A pantheistic argument.

[Edwardo Piet]

A physically blind person whould have more reason to "believe" in the universe than you do.

Why?

You don't have to "believe" in the universe anymore than you have to believe in the floor below you or the ground your house sits on.

I agree.

It is emperical and does not need any type of "believing".

You either believe it exists or you don't.

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So I guess my final thoughts on the matter would be that you are incapable of providing any justification for the assumption at the start (specifically that you have assumed god, and that influence is the qualifier), and you aren't willing to stick to your conclusion (or even admit that you said it).

I am willing to stick to my conclusion, I am just saying that to take my conclusion out of context and say I'm merely saying "the universe is god" is wrong.

How many times do I have to explain that I never said that my assumption was logically sound? And that I have repeatedly explained and quoted myself explaining that my purpose for the assumption is not based on logic but is rather pragmatic? It's just an experiment, I wanted to create this thread for reasons separate to logical soundness. The purpose of the thread was validity, not soundness. But you have denied my validity too.

Also, since you don't believe this (as per the response above), I suppose you aren't a pantheist either.

If god is the universe then I believe in god because otherwise I'd be denying the universe. If god is supernatural then I don't believe in god because I don't believe in anything supernatural.

If the only reason that you proposed this was to show how meaningless the terms atheism and theism are[...]

I wasn't showing that they're all meaningless, I was showing how one particular sense of theism and the atheism in response to that particular sense of theism is meaningless: Since we know that most atheists believe in the universe then that means that if god is the universe then there is a logical contradiction so that particular sense of theism and atheism is meaningless.

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LOL, no. He's trying to sub one word for another and then draw a conclusion from that.

I'm trying to make an argument that I see as valid. You have explained why you think the argument is not sound but I never argued for its soundness in the first place. I started with a hypothetical, so soundness need not apply, I'm just saying that if the premise is true, do you agree that the conclusion is valid?

A simpler way of putting it would be

"Red is a unicorn, if you don't believe in unicorns you don't believe in red. If you believe in red you believe in unicorns."

""Red" is a unicorn" doesn't mean "a unicorn" is "red". If "red" is a unicorn then "red" is no longer a colour it is a mythical beast that we call "a unicorn". If "a unicorn" is "red" then that means that what we normally would call the mythical beast that is "a unicorn" actually means the colour that we call "red".

Like I said, trouble with the concept of identity..which is endemic to pantheism.

You are confusing the concept of identity I reckon, not me. Because you are confusing the meaning of "god is the universe" and "the universe is god" and "red is a unicorn" and "a unicorn is red" with each other.