RE: Theism and Western atheism are on the same continuum. Both are realist.
November 28, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Ok, so both groups mentioned in your OP agree that things exist. This would be the point at which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's greatest creation confesses to a painful condition of colonic dyschezia (or "no shit Sherlock", to use the vernacular). That things exist would hopefully be undeniable, though not necessarily so; but there the two groups tend to part company, because the inevitable follow-up questions must be "what things exist?" and "how do we determine this existence?"
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'