Are Atheists using Intellectually Dishonest Arguments?

[Mister Agenda]

If someone tells me that a god or a Bigfoot is real or baseball signed by Babe Ruth is in their pocket, and don't provide evidence sufficient to convince me that they are correct, I have zero obligation to provide evidence that they are wrong.

But you do have a burden of proof for your belief that the evidence is insufficient.

Notice that before you stated that you have zero obligation, you have already been presented evidence, evaluated it and judged it to be insufficient. As such your disbelief is justified only to the extent that you can demonstrate that the evidence presented is indeed insufficient. In other words, you have a burden of proof with respect to the beliefs you have about the evidence in order to justify your subsequent disbelief, i.e. your disbelief is contingent upon prior beliefs that do have a burden of proof.

(If you simply don't care whether the proposition "God exists" is or is not true that's a different story. But when someone participates on AF it would be a little disingenous for them to claim that they don't care.)

I don't have a burden of proof for my opinion. I'm not obliged to explain myself, I can just withhold belief, or give it if I think it's warranted with no onus to explain a damn thing. If I'm kind enough to provide you with a walk-through as to where you went wrong, that's a service to you, and you're welcome. I don't have to justify not swallowing everything someone tries to feed me. My internal state of belief is really none of their business. For example, some pieces of shit would actually tell me that I don't really believe what I say I believe. They aren't worth my time and they already owe me an explanation for why they're that shitty.

I care about God's existence to about the same extent that I care about Bigfoot's. I'm not worried about God being real, if it exists I doubt it's the monster so many of its followers make it out to be. I'm pedantic and I'll argue just about anything if I think there's a flaw in the other person's claim or reasoning. I don't own any guns, but I'll correct someone who calls an AR-15 an assault rifle. I hate Stalin, but if someone says he was a pedophile, I want to know what evidence they're basing that on. I think some objects seen in the sky are UFOs in the sense that they have never been identified and perhaps never will be, but I'll call bullshit on Huggy's UFO-summoning guy when a confederate with a balloon is the more likely explanation. There's a theme in all that if you care to figure it out.

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Many of you guys, for being so quick to bring up the B.O.P. for others, work really hard to get out of it yourselves.  It appears that there are a bunch of pseudo-skeptics!

How about a sincere skeptic who genuinely doesn't not hold or want to hold a position for which I cannot meet the burden of proof. I suspect you WANT us to be gnostic theists so you throw the burden back on us, and it's really frustrating to you that all we're really saying about arguments for God is that we don't find them convincing.

You know, theists don't HAVE to carry the burden of proof. They can be agnostic theists just like atheists can be agnostic atheists. They can believe while admitting that they can't meet the burden of proof to show that what they believe in really exists. But they don't have to, unless they're trying to convince a skeptic that whatever version of deity or deities they believe in is actually real.

If I had to guesstimate, I'd say God is pretty improbable. There are lots of arguments that are used to support his existence, but they are, in my humble opinion, all fatally flawed, and five hundred zeroes don't add up to one. There are some versions of God that I consider married bachelors or squared circles or just at odds with what we actually know. I do believe that those versions of God aren't real, for those reasons. But the God of deism? Possible. The God of Providence? Possible. Their only problem is that there isn't any evidence for them, but at least they're coherent and don't require us to disbelieve what we can actually see or believe some version of Last Thursdayism. When a theist says they know their God is real, they're talking about one God or a related set of gods. When an atheist says they know there's no God, they're necessarily covering all possible versions and combinations of gods and Gods; and I think that is something that can't be known.

Just because you've taken a position that you can't meet the burden of proof on doesn't mean I have to.