I Know That God Does Not Exist

Do please note that Dredge had pulled me out of context by leaving out the second paragraph.Wow! So you're a forking lower-than-whale-snot white supremacist? Why am I not surprised in the least?Read Rob Altemeyer's freely available electronic book, The Authoritarians -- available in a few formats, including PDF and audio. He is a retired psychology professor who wrote this book in 2006 when President "Dubya" Bush was the worst president we had ever had -- boy have things changed! He had studied authoritarianism for decades ever since he had failed his doctorate questions on the subject for his doctorate (When you fail a question, you need to go back and research the question, which led to his further research). Most of his published research over the decades was couched in a lot of statistical mathematics, rather normal for the field, but this book was written to be much more accesible to the public.In his research, he devised a right-wing-authoritarian index (RWA) which he then tied via many surveys to a number of attitudes -- read the book for the details. Furthermore, he noted that "right wing" does not correlate to political affiliation, since members of "left wing" political groups can also rate highly in the RWA index.High RWA ratings are the white supremacists and other rightests. They are trapped in fear and hate of and for anyone outside of their own immediate group; ie, paranoid xenophobia. Their actions and reactions are based on fear and hate, not on reason. A physical part of their brains, the amygdala, is over-developed far more than in the normal population, meaning that it is overactive. Whenever something bad happens to somebody else (eg, a hurricane, poverty), then they are far more ready to blame the victim. They will immediately and without thought embrace any manipulative politician who proclaims that he agrees with them.Low RWA ratings are the opposite. They tend much more to use reason; their amygdalas are far less developed. When bad things happen to people, they look to the causes and solutions instead of blaming the victims. And when a manipulative politician proclaims that he agrees with them, they tend to be skeptical.So there's no wonder that manipulative politicians target the high RWAs, who are much more easy to manipulate -- think of the problem of herding cats or the common wisdom that you want to keep your cattle as dumb as possible (who would ever want a cow who keeps trying to outsmart you?).Altemeyer also describes some world management simulations that he had spiked with either all high RWAs or all low RWAs. The low RWAs could work together and solve severe global environmental problems, given their attitude of "we're all in this together, so we need to work together." The high RWAs very quickly led to global nuclear war. Backing the simulation up a couple years, the high RWAs still were on the verge of nuclear war, plus they had never done anything at all to solve the major global environmental problems.It is an interesting and easy read. Be sure to read the footnotes, since most of the material is there.

A new word I learned a few years ago on this forum is ignosticism:

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Ignosticism or igtheism is the idea that the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the term god has no coherent and unambiguous definition. It may also be described as the theological position that other theological positions assume too much about the concept of god.

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At the very least, there can be no productive discussion about whether some god-person exists until all sides can agree on some kind of proper definition of "god".Myself, I don't see how we could arrive at a proper definition, since there's no way for us to observe, let alone detect, any supernatural thing that might possibly be construed to be a god. All we can do is to try imagine such a thing, which means that we would have to make a god up.Furthermore, even if a god did actually exist, it would be not only be unobservable and undetectable to us, but also beyond our comprehension. So we would still need to make up a version of that god that our mere human minds could wrap itself around.So then, all the gods do exist, because we created them. That is how we can know so much about them in such great detail, because we also created their stories.

Except that every single god that has ever existed by virtue of having been created by people is exactly that same. How could you ever possibly differentiate between them? Word salad (and I really don't like that term). If they don't need this god-person, then why bother to seek him? If they don't need to commune with it, then why bother?None of that situation makes any sense.Ironically, your threw in "the way *they* imagine God *should behave*". But isn't that what you do?Have you started to adopt Faith's MO of denouncing that reflection in the mirror?

