Atheism isn't a belief?

I don't see that they are. I personally consider "belief" to cover only those things that I have to accept without evidence.Since I try not to have any of those, I don't accept that atheism is a belief. Particularly since it's a position characterized by a lack of certain beliefs.If atheism is a belief then "bald" is a hair color.

Depending on how you define the supernatural, which is really just a catch-all term for whatever unscientific nonsense you'd like to insert into the discussion, we might indeed have a very reasonable expectation of being able to apply rational empiricism to the subject.For instance if the "supernatural" I was presented with was telekinesis, a person with the power to move objects with his mind at will, why would that not be ameinable to rational, empirical study of his powers and capabilities?

Why do you continue to make authorititative statements about what atheists believe after having been told, by atheists, that they do not believe those things?

I performed your experiment with no results. Can you explain?

It would be nice if that thread could be promoted to discussion; I have a few thoughts on that - mostly that you incorrectly assume a deterministic universe, when it's abundantly clear that we live in a nondeterministic one - but I don't think they're on topic, here.

I've never understood this kind of thinking.Go outside with a yardstick. Mark off a square on somebody's lawn, or out in some scrubland somewhere - anywhere handy that isn't pavement - one meter by one meter. Imagine the volume formed if you go a meter up into the air and a half-meter down into the soil from that square.Now imagine everything that's in that cube-and-a-half. Probably about 80 lbs of soil, 1 m3 of air, and tens of thousands of individual living things. You could spend a lifetime studying the properties of what you have in that volume. Geology, biology, physics - it's a tiny universe of things to be discovered that you've marked out with your yardstick.

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Now imagine how many such volumes exist on this one planet alone, and that's just the land surface, one third of the surface of the Earth. Try to imagine how many one-meter cubes you could stack to fill up the oceans and the seas, if you can.

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Every cube a universe of discovery. A lifetime of study. And that's not enough for you? You find that so ordinary, so pedestrian, so insignificant that you have to make up more stuff to wonder about? You have to waste your time with stories about a magic skyman that wouldn't convince a child?

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The arrogance of the believer is sometimes truly astounding. Flabbergasting in it's all-too-human contradiction. It'd be funny if people didn't take it all so seriously. It'd be funny if telling you this wasn't something that would get me killed in the sort of society where it's your views that inform the legal system and not mine.

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This message has been edited by crashfrog, 08-20-2005 07:20 PM