RE: Why don't some people understand lack of belief?
April 2, 2018 at 4:00 pm
(This post was last modified: April 2, 2018 at 4:05 pm by Simon Moon.)
(April 2, 2018 at 3:15 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:(April 2, 2018 at 2:10 pm)rskovride Wrote:
Are you really attempting to dumb down and trivialize these distinctions? Who cares? Well everyone seems to care on this forum and the distinctions are used to give a more granular understanding of our position.
Yes, because those imaginary distinctions make atheism a trivial position. Nobody cares if you're 20% or 80% certain that no God exists. The issue isn't certainty. It's whether or not you are willing to commit to a stance despite the various uncertainties and vicissitudes of human existence.
Why is not being convinced that a god exists, a trivial position? This is the standard skeptical position on any existential claim.
I am willing to commit to a stance on the claim that gods exist. That position being, theists have not met their burden of proof to justify my belief in the existence of gods.
Just because we are not convinced that gods exist, does not mean, that we are forced to take the oposite position by default (that we are convinced that gods don't exist).
Quote:If I tell my friend that I'll meet him for lunch. I just say whether or not I'll show or if I need to check my calendar.I don't say, well, I'm an agnostic scheduler so I assume I'll be there unless my car unexpectedly breaks down. Nor do I insist that I'm a gnostic scheduler because there is no circumstance under which I would miss lunch.
False analogy.
Scheduling lunch is not an existential claim. There is no skeptical position on scheduling lunch.
I think the problem you are having, is that you put so much importance on the existence of your god, that you are unable to understand, that we just see it as yet another unsupported supernatural claim.
Just because the existence of a god is imperative for you to get your sources of: purpose, morality, existence of the universe, etc, does not mean we have to view the existence of gods with the same gravitas. Your god claims are just another magical claim to us.
So, the fact that you see our position as 'not taking a stance', has no more meaning to us, as telling us, that since we are not convinced that UFO's are alien space craft, we are not taking a stance on the alien claim.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
