Atheists... why do you believe that God doesn't exist?

[Mister Agenda]

I totally understand your frustration chas.

I made the statement in another thread that atheists here make sure everyone understands that atheism is a lack of belief, and they called me a liar and demanded I make a poll.

You made a dishonest poll by not including that choice.

More dishonest than you know. It's Fr0d0's contention that most of the atheists on this forum won't admit they believe anything, yet he neglected to make THAT an option.

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I totally understand your frustration chas.

I made the statement in another thread that atheists here make sure everyone understands that atheism is a lack of belief, and they called me a liar and demanded I make a poll.

The whole "atheism is simply a lack of belief" card turns out to be a lie the minute atheists start to defend their lack of belief by giving reasons for it.

I dare you to say something more stupid. At least make the equivalent effort of raising your little finger a millimeter in establishing your mere assertion that one can't lack belief in something if they have reasons not to believe.

Once you start making claims for or against an idea then you have stopped being agnostic (that strangely forgotten word) and have started to advocate a position.

Yes, and if your position is that you don't have a belief in something, that would be the position you're advocating. To believe something is to hold it to be true. Agnosticism is not about belief, it's about knowledge. Atheism is about belief, and at the least, it's not believing in any God or god propositions one has heard thus far.

It's a dishonest bait-and-switch tactic to avoid the burden of proof.

It would be dishonest to pretend to know something that you don't. You dishonestly refuse to accept that we hold our position honestly because it's inconvenient to your arguments for the burden of proof to be on you. What a putz.

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Good grief fr0d0! Haven't you been on this forum long enough to answer your own poll?

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Agree with Aral Wooters. You come across as rather silly with that post.

He's trying to back up his contention that atheists lose their minds when it's suggested that they believe something. Naturally, he focused the poll on the one thing he knows no atheist believes, by definition. He could have polled 'Do you believe bunnies are cute?', but that wouldn't give him the results he wants and he's being a little bitch about it.

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Good grief fr0d0! Haven't you been on this forum long enough to answer your own poll?

You talking to me ms Kichie?

If you notice, the poll was to answer some atheists here who thought that belief that there wasn't a god was the position of a vast majority of atheists. I said it wasn't and they called me a liar.

This is what you actually said: "The vast majority of atheist rial at the notion that they believe anything, let alone that God doesn't exist."

Because you're too much of a little bitch to correct yourself, here we are with a poll that really highlights just how dishonest you're being.

The wording of the options was a direct quote from the first dictionary definition to appear in my Google search.

A definition which doesn't have anything to do with what you're actually butthurt about: you said something stupid about atheists and got called on it. Now you're pretending the dispute was about whether atheists have a positive belief in no God when that wasn't what it was about at all.

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Can you demonstrate proving a negative? Do making the claims "unicorns, leprechauns and elves don't exist" require extensive evidence, or is rejecting their existence "burden reversal" as well?

I refer to the multitude of threads claiming to show problems with various doctrines, claiming that believers are delusional etc. For example...

Believer: I believe in God.
Atheist: You're wrong.
Believer: Why am I wrong?

In this case the burden of proof is actually on the atheist. That's very different from the following...

Believer: I believe in God.
Atheist: Why?

The problem is that some of you flip flop between the two pretending not to know the difference.

That's not your claim, Chad. Your claim is that we ALL do it. If you're backing off from that stupid assertion, at least have the grace to apologize for paining us all with the same brush.

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Believer: I believe in God.
Atheist: You're wrong.
Believer: Why am I wrong?
Me: Because there is no proof that your god exists.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But it is evidence that belief isn't justified. The believer isn't necessarily wrong that God exists, it's conceivable that God does, the atheist is claiming that the believer is wrong to believe God exists, and offers as his or her reasoning, lack of sufficient evidence that God exists.

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But yes. Burden of proof arguments are trivial like you say. At the same time I think its disingenuous for some to rail against believers and hiding behind a facade of indifference. If they were simply nonbelievers then the appropriate position is agnosticism.

Agnosticism isn't properly a belief position, it'a a knowledge position. Even if you don't agree with that, you've been around here long enough to know that's how we use the term. I suppose some gray area in the middle for those on the fence is available for 'agnostic agnostics', but the rest of us agnostics are agnostic theists or agnostic atheists.

In other words, the position of most of us regarding God's existence is agnosticism, but we're currently talking about belief or the lack thereof, not knowledge.

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You imply that faith has no rational basis. That's not true. Religious faith is based on specific revelation. We rationally evaluate the credibility of the subject and reliability of the witness. Reasonable people can disagree about the data without insults.

What I'm hearing is that a reasonable person wouldn't poison the well by calling everyone he disagrees with dishonest in his first post on a thread.

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Guy's been around for like five years or something.

Meanwhile, I've been around for just over one, and I have the same amount. Just sayin'...

There are people with more, but I just didn't see any recently.

For him, just being around awhile doesn't really satisfy my curiosity, but it's all good.

He's been known to make some really good posts. Something I wish he'd do more often, but I'd say he earned his rep fairly.