That's odd. Why did Jesus (as per Matthew) not know all the grounds for divorce? Or rather that Mosaic Law also allowed for a wife to request a divorce from her husband? Why would he have been so ignorant of Judaism that he would think that divorce was allowed only for the husband to be rid of his wife, but not the other way around?This was covered by Rabbi Kalir in my Rabbinic Literature class in university. He started by comparing Judaic divorce with Islamic divorce. As he taught us, in Islam the husband just had to say "I divorce you" three times and they were divorced. But in Judaism, it was far more difficult to divorce and involved some very specific conditions.As Rabbi Kalir told us, one of these specific conditions is if the husband's occupation made him smell too disgusting to be with. For example, tanning leather involves some noxious substances (including, as I understand it, animal manure and not the more pleasant kind), the stench of which is virtually impossible to wash off. If a woman's husband reeked of such a stench that she could not bear to be near him, then she could request a divorce.So didn't Jesus know that? Or rather should we ask why the author of Matthew didn't know that? One clue might be that Matthew 19 was written in Greek, not Aramaic.

Well, considering how astonishingly wrong you have consistently been about just about everything else, I am most definitely going to take the rabbi's word over yours on this one.

A cartoon in a mid-70's German parody/political magazine, Pardon! shows a person with an enormous nose looking up into the sky asking God why he had been given such a huge nose. God appears to him from behind a cloud with an enormous nose to tell him, "Because you were created in my image."Do please at least try to get a clue!

I see your William James Sidis and I raise you a Bertrand Russell (not how it's actually done in poker according to my poker class in OLLI where we just say what we are raising the bet to whatever (without splashing the pot, which is just plain rude, as I keep saying when watching movies)).Bertrand Russell was a pacifist in the UK during WWI, a criminal offense that could land you in jail. His story of being in-processed for incarceration includes a withered old female clerk asking him for personal information for his police file (eg, name, age, address, etc). "Religion?" "Agnostic." "Well, I guess they all worship the same god anyways." He said that that bit of humour kept his spirits up throughout his incarceration.Edited by dwise1, : minor grammatical correction (raising the bet to what?)

Edited by dwise1, : clarifying that "asking him personal questions" was part of her duty

More than a few decades ago on an afternoon talk show (eg, Mike Douglas, though I do not remember which one) Martin Mull did a similar joke (alongside his one warning to never drop your car keys in a Hollywood neighborhood known for its large homosexual demographic ... because they'll snatch them up in no time and steal your car (the long pause is important in that joke)).Martin Mull's initial joke: Two philosophers during that time in WWI pacifism, one having been arrested for pacifism and the other not. The one outside the bars asked why his friend was behind bars, to which his friend responded, "Why are you not behind bars?"No response from the audience, so Martin Mull's next joke started with "A minister, priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar ... " followed by audience laughter and his "OK, now I know what kind of audience I'm playing to!Edited by dwise1, : "followed by laughter"

Edited by dwise1, : more correct usage of quotation marks

Edited by dwise1, : clarifying the Hollywood joke

I really liked Bertrand Russell's assessment of what freethinking meant to Catholics versus Protestants. For Catholics, any deviation from their doctrine was heresy, while for Protestants any deviation just started another church.So for a Catholic, becoming a freethinker meant becoming an atheist. For a Protestant, it meant just creating yet another church.

