(September 6, 2015 at 5:45 pm)Shuffle Wrote:(September 6, 2015 at 4:54 pm)thehedglin Wrote: Listen, if I said I asked my wife if she believes in ghosts, and in the next sentence say WE don't believe in ghosts; that would mean me and my wife don't believe in ghosts. That does not imply every atheist on the planet doesn't.
We are also married, but that does not imply that you are.
We doesn't always mean everyone, especially after you specify the people you are talking about.
He made a joke, him and Casper are atheists, and don't believe in ghosts. I think you need to try reading it again.
That is definitely not what he meant, because in the very next sentence he says "as atheists," referring to the we. And if that is what he meant, I would be thrilled to have him clarify himself, and not have someone else do it for him.
Let me put it like this:
"Let me go ask my wife what she thinks........
Nope, we do not believe in ghosts.
As atheists, we have no use for gods or souls. Seems a strange question to ask as the ghost is the disembodied spirit or soul."
No, the we still references the SAME group it did before, otherwise the qualifier 'as atheists'(denoting the people in question are atheists) wouldn't be necessary. The 'as atheists' part is there to explain why we don't personally have no use for gods or souls, which we could argue is a bit of a generalization, but the majority of atheists DO reject gods and souls. A poll I saw on Debate.org said something like 62% of atheists there do not believe in a soul. While not absolutely accurate, I think that is a reasonable representation.
Moreover:
""Let me go ask my wife what she thinks........
Nope, we do not like Pat Robertson.
As atheists, we have no use for such con artists. Seems a strange question to ask as these people are the worst of the worst."
Does the 'we' in this statement mean everyone, or just me and my wife. If you answered the former, I am afraid you must have skipped basic reading comprehension. Now that I think about it, we had a similar problem in another thread, where you got rather hostile to me because you seemed more interested in addressing what you thought I said than what I actually did say.
I would more generally advocate that one only leave one entrance into their mind(reason), and keep the rest of it rather closed, as it is one hell of a lot easier to shovel shit in than it is to get it out.
If the evidence and reason for you to believe something isn't really any better than the reason you should believe some rural farmer from Arkansas got anally probed by interstellar visitors, then you probably shouldn't.
If the evidence and reason for you to believe something isn't really any better than the reason you should believe some rural farmer from Arkansas got anally probed by interstellar visitors, then you probably shouldn't.
