(February 15, 2015 at 5:09 pm)dreamsofpotato Wrote: Got into a small debate with someone over atheism, thought i'd come here for some advice:
I said i'm an atheist. He responds and said he could never be one because atheism says there is absolutely no god and nothing created the universe. I disagreed with that definition and said that I'm pretty sure the only absolute claim that atheism makes is that Religion has no validity, no credibility in any sort of cosmological debate, that religion is made-up and the gods of those religions are made-up. As for cosmology, I said, most atheists leave that question to science.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this argument. Should i not have argued and accepted his definition of atheism? Was I wrong in my definition? Does such a claim warrant a correction? Or were we both splitting hairs?
I call myself an "agnostic atheist", but the "agnostic" part of that is actually in a strict semantic technical sense. "Technically" I have not lived my entire future so I cant say what evidence might change my mind. I can say currently in my lucid state I don't see myself changing my position. I do currently hold that all religions and god claims are a result of human's flawed perceptions and neither religion or god claims are required to explain anything in nature and all are made up.
Religion is really nothing more than humans making excuses to set up social pecking orders. It turns our natural behavior to be cruel or compassionate and turns it into a cartoon super hero vs a cartoon super villain. Our species ability to be cruel or compassionate is in our evolution, not the human concocted books of myth and invisible sky heros.