No, that's not why. The reason why is from fear and mistrust of those who are different from us; IOW plain old xenophobia (fear of the foreign). Yet again, download and read Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians for free (as a PDF, for a nominal fee for e-book formats), and read it. It's an easy and entertaining read since he went out of his way to make accessible to non-psychologists and non-statistians the findings of four decades of his research, which are usually very heavily laden in statistical mathmatics.Basically, what he found was that those who rated high on his right-wing authoritarian (RWA) index viewed the world as being binary: Us versus Them, our in-group having to protect itself and its very existence against the dangers that the out-group presents. BTW, Altemeyer wasn't just expressing his opinions, but rather his in his decades of psychological research he also studied what high and low RWAs tend to believe and how they think (he's a retired psych professor who was just coming up on retirement when he wrote that book in 2006; he has since co-authored a book about Trump with Watergate figure John Dean, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers).One of the things that Altemeyer found is that high RWAs live every day in an almost constant state of heightened fear which lead to panicked and inappropriately strong reactions to minor events that pose no actual danger and which leads to hatred; ie, they frequently perceive danger where there is none. It has also been found that their amygdalae are larger and more active than in low-RWAs. The amygdala (we have two) is that part of the brain which plays a primary role in emotional responses such as fear, anxiety, and aggression. It is part of the limbic system which has been lumped into the "reptilian brain" just below it -- Wikipedia calls it the "paleomammalian cortex". Therefore the functions of the limbic system border on instinctual responses which have evolved.BTW, low-RWAs can also respond with fear and hate, but those responses are to actual dangers and those feelings normally go away after the danger is past. What makes the current climate different is that those very real dangers not only haven't gone away yet, but the GQP keeps doubling down.So as to your misapplied example of the need to quarantine infected populations during a pandemic, your objection raised an actual clear and present danger which requires emergency action while AZPaul3 was talking about normal, non-emergency times. Spoken like a high-RWA.Xenophobia makes a lot of sense evolutionarily that the instinct for fearing outsiders has been deeply ingrained into the most basic structures of our brains by many millennia of human evolution as it worked to help guarantee the survival of small human tribes -- perhaps even more so when there were still human sub-species (eg, Neanderthals) around in which case the "they don't look like us" aspect of xenophobia would have come into play. Each of those small tribes were able to survive because outsiders from other tribes did usually pose a danger to them so it was appropriate to fear them -- though interestingly, since they needed to raid neighboring tribes for wives, that could also explain the exact opposite response, xenophilia, our attraction to foreign females while fearing and hating foreign men.The problem is that we have outgrown the need for xenophobia, but we are still saddled with that ancient baggage which now poses a grave danger for society which is now very diversified. A quality which used to ensure our survival now will have the effect of destroying us.When you have an ethnically monolithic society (eg, as in most central and northern European countries) where everybody in the country looks pretty much the same and all share the same culture and religion (somewhat the same), then when refugees and colonial populations arrive looking different and having different cultures (including different religions) that creates a huge cultural shock for that society. For decades, Europeans have basically been scratching and shaking their heads over how the US would keep having such problems trying to deal with diversity (both racial and religion -- remember our own Protestant persecution of the Catholics), but now they're having to go through the same thing and they cannot deal with it. Part of the motivation for the growth of European right-wing nationalist groups (outside of Russian funding) is their reaction to the presence of refugees.When it was still on Netflix I watched the 2015 German movie, Er is wieder da ("He is Back", released with the English title, "Look Who's Back"), in which Hitler mysteriously reappears in 2011 Berlin. The director used the Borat model in which they traveled throughout Germany filming "Hitler" interacting with regular Germans. Over and over again those Germans complain to Hitler how their culture was being endangered by these foreign immigrants whom the government is giving everything. Even though that the 2016 US presidential campaign was only starting, the parallels between the mood in both countries were striking. BTW, I can't find that movie anywhere now. It had been on Netflix US but no longer. It doesn't come up on Roku Search. I even switched my unit's language to German to find German titles, but without luck. And ever since then Prime Video keeps coming up with German subtitles, though that has come in handy when I couldn't read the computer display on The Expanse.Now, your appeal to having to quarantine the "OUT group" for an actual disease touches on a common anti-immigrant trope, which is that they are all diseased. Or else bring other "cultural and societal maladies" including crime and a foreign culture -- in the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, a centerpiece of Zoot Suit, the prosecutor denounced the Hispanic defendants as having "Aztec blood" which made them naturally blood thirsty and driven to kill people by stabbing them (an actual part of the trial transcript). Even when that "foreign" population had been here since before we came and took the land from them (So Calif used to be part of Mexico). Our downtown had a sizeable Chinatown until we burned it down around 1910 in order to "control disease". 
But didn't Jesus teach that we are all brothers? "Don't call unclean that which I have made clean"? The Good Samaritan in which a hated foreigner is the good guy in the story? Doesn't that go against xenophobia?Sing a bit of that Christian song, "Jesus Loves the Little Children", to yourself:

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Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in his sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

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NOTE: some variant lyrics adds "brown"

