RE: Has atheism made you different?
April 23, 2013 at 12:13 pm
(This post was last modified: April 23, 2013 at 12:23 pm by Mister Agenda.)
(April 22, 2013 at 5:22 pm)Dawud Wrote: Can atheism ever compel someone to do something?
Has atheism ever motivated you to do anything?
Can atheism affect your character?
No. Neither can mere theism.
The part where you get confused is where you start and stop at atheism. How much would you know about someone if you knew only that they were a theist? Next to nothing. That's also how much you know about an atheist if you don't know anything else about them.
You don't know if I'm a communist, a rationalist, a Buddhist, a humanist, a nihilist, a secularist, a Raellian, a combination of some of the above or something more surprising if you only know I'm an atheist, and that means you can't know what motivates me. Because it's the other things, not the atheism, that motivate us.
If I'm an old-school Soviet-style communist I might be motivated to try to implement a state free of religion. If I'm a rationalist I might be more concerned with your spelling and grammar than changing the government. If I'm a secular humanist I want a world with freedom of religion and less poverty and more education. You don't know what I want if you don't know more about me than that I'm an atheist.
(April 22, 2013 at 5:39 pm)Dawud Wrote: If you were to logically necessitate that there were no teapot then surely you would believe there was no teapot? Are you telling me you would have no belief about the teapot in this situation? Like if someone said to you - "Do you believe there is no teapot" you would say "I don't believe anything about that teapot"....
I'd say that's strange...
So you don't have any beliefs about God? You don't believe it's imaginary? So you accept the possibility (though maybe slight) that God exists?
Most of us do accept that slight possibility. Most of us are agnostic atheists. One of the things it's helpful to know about someone in addition to whether they're an atheist.
Believing there is no teapot would be a belief, although pretty justifiable, it's not something one can know for sure, so it's not knowledge.
(April 22, 2013 at 6:06 pm)Dawud Wrote: So if someone said "I do not believe in God so I avoid churches"
They wouldn't really be talking sense... I mean it is a non-sequitur really...
I see.
So no-one could ever be compelled to do something because they have no belief in God - it has no bearing in their actions...
That's deep!
Everyone agree?
So you hold no beliefs about god?
What do you know regarding God?
I don't believe in God and I go to church. Q.E.D.
What would keep me out of churches is a lack of desire to attend or a belief that I shouldn't. Note that I could be a theist and think the same thing. You're trying to get atheism and theism to do too much work.
Being a theist doesn't mean you go to chuch (or mosque, or temple, etc.). Being an atheist doesn't mean you don't.
