't know they exist, you can't believe it them. Yup, but unless they say yes to fries, they don't get fries. they are afrieist. If you don't know whether you believe in God, you also don't get the fries. Instead you get fried. (I'm happy now.)

Well of course, if you, stick in the qualifier 'they don't know for sure exist'. But why would you do that? The question was 'what are the Jets?' If you have no clue what the Jets are, how can you support them?Tell me, do you believe in the nggarg?

Double post...Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Liar, liar, pants on fire. Pffnrr. Yes, of course people can - and routinely do - believe in GODs that they do not actually know exist. We call those people theists.They have however, been educated to know that billions of other people believe the same thing and it the thing itself has a name and has been well documented.On the other hand, you can't believe in a nggard because you can't tell me the first thing about it. Zip, zero, nowt. I did, but never mind - it's gone way above your head.

In other words you don't believe in nggards.How could you? They literally do not exist. Until you heard the word, you didn't believe in them did you? What's changed now that you've heard the word but literally know nothing else about them? ((sigh)) The question "do you support the Jets?" was posed to dwise1 many posts previously to demonstrate that his analogy of choosing between two teams was incorrect. The choice is not 'which team do you support?' where there is a third option of neither. The correct analogy is asking the positive question 'do you support the jets?' to which there is no 'I don't know' answer. Support, like belief, is a positive action. ie 'do you believe in god?' This is too vague to comment on If you don't have the patience to debate, there is a very simple solution.btw, get a sense of humour - liar, liar, pants on fire was - you know - a joke?

If you don't know that they exist *at all* ie never heard of them, you can not believe in them. If you'd never heard of god, how could you believe in him?See above, Jon, re nggards.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Fine. I assume you are accepting the principle that if you've never heard of something - anything, but we talking about someone not knowing what the Jets were - you can't believe in it and you can't be agnostic because there's nothing to 'don't know' about, just as there's nothing to believe in.Do you believe in Thor?

Whatever way you twist it, you do not believe in it. You're confusing knowledge with belief. Belief is a positive position you either have it or not.

I'm not accusing anybody of anything. I'm simply trying to discuss the meaning of two words, belief - which is a positive and binary position on something which can't be proven, and knowledge which is something we can have proof of.I'm pointing out that *despite* what people say, if they do not know whether they believe in something or not - eg. the nggard which didn't exist at all until I made it up - then they do not believe and they are atheistic about it. You've proven this by saying that you don't even know what the word means and probably never will. You know nothing whatsoever about it so you can't possibly believe in it. If you don't actively believe something you are atheistic about it. Belief is an active, emotional state, like anger, hate, love, happiness - you either have these states or you do not.You could, however, be agnostic about knowledge of the nggard - in which case you logically can't believe in it - but now that I've told you that it's a totally invented word you also have full knowledge of it's non-existence. But you still need the two part model - you still have to say that the nggard is a fantasy AND that You do not believe in it. Knowledge and belief - different words with different meanings.

Not only do I agree, but I have also said this over and over in this thread. That's why have two different words to denote two different states. Flat earth believers have knowledge that the earth is not flat but believe it anyway. We call those people delusional, but it makes no difference to the reality of their own beliefs.If you look back over what I have written you will see that I call both belief and disbelief in god delusional because we have no actual knowledge either way. That's probably too strong a word for it as delusional implies that there IS knowledge which is being denied, rather than no knowledge. I would demote delusional/deluded to irrational and will happily accept that atheism is irrational. Your heads and tails analogy is just the same as the Jets and Rangers (or whatever the sport names where). It's the wrong analogy. The correct one is to ask 'do you believe that the coin has landed heads up?' If you answer 'I don't know' then you do not believe it landed heads up. You can have all sorts of other rationalisations about states of knowledge, but the answer to that question is binary, you're forced to commit to a belief/non-belief position. (Obviously, the coin analogy ultimately fails because there is no emotional committment to it - active belief or not in gods is an emotional state, not a rational one.)If it helps, you could call someone who say he doesn't know whether he belives in god or not, a passive atheist, I suppose.Belief is not knowledge, it's an active, positive state of mind that deals only in irrational choices. By trying to make it fit an artificial rational model, you miss the entire point of what belief is.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.