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So maybe inclusiveness was meant to be part of Christian belief since it was taught by Jesus, even though Christian doctrine has been constructed to oppose Jesus' teachings.Edited by dwise1, : minor typo

In our world (AKA "the real world") inclusiveness is vitally necessary to keep our society from tearing itself apart.Think of the armed services. Each branch has its own culture, its own part of the Mission, and its own way of operating towards completing the Mission. Because of having their own cultures and histories and differences in which they operate, there is some friction between the branches, AKA "rivalries" (eg, there was fierce in-fighting after Sputnik over which branch's rocket program would be the first to launch a US satellite). The Mission requires that we not only work together but also that we learn to coordinate our operations very closely, such that we now have joint Navy-Air Force bases.Now, I had always been an advocate of my interpretation of "Total Force", which is that we are on the same team committed to the same Mission so stop this stupid inter-branch rivalry and bickering! Inter-branch inclusiveness.Your model of exclusiveness just brings us back to the disaster of the failed mission to rescue the American Embassy hostages in Teheran (Spring 1980), which was our wake-up call for the need to learn to integrate for joint operations. But let's take your desired model one step further and anticipate the inter-branch exclusivity and rivalry escalating to open aggression and virtual civil war between the branches complete with weapons fired in anger.Somewhat hyperbolic, but what's the limit, where would we draw the line? Your need for exclusiveness would require something like apartheid where the "wrong" segments of our diverse population would have to be collected and restricted in special "homeland" regions where they would have to endure poverty and lack of proper education, medical care, or even any kind of functional economy.Instead of all of us being Americans living in the same country and participating in the same economy and society, you want to fragment us into privileged communities for your "IN group" and ghettos for the "Others" (I'm thinking of the original ghettos, i ghetti, in which the Jews had been segregated for centuries in order to protect the Christians from having to deal with the "anarchy" of being exposed to the existence of a different religion)? You are advocating the oppression of the "Others"?Oppressing entire large portions of the population leads to deeply ingrained resentment and eventually erupts into violent rebellion with devastating consequences for our society. Is that what you really advocate? Basically, that would result in the widespread outbreak of anarchy, which you claim is what you want to keep have happening. Yet you promote anarchy happening.Or wouldn't including those large portions of the population into all aspects of society help to keep anarchy from happening? And to allow our society -- and ourselves -- to prosper? I have no idea what you are talking about. First you advocate for exclusion and then you switch sides and talk about "being in communion"?Who being in communion with whom? Only your "IN group" excluding "the Others" whom you keep safely locked away out of sight in their ghettos?Have you actually thought any of this through?

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You keep using that word. I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

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There are so many gods and there have been so very many more gods in the past. And that's just considering all the gods that we have created in all of human existence, ignoring for sake of simplification how each individual creates his own gods based on his misunderstanding of the ideas of gods that he's taught (that would increase the number of gods billions-fold). Which one are you talking about? Do you even know that? It should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that until you can properly define which god you are talking about, then you could not even begin to address the question of whether that god exists or not.For that matter, developing any argument or engaging in any discussion requires that the terminology we use be properly defined as fully and precisely and properly as possible. The presentation of such a proper definition of "god" in these discussions is so rare that I cannot think of a single instance of it being done.For example, if you are also a creationist who would go on to discuss evolution eiher here or anywhere else, then you must provide a clear description of what you are calling "evolution" (plus how you think that it works). It has been my decades-long experience that when creationists talk about "evolution" nothing they say has anything to do with evolution nor how it works, but rather they are arguing against something entirely different that they merely call "evolution" and their arguments against how their "evolution" works have nothing to do with how evolution actually works. And for decades every time I ask a creationist what he means by "evolution" and how he thinks that it works, he either runs away or immediately tries to change the subject. Same as when we ask a theist what he means by "god". 
So I'll go out on a limb here and assume that you're a theist of the "Evangelical Christian" persuasion. In that case for you "god" would be your particular sect's particular interpretation of "God", which is generally based on the Jewish god, יהוה (commonly euphemized as "Adonai" because of the Commandment to not say the Name (hence "HaShem" (השׁם, "The Name") -- even when the rest of the text uses vowel points (the Hebrew alphabet consist of only consonants, no vowels) יהוה is never written with points, a custom extended into English by writing "G-d"), even though Evangelical Christianity's "God" is markedly different from the Judaism's "G-d" or even the "God" of most other forms of Christianity.Therefore, there is no universally understood meaning for "god", "god" does not refer to one specific god (nor does "God", BTW, as you can now clearly see), so just throwing it out there (either as "god" or "God") begs of the question of "What the hell are you talking about?" No, you cannot, given that the closest thing to a universal definition for "god" is that it refers to a supernatural entity. The distinguishing characteristic of the supernatural and of anything supernatural is that we cannot sense it, we cannot detect it, we cannot even determine whether it exists. Therefore, you cannot prove that a supernatural entity exists.As for proving "god does not exist", from the subject of burden of proof we have the question of Proving a negative (follow link for access to the quote's embedded links):

