Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[Simon Moon]

I recall when no one will even admit there are interesting definitions of God and uninteresting ones, they hate the fact that thinking unbiasedly about definitions leads to forced results like God absolutely not existing or having already revealed himself. For them, all theology is red herring, simply because their christianity turned out to be red herring, and they see no problem in generalizing their childhood trauma to all religions.


The first ten years I lived in Japan I went everywhere by bicycle, because the city is compact and a good size. The city I'm in, however, is notorious for aggressive and inconsiderate drivers, and eventually I had to give up. It's dangerous, but more disturbing for my peace of mind was the fact that I was getting really angry at people. 

It seemed to me that it was easy to identify people who, in my personal judgment, deserved to be scolded. But once I picked out who I could get angry at I was in danger of going overboard. All the anger I had pent up about other things found an outlet in the inconsiderate drivers. 

My guess is that something similar is going on here. If people want to demonstrate the falseness of religion or persuade people to change their minds, they wouldn't type what they do. If they are in any way trying to make the world a better place, they would go about things differently. It seems more likely that they choose you and other people with differing metaphysical beliefs as targets for their negative feelings, just because they want targets. 

WOW!

Of all things, I really thought that you understood where the burden of proof lies.

Part of the problem is the whole New Atheist thing. Dawkins and Hitchens and those guys began with the a priori belief that theology must be so stupid that you don't have to know anything about it to criticize it. They were not bothered by the fact that their books contain numerous factual errors, and neither were their fans. We're well into the second generation of such thinking by now.

Dawkins was a theist until he was about 16. Hitchens, I'm not sure about.

But, even so, you are wrong on another level.

It doesn't matter if Dawkins' and Hitchens' books contained theological errors. There is no reason to worry about theological errors, until such a time when the existence of a god or gods has been demonstrate. Once that is done, then one can start to debate which theology best describes said god. Your criticism is sort of putting the cart before the horse.