If I were an Atheist

[AdamLOV]

The fact that something is not explicitly required from a group does not mean that there are not implicit requirements. What I propose would be that the majority of atheists are expected by their peers to not merely disbelieve in God, but in many other religious-quasi religious constructs, such as ghosts or demons. This in no way entails that every single atheist will not believe in such phenomena. Rather, I am suggesting that we distinguish between hard atheism of the purist variety (generalized disbelief) and more heterogenous forms of atheism (selective disbelief).

A poll that I ran seems to suggest that only 15% of atheists consider atheism to require being of your 'hard' variety.

https://atheistforums.org/thread-14681.html

One of the most important rules of logic is that just because the majority of a group claims something to be true does not mean that that concept is true. An important difficulty of opinion polling is pining down whose opinion is relevant. It has been shown that group animals follow their "leaders", so to speak, and elections are decided more by the opinions of certain relevant personages who influence the majority, rather than the majority itself. Therefore, one ought, theoretically, to merely ask those who opinions are most influential in deciding elections. But pollsters rarely, if ever, do that, because it is well near impossible to decide who is most influential. As a consequence of the impossibility of deciding whose opinion is relecant, opinion polls do not and should not decide questions pertaining to truth. Even if one successfully forecasts the defeat of an incumbent government, one will never be able to decide whose decisions were decisive in making the overturning of the incumbent a reality and, even more importantly, the opinion poll says absolutely nothing about whether voters actually chose wisely. Opinion polls, in short, are not and shall never be arbiters of truth.

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Hatsh: Are you suggesting the forum itself is making claims? I don't get what you mean.

Atheist tends to have two definitions, one of which makes a claim and one which does not. The forum is simply an atheist forum, so it covers people who may make claims or may not. The most common definition of atheism, as used in the atheist community at least, is that the negative claim is not assumed. The mistake is when people assume all atheists make claims. I agree, if you make a claim, you should admit it and be prepared to explain it if you expect it to be taken seriously.

Yes, people suffering while coming out of Mormonism is just one example of the kind of person who would benefit from being here. It certainly is horrific and unbelievable in this day and age.

"Deny" was a poor choice of words, you replied while I was halfway through editing it I've changed the wording. I need to proof read more.

Personally, I cannot even properly assess the claims about gods because I think they are untestable at best and incoherent at worst. That makes me an ignostic. So I can't properly say I believe there are "no gods" when I have no clue what a god is supposed to be. In an informal sense, I'll say I believe there are none of the popular story book gods, because there is no evidence, they are self contradictory and they are ludicrously removed from all reality as we know it. I could claim certainty on logical grounds for internally inconsistent claims.

Adam: You do realize that you are an atheist or a theist, right? Which are you, if you don't mind me asking? Again, refer to my website please if this is not clear. If you have an active belief that there is one or more gods, you're a theist. Otherwise, you're an atheist. There is no middle ground. Some people don't like the labels, which is fine. But by our commonly used definitions, you're one or the other.

As I've been alluding to, you can reject the claim that there is a god and also reject the claim that there are no gods. That makes you a (weak) agnostic atheist. It's the default position. Some people like to call this position "just agnostic", which is fine. They can use words differently if they want. But it's still agnostic atheism.

I would characterize myself as an Atheist, although I am undecided in relation to the question whether there existed a God in the (distant) past. Right now, according to the best of our information, God is absent from this universe. This in no way implies that a dead Deity could not, at some point, make a comeback. Religion, in this day and age, can only be of a dark, clouded nature, in my opinion. That is, the current stage of temporality would seem to imply the absence of a Deity. Atheism, as such, is a provisional stance. I fail to comprehend why someone would have to decide this matter for once and for all, as if various forms of materiality did not appear, disappear and reappear periodically (one cannot, after all, reasonably rule out the possibility of the world being a "multiverse", where perhaps deities are present, whereas in our universe they are manifestly absent).