(December 6, 2011 at 8:09 pm)Norfolk And Chance Wrote: Actually any animal or humans default position is nothingness regarding god.It depends on how broad your definition of "atheist" is. There is the never-being-told-of kind, which applies to animals and I suppose some people, and there is the hearing-but-disbelieving kind. I would consider the "nothingness" and the "disbelief" kind to both be atheist.
You can't be atheist by default because you have to have a proposition (a god proposed by theists) to not believe. You can't believe or not believe in something unproposed and unheard of.
You can't be a theist by default, obviously because you need to be taught theism.
You can't be even agnostic by default, because even that requires a subject to "not know" about.
If no one ever made up and proposed god, none of the 3 above would exist.
Effectively, you definitely need theism for atheism to exist, there is no getting away from that.
"Sisters, you know only the north; I have traveled in the south lands. There are churches there, believe me, that cut their children too, as the people of Bolvangar did--not in the same way, but just as horribly. They cut their sexual organs, yes, both boys and girls; they cut them with knives so that they shan't feel. That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. So if a war comes, and the Church is on one side of it, we must be on the other, no matter what strange allies we find ourselves bound to."
-Ruta Skadi, The Subtle Knife
-Ruta Skadi, The Subtle Knife
