(February 12, 2014 at 6:19 pm)Brian37 Wrote:(February 12, 2014 at 7:19 am)Esquilax Wrote: It's something of a coping mechanism in place of not having any evidence, to me; they can't rise to the level of objective justification for their beliefs, so the only choice left is to drag us down to theirs. And so, rather than just questioning them, the reason we're giving them trouble is because we've got our own ideological agenda that's counter to theirs. At that point, our position is just opinion, no better than theirs.
Science as a method has an agenda as much as saying gravity exists is an agenda.
Opinion? No, science is not atheist based and I've met some people calling themselves atheists with just as whacked out beliefs as any god claim. "Atheist" is not an "agenda".
We are entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts.
The ability to express an opinion from a legal standpoint is not the issue. The credibility of any given claim is the issue. Not all claims are equal by default.
If you notice, theists are great at projecting their flaws on us. It seems as though almost every theist argument involves the assumption that atheism is a religion, that we 'worship' science, that we 'proselytize', that we think of ourselves as 'gods', that we rely on 'faith', and that's ignoring every other attempt at equivocating perceived flaws of atheism to the real flaws of theism.
Theists are not constrained by intellectual integrity, as they can invent all the facts they think are necessary to win an argument. Really though (and I know it makes me a bit of a hypocrite to say this), debating with a theist is really kind of self-defeating, because it implies that their position is worth debating. Not only is the kernel of their beliefs intentionally designed so as to be unfalsifiable, so is every single argument in defense of it. What better indication could you need to know for sure that there's no substance at the heart of any of it?
Treating theist beliefs with any degree of validity only gives them the false impression that they are.