Atheists can't hold office in the USA?

Again, what YOU think is "not worth mentioning" is not the same as not existing. Agnostics do exist. Period. Just admit you said a stupid thing.

Ho hum. Groundhog Day.Agnostics do not exist when considering the god question because atheism and theism deal with belief not knowledge. No one has knowledge of god, so everyone is agnostic. If everyone is agnostic it's not a distinguishing feature.To be 'agnostic' about belief is to admit to a non-belief. Therefore anyone who says he doesn't know whether he believes or not is a default atheist.Agnostism is defunct and always was.

So now you're moving the goalposts to "distinguishing feature".But of course, how we identify ourselves is a distinguishing feature. You identify as an atheist. I identify as an agnostic. How we self-identify distinguishes us far more than our internals. Still nonsense. Juries don't know what to believe. They're agnostic. Defunct and non-existent aren't the same either. You have a large vocabulary for a weasel but you should try to learn what words mean.

You can't have failed to have noticed that I haven't changed my postion since post 1. If you can't say that you believe in god, you don't and are therefore an atheist. But I do try to find different ways to get that simple and obvious position into your vision. Ah, now we get there. 'How we identify ourselves is a distinguishing feature'. It sure is. It's interesting to hear you now say that you're an atheist, which you are because you don't believe in god. But nevertheless, claim to be agnostic! Hah! are you running for office? The reason for the invention of the word agnostic, was to get out of having to admit to not believing in god.When you say to people that you're an atheist *and* an agnostic, do you think that they go away thinking that you believe in god or not? Utter crap. Apart from the fact that a jury is a descriptor of a group and can't believe anything, individuals in a jury are required to 'believe' someone is guilty or not guilty. If they don't know what to believe, the person is not guilty. If you don't know whether you believe or not, you don't believe. Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

It's amusing that you are being annoyed by these arguments because they are the very arguments I have learned from you. The only difference being that you apply them to gods and I am applying them to leprechauns.Welcome to my world..... As far as Sam is concerned they are all manifestations of the true but unknowable nature of the real leprechauns he believes in.....Remember the blind men and the elephant story? Sam is utterly delighted in your ongoing use of the 'IF some THEN all' logical fallacy and, to much cheering from leprechauni-ists, he again accuses you of being an a-leprechaun-ist fundamentalist who is completely unable to support his 'positive position'.He draws lots more impressively colorful diagrams and accuses you repeatedly of suffering from cognitive dissonance. Well that's what I'm talking about!!!And thus the special pleading that theists insist upon, and which the language commonly used embraces, continues....Imagine if you lived in a world full of Sams where leprechauns were given the same status that gods are and being a leprechaun-ist or an a-leprechaun-ist was a topic of social relevance......

Annoyed isn't the right word - I'm pretty sure that would require me actually caring.I'm laughing at you on this end... Well no, that's not the only difference at all. I'm not making the same arguments as you did so your responses to mine are not the even the same as mine to yours.You're really trying to parallel them but actually you're not. Except that nobody says that elves and fairies, etc., are leprechauns.You've put the blind men in a petting zoo and are trying to say that the goats and sheep are elephants - so you can then say that the elephant has been specially plead.I don't see how anyone would fall for that.As I said before, if you changed it from leprechauns to just "small magical creatures" then my arguments would have to be different. And then they would be more parallel to arguments against "gods". As I've explained in other threads, if you want to talk about a particular god, like a particular small magical creature, then its easy to construct arguments against them. But those arguments don't work for all gods in general like they don't work for all small magical creatures in general.Coming up with an argument against leprechauns is just as easy as coming up with an argument against Thor. But that is not an argument against elves, like the one against Thor isn't an argument against Allah. I haven't made an If-Then argument at all.When you were talking about gods, you did.Again, we're just not making the same arguments. But you do spend a lot of time discussing gods where I won't hardly talk about leprechauns.I guess you do care about gods.I still don't about leprechauns. Its not special pleading just because it is different. My argument against leprechauns is not like your argument against gods. And the reasons that I know that leprechauns aren't real are not like the reasons that you believe that gods are not real.Your just desperately trying to make your anti-god argument valid.But you're failing to draw a parallel to my anti-leprechaun argument.My argument against leprechauns just is not the same as your argument against gods. If everyone believed in leprechauns then I would reconsider my position, and most likely go from an atheist one to an agnostic one. And I probably would also avoid claiming that they really are fictitious. For one, I don't care and wouldn't want to waste my time discussing it. And for two, yeah I don't care so why should I care?It very easy to avoid the social relevance by just not talking about it.

