Your stance on Hard Atheism

[Thumpalumpacus]

Interesting. Thank you.
Would you say this helps the position of the people who - do - say it is manmade? Like we atheists do? Let's face it: The consequence of not believing in the god many of our fellow christian po(e)sters claim to have personal experience with - on an atheist discussion forum in particular - means you are saying it is man made. Many of us actually do so in these discussions.

I'm one of those who believes that gods are manmade constructs. I'm also inclined to believe that global warming is manmade, though my suspicion there is weaker than my suspicion about gods.

I think AGW deniers are much fonder of us AGW agnostics for the simple reason that their belief is such a fringe belief that they appreciate anyone who doesn't appear to dismiss their position completely. (Pardon the sidebar, and not to derail the topic at hand, but -- on that topic I'm not agnostic about whether man's activities are aiding the retention of heat, but I am agnostic about whether our activities are sufficient to send us past the tipping point. And in a parallel to theistic discussion, I hold to a Pascal's Wager-sort of argument: "We may or may not be sending the world past the AGW tipping point, isn't it better for us to assume we are and act accordingly?")

I'm saying it's too goddamn specific. Especially here. To me it's like starting a scientific article on the origins of life with the text: 'well, we can't be sure about anything, after all god or the devil could be tricking us by leaving fake fossils all over the place, but we believe we found out etc.' It's like throwing out 10 miles of line when catching a fish, while you don't really need to.

The difference is, here our audience is not entirely fellow scientists who share our assumptions. Our audience includes theists who are all too happy to impute onto me a position I don't hold; so no, it isn't too specific, it's precisely the right word for what I stand for. It's happened too many times that I've been told that I am making a positive claim that god doesn't exist, when in fact the only claim I'm making is that I don't believe he exists. It's a subtle difference, but it is a difference, and on a forum as nit-picky as an atheist forum, that distinction is important and like Mr Agenda, I prefer to get it out of the way so that any strawmen erected thereafter are obvious to the audience of the discussion as well as myself.

(Mind you, in the matter of gods I'm not a logical or purist agnostic, who maintains that we cannot know about their existence. It's my simple assertion that I cannot logically discount them.)