Am I still an atheist if I believe in a higher being?

[vixene]

Ok if you say so. Remember, you're just a guy with an opinion on the the internet.

You know he's not actually dealing in matters of opinion, right. With a little research you can prove him right or wrong.

I'm a little lazy right now.

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While I agree that labels aren't always helpful or useful, it can help you and others have a solid understanding of what you believe as a ground basis...then again, it can also immediately turn you into an easily dismissed strawman for some people.

Personally, I've had only positive experiences with "coming out" as an atheist to the people I've chosen to do that with. I'm staving it off with my parents because my dad is a preacher and they're both old enough to be my grandparents, so I just think it would steal their peace and negatively impact our relationship mostly. My brother knows and doesn't really care, and a bunch of my co-workers know, and most of them either agree, don't hold a verbalized position of belief, and/or don't care. A few other friends know, and that's about it. Mostly, people my age are either mostly pretty tolerant or in agreement with me. I live in the northern butt-cheek of the Bible Belt (that would be Virginia), so it's this weird mix of conservative old people and forward-thinking young people (part of the latter due to a fairly liberal and lesbeian-friendly mostly-women's college in my town).

Anyway, if you don't like the labels "strong" and "weak" in terms of atheism, I've heard the terms "gnostic atheist" and "agnostic atheist" to describe the exact same concept. A gnostic atheist claims to believe and/or know that gods in any form do not exist, while an agnostic atheist does not claim to know for certain, but rejects the extant god claims without evidence to justify it.

Personally, I have never seen anyone manage to describe a potentially extant god without resorting to fiction or paradox and/or being so vague and wishy-washy with the definition of the word "god" as to render the term utterly useless for the purpose of describing anything at all. Because of this, I'm in the camp that lumps god in with impossible objects rather than possible ones. By every satisfying definition of the word "god" I've ever encountered, such a thing could only exist in the realm of fiction and abstract ideas.

While it is logically unsound to claim for certain that a possible object does not exist, it is NOT logically unsound to claim that an impossible object does not exist.

For instance, it is not logically sound to rule out the existence of unicorns (horses with horns) because those fall into the realm of possible objects. Horses exist, and herd animals with horns exist, so it's reasonable to assume that they could exist, even if there's no evidence that they do.

It is logically sound, however, to rule out the existence of a square circle anywhere in the universe. The words "square" and "circle" have mutually exclusive definitions (unless you play with the words so as to render them meaningless--a favorite trick of charlatans) because squares must have corners whereas circles cannot have corners. Because of this, a "square circle" is an inherently paradoxical object that cannot exist.

Now, the general consensus about the word "god," as I understand the term, is that if a thing exists physically and bodily in our natural universe, it is an alien being and not a god. Furthermore, it would theoretically be somewhere for us to find out there in space somewhere, meaning it would be more than possible to produce evidence of its actual existence. For a thing to be a god, though, it must generally exist on some non-material plane, which means to believe in one, you must be able to convince yourself that consciousness can exist without matter or energy (as both are part of the material universe). Because all evidence points to the idea that a complex form of matter (read: brains) must be present in order for a consciousness to be possible, to me that lumps god in with square circles and not unicorns. God, as I understand the word, is an impossible object.

The thing you have to decide for yourself is whether you think god is a unicorn or a square circle.

I feel really bad saying this, but that was really long and I struggled to follow through the gist of it...