RE: Is atheism a belief?
February 28, 2019 at 4:16 am
(This post was last modified: February 28, 2019 at 4:26 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(February 28, 2019 at 4:10 am)bennyboy Wrote:If your beagle and your bunions -could- possess god beliefs, but didn't..then yes, they'd be atheists same as you or I. Plenty of kids believe in gods, I wasn't one of them.(February 28, 2019 at 3:44 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: I wasn't doing that when I was five, and I was an atheist then, too.
Yeah, I consider this a pretty serious abuse of the suffix "-ist." At the very least, an ism should express some kind of position. "I do not believe in any gods" is fine, but atheist as simply lacking a belief means that my beagle and my bunions are atheist in about the same way-- I don't think that's a particularly good use of that terminology.
Unless, that is, you're saying that at five, you had an opinion about the existence of a deity-- and that you found evidence for said existence lacking-- then I'd I wouldn't say that "atheist" was a good descriptor of you.
I didn't have evidentiary standards at age five, I wouldn't have known what that meant. Conveniently, I believed in all sorts of shit without evidence (and still do). If we're using terms like reason very loosely, the likely cause for my atheism has nothing to do with evidentiary standards or any process of reasoning. I was exposed to alot of different religious narratives as a kid. That probably framed how I viewed the christian stories differently than I might if they'd been presented to me as the only story either by indoctrination or cultural dominance.
(February 28, 2019 at 4:12 am)Belaqua Wrote:(February 28, 2019 at 4:08 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: So, having always been an atheist, what were your criteria and reasons at age five?
That was quite a while ago. My thinking has moved on a lot since then.
Please note that throughout this discussion I have been talking about adult atheists who live in a society, who have heard, evaluated, and rejected the claims made by religious people.
It doesn't matter with respect to your claim. The cause of your atheism must be at least as old as your atheism (unless causality flows backward through time)..so if the things you offer today aren't that, then they simply cannot be the cause for your atheism.
How do you know that your thinking actually has "moved on" since then unless you can identify that impetus in it's own preceding timeframe? It's at least possible that all of the reasons you have command of now are rhetorical flourishes for a position that you didn't arrive at rationally. This is almost certainly true in my own case, at least. I know how a person might arrive at my position rationally, today, but that isn't how I got here all those yesterdays ago.
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