RE: Is atheism a belief?
March 11, 2019 at 2:25 am
(This post was last modified: March 11, 2019 at 2:25 am by Fake Messiah.)
(March 10, 2019 at 10:23 pm)Belaqua Wrote:(March 10, 2019 at 6:24 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Atheism is not a belief, positive or negative. Just like someone who knows that the earth is round does not merely believe that the earth is round.
Well, the shape of the earth is pretty hard for reasonable people to deny. (Though I know that there are currently unreasonable people who do so.)
As so often in discussions like these, we end up getting fuzzy about what "belief" and "knowledge" mean.
It is more a thing of a simple observation than a knowledge - just like with round Earth: for instance I observe that there are many highly religious nations with horrible infant mortality rates. Meanwhile, highly secular nations with large percentages of atheists in their populations have very low infant mortality rates. And what is more sincere than a mother's prayer for the health of her baby? You see it's a simple observation.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
