RE: A problem with the word "atheist"
January 26, 2018 at 8:56 am
(This post was last modified: January 26, 2018 at 8:57 am by Fake Messiah.)
(January 26, 2018 at 7:33 am)Huggy74 Wrote:(January 23, 2018 at 8:53 pm)The Valkyrie Wrote: Dawkins suggested atheists call themselves "brights". Which, to me, is a stupid idea.
I suggest we use "not dumbfucks".
There's just one problem, you can't say for certain that God doesn't exist so if in fact God does exist the you become the epitome of a "dumbf*ck".
It's more like you can't prove that Santa doesn't exist and since belief in Santa smacks of the same sort of superstitious nonsense you can claim god too as no longer credible.
There is a cumulative case to be made for Santa's non-existence. You reason that if Santa did exist then it would be rational for you to expect a lot of evidence to turn up that in fact never has turned up. If Santa exists then it generates a whole lot of reasonable expectations all of which are unfulfilled, like that he would leave sooty footprints as he made his way from the chimney to your bedside; that someone would have actually seen him careering across the sky behind his reindeer fast enough to visit, and spend a little time with, every child in the world in the space of a single evening; you would expect someone to be able to give you a plausible account of how he could break the laws of physics in this way. And so on.
These kinds of evidential considerations, atheists regard, are much more powerful than any to do with simple lack of evidence.
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"