I can feel your anger

[CliveStaples]

Don't really see why you don't understand. Theism, the positive belief that God exists, informs the belief sets underneath that positive claim directly. They give meaning to an otherwise meaningless set of beliefs.
For example, "God created the universe", a Christian claim, wouldn't mean anything unless you believed in God.
I feel like I am explaining to you the definition of "of". It's hard as hell to do, but represents the most basic of ideas.

Right, and you couldn't have an atheist motivating set without exhibiting atheism. Of course theist motivating sets are necessarily theistic. Atheist motivating sets are necessarily atheistic.

You're trying to come up with some kind of foundationalism, where motivating sets have to be drawn from some base set of foundational beliefs (or something of the like), and since atheism has no foundational beliefs, it can't form a motivational set.

Apparently, you think that this approach is so obviously correct that you don't need to think about what your own assumptions were in order to explain it to someone else, and that not automatically sharing your particular intuition for motivating sets is like not sharing your understanding of the English word "of". Cool beans.

What I'm thinking of is a bit more general than that. Maybe there are no foundational beliefs; maybe there's just an infinite tower of beliefs. I don't want to pigeonhole myself into only one kind of set structure.


But most of what you're talking about is already handled, I think, by things like implication. "God created the universe" implies "God exists"; thus, if "God created the universe" is in the motivating set, then so must "God exists" (since we're really looking at the closure of the set under implication). This means that if we include q in the set of motivating beliefs, we include all beliefs necessary to believe q.

Theistic sets make a positive claim that other ideas can use to be given meaning. Atheism is a lack of belief that cannot and does not mean anything to the positive beliefs that simply don't incorporate God.
You would have a single category for theism, and infinite categories for a-unicornism, a-Cthuluism, atheism, a-conspiracytheoryism- you get the point, I hope.
Atheism influences the beliefs of a Nihilist just as a-unicornism does, y'know?

See, I think you're looking at this differently than me. You're kind of looking at the kernel--in Theism's case, it's "At least one god exists"--and saying, "okay, how foundational is this to the motivating set?"

What I'm doing is more like, "Let's look at the motivating set. What are the characteristics of the motivating set?"

Like I explained, it is silly to try to say that lack of belief is the cornerstone of affirmative belief.

But the whole "cornerstone" approach is yours, not mine. Why is your approach better?