That's simply not true. Huxley readily admitted that he did not believe in god.The reason he invented to the word was to avoid being grouped with the atheists.Because even though you do not believe in god, you can also not believe that there is no god.The atheists in Huxley's time, like the theists, behaved as if they had attained a certain gnosis - that they had figured it out.Huxley invented the term agnosticism to separate himself from both of those groups to say - "no, you have not figured it out". That you lack a belief in god, but are reasonable enough to admit that you aren't sure, unlike the atheists that think they're sure enough to make claims that god does not exist. You can keep repeating it but its still not true.If you are unfamiliar with a concept, you don't know if you believe in it or not, but it can be something that you do believe in but you just haven't realized it yet. You don't disbelieve in the thing until you learn what it is - you're in limbo until you know what it is.

Just as fundamentalist Christians say god wrote\inspired the bible so it must be true ... you are again referring to your dogma as was written in The Book of Huxley ... How fundamentalist of you. And amusingly squirmy ...So you are as adamant about your belief as Faith is about hers. Fascinating. Well maybe there is hope for you ... if they haven't decided are they theist or atheist? What about part theist and part atheist? What causes you to force them into one box or the other? Or you just can't admit to your fundamentalist core that a middle position exists, no matter how much you try to define it out of existence. A kind of backward "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Also curiously in line with fundamentalist Christians that label anyone not a fundamentalist Christian as an atheist. You do have a lot in common ... Very easily -- I am 50% sure of deism and 50% sure of atheism ... because neither position is refuted by evidence (so I cannot disbelieve either) and because neither position has provided sufficient evidence to compel one to chose either position with anything more than 50% confidence\sureness. Typical open-minded skeptic position when there is insufficient evidence to compel a conclusion. Ah the godless of the gaps. Because you perceive an absence of evidence you feel 100% confident (sure) you can make the logically false appeal from ignorance argument that it is evidence absence with impunity, and think (pretend) it is rational ...

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Argument from Ignorance

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Argument from ignorance (Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance stands for "lack of evidence to the contrary"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to prove the proposition satisfactorily to be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four,

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1. true
2. false
3. unknown between true or false
4. being unknowable (among the first three).[1]

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In this case we are dealing with either (3) or (4) ... so no, your perception of an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (all it really is amounts to a perceived absence of evidence). Says the fundamentalist atheist unwilling to look at the evidence and admit to the proportion of "don't disbelieve god/s exist" is a statement of moderate default/passive theism .... Very easily -- I am 50% sure of deism and 50% sure of atheism ... because neither position is refuted by evidence (so I cannot disbelieve either) and because neither position has provided sufficient evidence to compel one to chose either position with anything more than 50% confidence\sureness.But you will likely be fundamentally incapable of accepting that as written.Can I assume that you agree that "there is NO gray area between sure and not-sure, where information is incomplete and possibly contradictory?" The number of quote boxes are indicative of the number of times you have not answered this simple question, which I find vastly amusing given your fundamentalist black and white position on belief and not-belief ...So, should I put you down for "Agree" because ... Gotta love the equivocation there ... that sounds a lot like NOT 100% absolutely sure to me, so maybe your problem is not being able to see shades of gray ...Fascinating: according to your paradigm you are an asurist ... because you exhibit a smidgen of doubt ... According to you and your dogmatic fundamentalism. Curiously I am not asking about whether there is a "need in people to believe in some form of god" but whether they need (feel driven) to decide that god/s exist (theists) or that god/s don't exist (atheists) ... why do you feel so driven to decide god/s don't exist?Here's the chart again: Now I remind you that you said So that eliminates (B) from the possible paths you would follow, but does not answer why you feel so compelled to choose (D) over (C).But then you pretend to decide FOR them: Curiously this just further demonstrates you are part of the group with a "pathological compulsion\drive that pushes them to make irrational and baseless decisions\opinions\beliefs" ...And it is the more amusing that you cannot accept a 50/50 position when you say: Position (C) is more rational than (D) ... you should try it some time. Being absolutely sure of a belief is silly and not rational behavior.Enjoy

http://xkcd.com/386/Comic

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png

I've pointed out that your position since post 1 has been self-contradictory. I think they go away understanding that I don't know. We've been through this already. The reason juries take time to deliberate is because they don't know what to believe. They have to decide what to believe. Some members may change their minds about what they believe. If you don't know, you don't know.

Has your computer been hacked??

