Do you wish there's a god?

[Belacqua]

I dont' see why a small child can't reject God without rationally evaluating the concept.

I've been clear all along that I'm not talking about small children. I'm NOT talking about babies, rocks, lizards, children raised by wolves, or people in a persistent vegetative state. 

I'm talking about adult people, who are part of a society, who are capable of language. I assume that includes most of the people posting here. 

As an adult, I assume you have

1) heard the claims made by religious people, 
2) evaluated those claims, 
3) rejected those claims. (Because if you had accepted the claims you wouldn't be an atheist anymore.

Now, I'm pretty sure that to evaluate and reject claims, you need some standard(s) of evaluation. These might be better standards (e.g. science, not revelation, gives us reliable data) or worse (e.g. the nuns were mean to me). But they are standards, adults have them and babies don't. 

Now as good and obvious as those standards may be, they are still things that we hold to be true -- what I call beliefs. These beliefs led us to reject religious claims, and therefore we are, despite having heard those claims, atheists. 

Therefore, we have beliefs, things we hold to be true, epistemological or metaphysical commitments, call them what you will, which have resulted in our adult, non-lizard, non-baby atheism. If someone was an atheist as a baby, that isn't relevant to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about now. 

The reason this caught my attention is that some people claim they, as atheists, have nothing to defend and nothing to explain. They merely lack belief. It's true that the only thing all atheists have in common is this lack. But those standards of evaluating evidence are nonetheless something. 

Bucky Ball said that he needed no reasons at all to reject the existence of dragons. But that's silly. There are all kinds of reasons to reject the existence of dragons, and if he doesn't know them he's not thinking very much. 

When Christians present what they call evidence, and we hear, evaluate, and reject it, we have something to defend and explain. It may seem trivially easy to us, but it is a standard or set of standards for how we hold the world to be and what kind of evidence we accept. 

Pure Lackists are what I've been calling people who claim their atheism is the same as that of a rock or a lizard -- pure lack, with no intellectual commitments involved. I honestly don't understand why this position is difficult to accept or controversial at all, but it's made people surprisingly mad.