(September 6, 2015 at 6:11 pm)thehedglin Wrote:(September 6, 2015 at 5:45 pm)Shuffle Wrote: 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.
If Casper is an atheist, and does not believe in ghosts, then your interpretation is right.
If the Casper part of his post was just a joke and the rest was actually his response to my question, then my interpretation is right.
We will only know who's is right when he comes back and clarifies his post, but until then, we can only interpret.
