RE: Atheist or Agnostic?
April 4, 2015 at 12:25 am
(This post was last modified: April 4, 2015 at 12:50 am by Whateverist.)
(April 3, 2015 at 10:25 pm)datc Wrote: As I suggested, if you live your life without worrying about God (or gods, or unicorns), then you are demonstrating your atheism to all concerned. But that's a practical lifestyle choice of your own personal active life. It has no value for the speculative question of whether God exists.
Likewise, the speculative question of whether or not gods exist has no value for the living of my life. Lacking a proper definition of gods, I have more important business to attend to.
(April 3, 2015 at 10:44 pm)Bad Wolf Wrote:datc Wrote:One cannot know P without giving mental assent to, i.e., without extending belief to, P.So what you are saying is that you can't know something without believing it. I suppose I can agree with that but knowledge and belief are still two different concepts no matter how related they are.
Believing that a proposition is true is pretty different than believing in gods. Regarding the number of sweets in the jar, I don't have to believe the number of sweets is either even or odd .. I know that it must be (assuming we're not counting fractions of sweets). Even-ness and oddness are not in question and require no leap of faith.
With gods, before we can answer any 'simple' questions regarding them, we really do need a workable definition. Otherwise, we are left to decide if we believe in them without any general agreement as what even counts as one. It would help a lot if theists would at least admit that there is no general agreement. Those in an organized religion pretty much define god(s) based on their particular orthodoxy. They really can't just ignore the fact that "gods" describes a class of supernatural beings, of which theirs is but one. The "supernatural" tips you off that you won't actually find one in the natural world. Each one has to invent the category of "false gods" to account for this. If they were honest with themselves they would admit that the only thing that sets their own exemplar of gods apart is its being theirs, a situation which precisely mirrors the situation for every believer in every other god.