I agree - his argument was about people claiming to have knowledge that they could not have. Huxley's new word appears to have filled a necessary gap and came at a time when science was making enormous advances in society. In pre-modern society the church claimed to have the monopoly on all knowledge, not just about god, but all knowledge (because all knowledge came from god). The idea that you could acceptably and intellectually say that you don't believe in god in that way must have been very attractive, and fashionable. But it's now just an obvious statement and it has always missed the point. The point being that no-one can have knowledge in a scientific sense about god. if they did, we all would. No, instead what people have is faith or belief. So we return to this. To use the jury analogy, I am sure beyond reasonable doubt that god does not exist. But in fact, that statement is almost meaningless, because 'reasonable doubt' is actually indeterminate. If we take the definition of reasonable doubt to be what most reasonable people think - which is the test - my opinion is a minority one and may not be regarded as reasonable.Belief either way is, in fact, an emotional certainty, not a rational one - or at least it's an emotional certainty guided by a rational thought. I can and do make the claim that god does not exist, but I do not do it finally on the basis of knowledge but on something that we call belief (or, in my case, lack of.)Belief in god is a unique case, off hand I can't think of any other circumstance where we have this kind of bollocksed up argument. To repeat for the umpteenth time - this God think is simply special pleading, requiring no more examination than that we would apply to any other phenomenon - we don't - or at least shouldn't - believe it until it's demonstrably true. We are not neutral about belief. People either believe or they don't. The fact that many people do believe stuff for no rational reason, just tells us something about ourselves - we're humans, not Vulcans.

Now you're just being silly. It's Huxley's word, he gets to define it - not you and not me. His definition is one that you should agree with in that it just the scientific method. I AM sure that there is no god. You seem to have a real problem accepting that. It's "fascinating" to watch you try to misunderstand that - over and over again.However, my lack of belief in god is rather different from Faith's belief in God because she says that any evidence that she's presented with that speaks to the non-existence of god cannot be true. I am more than happy to accept any evidence that you, her or anyone wish to present and I WILL change my mind if I find it conclusive. So far I find the lack of evidence for a god conclusive so I conclude that there is no god. However, there remains the possibility that I'm wrong.I'm going to ignore the rest of your volumous post as I'm just repeating myself and you're not interested in trying to understand what I'm saying. But this is at least new territory. And yet you *have* chosen; you call yourself a Deist not an atheist. You believe in god. Curiously amusing and fascinating all at once.

He wasn't as hung up on dissociating belief from knowledge as you are, though:

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I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions ...

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When I tried to exemplify how people don't actually disbelieve unfamiliar concepts before they figure out what they are, by using the unknown Concept X as being cheese example, you stifled that discussion by saying that you don't need belief because you have knowledge.I don't think Huxley would have that issue with that discussion. You say he "confuses" knowledge and belief, but I don't see that he does. I think he understands the differences, but realizes that the dissociation isn't as important as you are making it.Plus, if we really wanted to be pedantic about it, we could say that nobody really knows anything and all that we really do have are beliefs.But I don't like to go there, because I don't have a problem saying that I know the sun will rise tomorrow, or even that I believe that sodium and chloride make salt, or whatever simple scientific knowledge you want to go with. Particularly, the discovery of and explanation of evolution and how that impacted man's 'special place' in this world and how that relates to our understanding of a need for a god.I imagine there were people saying that if you accepted evolution then you were anti-god. Huxley's agnosticism gave folks a description they could use that explained that while they were for scientific explanations, they were not against god.You keep saying that its about distancing yourself from religion but I think its more about aligning yourself with science (and not caring about the religion).I thought this was interesting:

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Huxley supported the reading of the Bible in schools. This may seem out of step with his agnostic convictions, but he believed that the Bible's significant moral teachings and superb use of language were relevant to English life. "I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches". However, what Huxley proposed was to create an edited version of the Bible, shorn of "shortcomings and errors... statements to which men of science absolutely and entirely demur...

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So i don't see him as being anti-religion as much as you seem to. I don't think that stuff drove much of his desire to invent a new term. Huxley didn't really care that much about denying orthodoxy, it seems to me.He was much more pro-science than anti-religion, me thinks.

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I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objections to the doctrine.

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. Weird, my religious beliefs carry almost no certainty. Would an isolated man come up with a god concept or not? What do you think?I think they would. I think there's something inside us that draws us to wonder about the what-else that might be out there, and how it might be much greater than we are.If men do come up with god concepts on their own, then I don't think its special pleading as much as it just is a special case - its something almost everyone wonders about so it makes sense that we don't treat it like anything else.On the other hand, if we need indoctrination to form beliefs in gods, then while still being a special case, I can see how its more actual pleading in that regard.Edited by Cat Sci, : formatting, pasted an update in the wrong spotEdited by Cat Sci, : strike two