Do you have the right to be an atheist?

[The Inquisition]

aww, this thread was going so annoyingly well, do we have to end it? Anyway, I agree with pool on one thing though, being a gnostic-atheist is pretty hard considering "god" is one of the most ill-defined terms out there, and new twisted definitions can be made up easily as pool did in the thread, but then again those gnostic-atheists do form their position based on the evidence of the plethora of god concepts, which by the way is zero evidence, so they are not wrong. But I'd love to hear from someone who outright rejects the possibility of any and all gods, what their opinion on this is.

I think it's more proper to discard the claim as being generally nonsensical/ill defined, where appropriate. "Try again later." It usually has no failure criteria, but also no success criteria either due to the lack of a coherent definition. It depends on the specific claim, of course, and how much information is given. Omni-qualities are impossible to demonstrate I think, where given. And what separates a god from a super powered alien? Once you remove all the nonsense, I think the question is more like, "Was our reality created by an intelligent being?" That's the heart of it, and a question that perhaps could actually be possible to demonstrate someday. All these super powers only cloud the issue, and are just hero worship.

It's often claimed that there is one single God as well. So even if you managed to find and prove that God, whatever the hell it is, you'd then have to prove there were no others! The success criteria then includes the apparent impossibility of proving a negative.

Of course, if a more mundane definition of God is given, then it may actually be obvious it does exist, or at least possible it does exist. This is the problem with "Is there a god?" It doesn't tell you anything meaningful with which to answer the question. We need at least some coherent information. Or else the question becomes, "Is there anything which someone might consider a god?" Yes, everything.

That's an inherent problem with theism, it's almost impossible to provide a coherent definition of god.

Christians like to jump to a number of conclusions about god, without even providing a definition that everyone would agree on, I've labelled it a presuppositional stack of assumptions, here's an example.

1. The universe exists.
2. God exists.
3. The god of the bible exists. (Jews got it right!)
4. Jesus was the son of god and exists. (Jews got it wrong!)
5. The bible is accurate and truthful about god and his son. (Jews will fry in hell)
6. The particular sect of Christianity I'm in is the Truth. (Everyone else will fry in hell)

They take one fact and go crazy with it, never looking at the house of cards they've built their world view on.