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A negative claim is the opposite of an affirmative or positive claim. It asserts the non-existence or exclusion of something.

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A negative claim may or may not exist as a counterpoint to a previous claim. A proof of impossibility or an evidence of absence argument are typical methods to fulfill the burden of proof for a negative claim.

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Most express that as "you cannot prove a negative," but as that quote shows there are still ways to address it. So as for proving and various or all gods do not exist we most certainly do have copious evidence of absence and arguments can be made for impossibility. 
Also, the entire question of any god's existence is irrelevant and meaningless. It's not even what most atheists are talking about, but rather it is the opponents of atheists who are fixated on that question.So many times I've seen theists use one of two approaches (or even both):

1. Deride the atheist for believing that "God does not exist" and demand that the atheist provide proof that "God does not exist".
   1. That misrepresents many if not most atheists' position: "We just cannot bring ourselves to believe that stuff that you're pushing. We're not buying it!"
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   2. The existence of any gods, let alone specific ones, is not important to us. We just cannot give credence nor allegiance to any of those gods. We do not give credence to the existence of a religion's gods solely because we do not accept that religion itself. It is not not accepting the existence of certain (or any) gods which causes us to reject their associated religions. IOW, our theist opponents have our atheism's causality completely turned around.
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   3. You are imposing on us the monumental task, considered logically impossible by most, of Proving a negative (yes, I am providing the link to that a second time in the same message). Refer above to review the problems with that (assuming you had read it the first time). How very unreasonable of them, especially since they do that in order to shift the burden of proof away from them, where it belongs, and to us instead.
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   4. The Burden of Proof for the existence of any god belongs to those who advocate for us to accept that existence. IOW, the existence of your god is a positive claim, which places the burden of proof squarely on your shoulders, not ours. So do your own job and stop trying to foist it off on others.
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2. Try to maneuver the atheist into conceding to the possibility that some god, any unspecified god might possibly exist. After all, maintaining that absolutely no god exists is an absolute position that is unprovable (review the beginning of this section), so there is a chance that you, the atheist, are wrong about that absolute position. And then at the moment that the atheist makes even the slightest concession you seize upon it as them admitting to your own particular perversion of יהוה including the entire body of theology, beliefs, superstitions, and perverse apologetics belonging to your own particular sect.
   
   1. First, this is still based on the false assumption that "existence of God" is a prime issue for atheists. It isn't, so theists need to stop projecting their own issues and insecurities onto others.
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   2. Second, there are almost infinitely more gods than your own particular perversion of your misunderstandings of יהוה. Conceding that a god might possibly does not automatically validate your own particular perversion of יהוה, but rather Vishnu would be just as valid a consideration.
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      Though the concession is actually that the supernatural could possibly exist, which may or may not include entities for which we humans might create gods to try to comprehend those entities (which we cannot learn anything about anyway, so good luck with that!).

