RE: Is atheism a belief?
December 27, 2018 at 8:08 pm
(This post was last modified: December 27, 2018 at 8:18 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
I was an atheist before I had any solid convictions about evidence, and even today, questions of whether or not some fucking fairy created the earth..as a gnostic atheist, don't have much bearing on my atheism. That shit is just hilariously false, but that's just a tick of human beings, not some damning comment on gods in their entirety. Very few gods were creator gods. It's not that we don't have any evidence that gods created this world that I laugh at that childish conjecture, but that all evidence points to the contrary. even among that limited set. If the purported creator gods existed...at least that much about their background stories is demonstrably false....and it honestly doesn't matter whether or not you believe in gods in the general, that much is inarguable, in good faith.
I have simply never believed. I suppose it would be fun to tell you that I was a brilliant five year old who'd read popper and what not...and was similarly well read in the conundrum of a justified true belief, but that would be fiction. So..theres some grand irony..in that who I am now, well...I actually do fit the characterization of an atheist with positive beliefs about the existence of gods...but even -I- didn't start out that way.
Still there remains the fact, like the fact I opened up with...that most of these guys just don't hold the position that I do. They're agnostics. Maybe they don't believe in -your- god, and maybe that much is a positive belief, but your god is a tiny bit of the sample. Positively not believing in your god simply isn't enough to determine that they have a positive belief that gods don't exist in general. It's not exactly their fault that your god is so silly that a bunch of agnostics can come down off the fence for a half second.
I have simply never believed. I suppose it would be fun to tell you that I was a brilliant five year old who'd read popper and what not...and was similarly well read in the conundrum of a justified true belief, but that would be fiction. So..theres some grand irony..in that who I am now, well...I actually do fit the characterization of an atheist with positive beliefs about the existence of gods...but even -I- didn't start out that way.
Still there remains the fact, like the fact I opened up with...that most of these guys just don't hold the position that I do. They're agnostics. Maybe they don't believe in -your- god, and maybe that much is a positive belief, but your god is a tiny bit of the sample. Positively not believing in your god simply isn't enough to determine that they have a positive belief that gods don't exist in general. It's not exactly their fault that your god is so silly that a bunch of agnostics can come down off the fence for a half second.
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