RE: Has atheism made you different?
April 22, 2013 at 5:58 pm
(This post was last modified: April 22, 2013 at 6:02 pm by Ben Davis.)
(April 22, 2013 at 5:34 pm)Dawud Wrote: Well if I said there was a teapot flying around in the debris of space you would not be compelled to believe me (there is no evidence) - but to believe that there is no teapot would be to have belief.
You're conflating 'atheism' with 'antitheism'; an atheistic position is 'I have no belief in god/s' whilst an antitheistic position is 'there is/are no god/s'. Antitheism is a subset of atheism but not all atheists are antitheists.
Quote:Like if there was an agnostic regarding the teapot who said "it doesn't matter it doesn't affect me!" - they wouldn't believe either way. But if you said to them "no - there is no teapot" that would be quite different - they could believe your statement or not: it is a claim about the way the universe is...Knowledge and belief are two different positions; the former deals with what you know, the latter with what you believe. One can be:
- a gnostic theist (claims to know there is a god)
- a gnostic atheist (claims to know there is no god - an antitheist)
- an agnostic theist (believes there's a god but makes no claim to 'know')
- an agnostic atheist (doesn't believe in god but makes no claim to 'know')
The 2 positions are not mutually exclusive.
So, to the OP:
1. No, atheism can never compel someone to do something because it is the absence of theism, nothing more. Atheism is not a value system, it's a result of value systems.
2. No. See 1.
3. No. See 1.
Sum ergo sum