So are you still hung up over god-existence? Why should it be such an issue with you? Thoughts are about a physical as the analog electrical signals going through the amplifier stages of a radio. Or the voltage levels of digital data as it passes through parallel or serial pathways (eg, wires made out of conductive materials) from one register or memory cell to another (all quite physical in their construction, nothing at all abstract about them). All those signals supported by those physical constructs are themselves the result of physical processes (chemical and electrical actions involving matter and energy, which makes them physical!So what the hell are you talking about? What you said makes no sense whatsoever. 
Your other attempts to define away the physical as not being physical are pure nonsense. Uh ... . Didn't your parents ever have The Talk with you? The one about where babies come from?Your parents created you. Didn't you know that? You see, when a mommy and a daddy really love each other ... . And it doesn't involve any storks or cabbage patches.A bit more context can be found in the opening credits of the famous 1969 animated short, Bambi Meets Godzilla, in which writer, choreographer, wardrobe designer, and producer Marv Newland includes this credit:

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Marv Newland produced by Mr. & Mrs. Newland

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Oddly, I seemed to have remembered an additional note to that, "Thanks, Mom and Dad!", but I didn't see it. Uh, no, a god is defined as a human construct to represent a proposed supernatural entity. The necessity of such a construct is both because humans are incapable of sensing, etc, anything supernatural and so cannot learn anything about a supernatural entity except through extraordinary means outside (which would be subject to many problems were that to ever happen, which there is no evidence of) and because the human mind is incapable of dealing with any supernatural entity which could be considered a candidate for "God". That last is why you have had to create your own model of "God" out of your own misunderstanding of what others have taught you about their own misunderstanding of what they had been taught, etc, etc, etc, rinse and repeat for hundreds of generations.Also, as ringo pointed out in Message 2758, only some gods are given the attribute of being creators. Therefore, your definition of "god" as "creator of the universe" is faulty and cannot be used. Remember that you have not specified which of the near-infinite number of gods you are referring to with "god". You presented a faulty misdefinition. You have proven nothing. We were taught that the name, יהוה, was derived from the Hebrew verb for "to be": היה ("hayah" -- sorry, I haven't figured how to do pointed script here). Such that basically יהוה was saying "I am that I am", which leads to the Popeye Postulate "I yam what I yam", which in turn leads to the Tuber Testament (what with all the yams). DISCLOSURE:That is a string of bits (AKA "binary digits"). In octal it would be written as 010707 (the leading zero marks it as being in octal) and in hexadecimal it would be written as 0x11C7 (the 0x marks it as being in hex). Rendering it into decimal would be more work than it's worth. Besides, we don't even know whether it even is a number.Which is the rub, isn't it? Data contains no inherent properties which tells us what data type it is! Is it an integer numeric value and if so how many bits long is the word (also, considering that leading 1, is it in 2's Complement form or some other integer format)? Is it some kind of floating-point value and if so what is that data type's Is it character data and if so using what set of character codes? Is it concatenation of bit fields and if so in what Interface Control Document (ICD) and where in that ICD is the format of those bit fields specified? There are also possible issues concerning encryption and decryption, but that does not affect the fundamental problem of identifying the type of data we're dealing with. Or, for that matter, whether the data stream isn't just simply random bits devoid of any possible meaning. To borrow from a Hardee's chicken fillet sandwich commercial (denigrating McD's chicken items constructed of "chicken parts"): bits are bits.The data itself tells us nothing about what it's data type is nor how it's used. Rather, that depends entirely on how a program uses it. It's the program that determines how it uses those bit strings and hence what they mean. For that matter, a program could use the exact same string of bits as completely different data types as needed (eg, using C/C++'s union structure). 
So then, why did you include that? Did you have a point? The rest is just gobbely-gook nonsense reminiscent of New Age blatherings. Maybe you should go back to playing with crystals.Or stop to think about what you are trying to say. And learn some things along the way.Edited by dwise1, : ABE about ignosticism

