Pastor "tries on" atheism for a year, is promptly fired by his Christian employers.

[Jacob(smooth)]

It would be a derail. But it has to do with the level of cognitive dissonance you are willing to tolerate in your belief system and that is a "user serviceable variable"

[downbeatplumb]

It would be a derail. But it has to do with the level of cognitive dissonance you are willing to tolerate in your belief system and that is a "user serviceable variable"

I always thought of belief as binary either 1 there is a god or 0 there isn't.
I really can't see the shades of grey here.

[Jacob(smooth)]

How about

There might be a god

There is a god but I don't understand what he / it is like

I'm not going to examine the question in case I don't like the answer (sort of schrodingers god)

[Drich]

I know, but your claim was that this was the only job he was fired from, when it wasn't even the first one.

The subject matter in your thread and in the headlines was that a pastor got fired, so i addressed the pastor part. Who cares if a researcher get fired or even a professor?

At the very least, you're guilty of attempting to sweep the actual injustice here under the rug, which is a lie of omission. So, which is it: embarrassing error, or intentional dishonesty?

neither. Your stated intentions of this thread per the title was a pastor getting fired. That is what i chose to speak on.

Yes, which was what made me think you'd only read the headline before you responded.

I did not read the whole artical, I stopped at the point where it identified his role as a pastor, and then spoke to that once I had enough info to support my beliefs.

I know what you though, because I chose my words carfully. As i do with everything I speak on.

I still think that's true, by the way: seems to me this is a desperate scrabble to retain some credibility after you got called out, which is why you've so evidently ignored the meat of your post in doing so.

No, this is an attempt to help you frame out a title and topic to reflect what it is you want to discuss verses a transparent attempt to bait and switch.

Which is why you called him a douche when his complaints, mentioned in the meat of the article, by the way, specifically related to his professorship: he never once complained about being fired from his pastor position, meaning everything you said was factually inaccurate anyway. Yet more evidence, in my view, that all this comprehension of yours happened post-call out.

I freely admit I did not read the whole artical. The guy is a douche because he like you is using his job as a pastor to sell a story no one would otherwise give two squirts about.

Oh, I think I'm just being schooled on transparent lying, Drich.

maybe a little.

[Angrboda]

It would be a derail. But it has to do with the level of cognitive dissonance you are willing to tolerate in your belief system and that is a "user serviceable variable"

I always thought of belief as binary either 1 there is a god or 0 there isn't.
I really can't see the shades of grey here.

Belief would appear to be more complex than this. If I ask you, do you believe that there is not a blue whale inside the room with you, you'd likely reply that, yes, you believe there is not a blue whale in the room. This is a belief, but was it 0 or 1 before I asked the question. It was neither. It was a tacit belief. You might say that it follows from your other beliefs, but that's not the same thing, and most of the beliefs it follows from ("I don't see a blue whale" "I am alone" "the room doesn't contain any unusual items") are also themselves tacit beliefs. Many people, when surveyed, will describe themselves as non-religious, yet not atheist. Are they 0's or 1's, or some more complex thing?

Tacit beliefs are not stored in a representational, mental format, but rather, are spontaneously formed or assented to in particular situations. Dennett gives somewhere the example that most of us would spontaneously agree that 'zebras don't wear overcoats in the wild', although few have had this stored as a mental representation. More formally phrased, we can say that an agent S occurrently believes p iff she has a mental representation of p. By contrast, S tacitly believes p iff S spontaneously and reliably forms p in a specific situation or context, but prior to this, S did not have p stored as a mental representation.

One common atheist position is that, "I don't deny the existence of a god, I deny the existence of the gods that have been proposed to me." This would seem to be an atheist position consisting almost entirely of tacit beliefs, that they don't disbelieve specific gods until the question is explicitly raised.

[EgoRaptor]

Bell decided to run an experiment where he would live like an atheist for a year

I'd love to know what that means. Actually he sounds like a twit.

You know, the hedonism, baby eating & all the other fun stuff we atheists do.

[Esquilax]

The subject matter in your thread and in the headlines was that a pastor got fired, so i addressed the pastor part. Who cares if a researcher get fired or even a professor?

Well, for one, I care: it's symbolic, to me, of the way christianity discourages investigation, which was part of the reason for my creating the thread in the first place. Are you seriously saying that you decided to focus on the single sentence about him getting fired from his (not a pastor!) job with a church, when the rest of the article made it fairly clear that more was going on, in addition to my own OP showing what it was that was being discussed?

neither. Your stated intentions of this thread per the title was a pastor getting fired. That is what i chose to speak on.

Liar, then.

I did not read the whole artical, I stopped at the point where it identified his role as a pastor, and then spoke to that once I had enough info to support my beliefs.

That support for your beliefs apparently started mid sentence, because the one sentence that you're determined to lie about focusing on said he was a consultant on a non-profit venture, and not a pastor at all.

I know what you though, because I chose my words carfully. As i do with everything I speak on.

Do you find all the back tracking hard?

No, this is an attempt to help you frame out a title and topic to reflect what it is you want to discuss verses a transparent attempt to bait and switch.

Bait and switch? The entirety of the article I linked to, bar one sentence concerned the guy being fired from his theology school, and yet somehow I'm bait and switching you? See, my thread here didn't just have a title, Drich: it had what's called an "Original Post" to add context to the discussion being proposed. Perhaps you could pay attention to that next time, assuming anyone is buying this bullshit excuse you're selling?

I freely admit I did not read the whole artical. The guy is a douche because he like you is using his job as a pastor to sell a story no one would otherwise give two squirts about.

He was never a pastor at the time he was fired. He was chronicling his experiences with this experiment- which his getting fired happened to be a part of- on his own recognizance, and the Friendly Atheist happened to pick up on it. Nobody is selling a story, something you would know if you actually bothered to read the whole article, rather than the one sentence in it you felt justified in disagreeing with.

You know, it's staggering to me that you'll admit that you aren't in possession of all the facts, completely fail to rectify that, and then still act like you haven't made an error, and have in fact been tricked by us atheists. Your ego must be generating it's own weather systems.

[Angrboda]

-deleted-

[Mr Greene]

Elsewhere the opinions vary as to whether he's an atheist-in-the-closet or evangelical fundie troll about to launch a book about how atheism is wrong.
Given his history I tend to edge on the first case though not enough to gamble actual money.

[Drich]

..So the pastor was not a pastor when he was fired at all? Then how does the head line read true? I get he was a pastor at one point but was not a pastor in any capasity when fired correct? If so then shouldnt the story read "Former pastor gets fired from a Christian university for trying atheism?"

I use to mop floors in a tire store when I was in high school. does that make me a janitor now, even if my current job does not have me doing janitorial work? what if i get fired for not cleaning up after myself. Would the Head lines read 'Janitor get fired for refusing to clean?"

There is all kinds of dishonesty written into this artical to try and frame Christians/7 day avt in a negitive light, and I am the one being scrutnized?