Christianity and Suicide

[Inkfeather132]

Belief is simply your judgment of the preponderance of evidence for or against a thing's existence or truthfulness. If you have good reason to think a thing exists or is truthful then you afford belief to it, even in the presence of some uncertainty. Otherwise you don't. That's your belief position.

Your knowledge position is something else. It is the data you are in possession of. It can and often does vary independently from your belief position.

Belief: I believe in god's existence.
Knowledge: I know that god exits.

Most of us unbelievers don't make a knowledge claim about god, but see no good reason to afford belief to the concept. That is agnostic atheism.

Why don't we make a knowledge claim? Because, inherently, we can't. And neither can a believer. Gods are invisible and intangible. Their existence is asserted, and not testable. We cannot make a knowledge claim for OR against the god hypothesis because it's not constructed in such a way as to be testable and falsifiable and therefore, provable.

But we can examine the preponderance of evidence and say that there's no good and sufficient reason to afford belief.

This distinction is not pedantic or mere semantics. In the immediate discussion above, I see Godscreated and others shifting back and forth between their belief and knowledge claims. "I believe, therefore I know" is not a a valid claim. All claims that derive from it are therefore not valid, either. The most you can say is "I have decided to believe and have practiced it for so long that it feels right to me and I have given myself over to confirmation bias and agency inference to the point that it is subjectively similar to a real relationship with a real being."

As an aside, this confusion between belief and knowledge claims often results in caricature of the actual position that atheists are taking. The vast majority of us don't "claim" that there "is" no god. That would be a much easier strawman to knock down. We don't see evidence to substantiate the claim of god's existence and so do not believe it because we do not believe the unsubstantiated. That is much more problematic for the theist position.

Similarly, to the point of this thread, there's a tendency to talk about "suicide" like it's a single topic. It's not. There's both rational and irrational suicide. They have completely different motivations. The former is simply choosing not to have more new experiences for good and sufficient personal reasons, with full consideration of other options and of how the decision effects other interested parties. The latter is generally emotion based and centered in despair or other acute pain, and mostly disregards or discounts how it effects others. The latter is by far the most common form of suicide but we tend to talk about it as if it were the only form or motivation for the act. Irrational suicide is impulsive and ill-considered; rational suicide is the opposite. This is problematic for authoritarian types who just want a black and white rule to follow wherever possible; they try to characterize what they're trying to control as a simple black and white issue.

I understand and agree with what you are saying. Sometimes I do use the two interchangeably (leftover thinking from being a theist my whole life I guess), and I will try to be careful not to do that in the future  But GC (and many other theists) do equate belief with knowledge. The point of my post to him was that I "knew" god the same way that he "knows" god now. In other words, not at all.