I do realize that this OP is mainly to examine discussions of the existence of "God", a topic which is immensely important to theists but only marginally (*yawn*) to atheists. It seems that whenever a theist tries to engage with an atheist (or vice versa) the theist immediately gloms onto arguing over the "existence of God" and refuses to let go (like a pit bull's bite when he's in the "red zone"), thus blocking the possibility of constructive discussion. It seems to me that theists also obsess over that question among themselves, but in countless atheist gatherings spanning decades I have almost never heard atheists discussing "the existence of God" among ourselves -- with the exception of sharing those unpleasant encounters with theists and how to respond to them.Of course I'm speaking for myself on this, but as I explained to Godblog in Message 2759 the "existence of God" is a non-issue for us atheists and we get get very bored of it very quickly. Theists seem to think that we became atheists because we reject God (for myriad "reasons" that populate their fantasies), whereas we don't accept "God" because it's part of the overall package of the religion that is what we actually reject -- we don't explicitly reject "God", but rather we reject those religions and their gods are merely part of the bath water that we're throwing out the window.Therefore, by obsessing over their issues with the "existence of God" in order to challenge why we're atheists, theists are blinding themselves to the real reason for our atheism: their religion. They may as well challenge us to disprove transubstantiation, which to us atheists is basically the same kind of question as their god. 
So then: We also simply "don't believe in transubstantiation".Atheism can also be read as "not/without theism" in order to emphasize that it's religions that we do not accept. By not accepting a religion and throwing that dirty bath water out the window, we also throw out everything in that dirty bath water, including their gods.So theists need to stop obsessing over their gods and prepare to discuss their religions with us. Not that they would ever do that. 
A corollary question for theists would be their definition of "atheist". In particular, given a particular individual, how to they classify him/her as an atheist?The operative definition that we keep hearing is what you repeat in your OP (quoted here as they usually say it): "Atheists do not believe in God."OK, so what's "God"? Refer again to my preceding Message 2759 for a discussion of that. Of course, every theist who ever uses the word "God" is referring solely to his own god to the exclusion of all other gods (whether that thought has ever occurred to them or not).So what about a theist who is not a Christian (a "true Christian" in particular)? We atheists would identify him as a theist, but would a theist who believes in a different god also accept that other theist as a theist? Or as an atheist because he believes in a different god, not "The True God"?For example, a Hindu does not believe in a "true Christian's" perversion of יהוה but rather believes in Vishnu.
To us atheists he's obviously a theist, but shouldn't a "true Christian" consider him to be an atheist because he doesn't believe in "God" (as defined by "true Christians")?What about a Mormon whose ideas of "God" are not the same as the "true Christian's"? Or what about Catholics?So in the fevered "true Christian" brain, who is an atheist and who isn't? Gotta get ready now to go to our monthly Atheists United breakfast discussion.Guess what we will most probably not discuss. 

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ABE: Atheists-Breakfast DebriefAt our month Atheists United breakfast (which ran from 1030 to 1430) we enjoyed lively discussion of several topics including politics (mainly whether there still exist any Republicans who actually believe in some actual policies and why are they so silent), whether there's any valid reason for reading Tolkein, linguistics (including why and how languages change, why English spelling is so damned weird, how English grammar is being screwed up by present speakers), the usefulness of Wikipedia in researching specialized vocabularies in foreign languages, the necessity for the invention of various aspects in Star Trek technology for the purpose of promoting the narrative (and to deal with budgetary and visual effects problems), etc.I cannot speak for everything discussed at the other end of the table (common problem with our long table), but almost the only discussion of religion involved "atheists in foxholes" wherein atheists seem far better at dealing with imminent death that are fundamentalist Christians (from an actual war story in which the only ones freaking out and fouling themselves in sheer terror of dying were the "guaranteed saved" Christians), and stories of giving up religion for Lent.As I had predicted, "existence of God", being a non-issue with atheists, was a non-topic as usual.Edited by dwise1, : gotta go

Edited by dwise1, : ABE

Who cares? How happy does it make you to "know" that Sauron doesn't exist?It's the religions themselves that we don't accept, not any individual components of those religions (eg, their gods). We reject religions because of the religions, not because of their individual components, so such "issues" as "does a particular god exist" are simply uninteresting and of no concern.

Edited by dwise1, : added last sentence