Strong Atheism

[BlackMason]

No... I'm just not comfortable with that. I'm not even comfortable stating "invisible pink unicorns do not exist".

I'm actually legitimately curious. Why not??

Er, because that would be an argument from ignorance. They said that black swans don't exist...then they went to Australia and saw their asses.

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I understand that position, and I currently identify with it. It’s logically sound and difficult to counter. But lately I've been thinking we should go farther. Why not make the positive claim “gods do not exist” and take on a burden of proof? We’re tough and smart; we can handle it! The position in the first paragraph, while strong, is starting to look more and more like a cop out to me. We’re atheists, god damnit! We’re supposed to have balls! So, I say we abandon the 6/7 “weak atheist” approach and put forth arguments for the non-existence of deities.

It's not a cop out. It's a very reasonable approach. You'll then have a burden of proof that you can't begin to discharge just like theists. What would be your evidence? What do you expect to find? Arguments don't prove anything, evidence does. Arguments help explain evidence. Arguments alone are just the icing. The evidence is the cake. You need to marry the two.

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Why not make the positive claim “gods do not exist”

I already do. I am quite the militant anti-theist.

Would you be willing to share your evidence with us?

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I do not make the claim that gods don't exist because I don't think absolute certainty is possible.

By this logic, though, shouldn't all claims of any kind be avoided?

No that's not necessary. That's where inductive reasoning comes in.

[CharnelRC]

God is a philosophical concept. You don't need a physical evidence to counter argue such a concept. Logic is enough.

God can be anything.
Most cultures however, chose something that's beyond human ability, ranging from a water walking man to a cosmic objects like our Sun.
This shows that it's just a term needed and used to fill the holes in a layman's knowledge. As Lederman once said, God is there, where knowledge is not.

[rexbeccarox]

I don't think the question "is there a god?" can be answered, positively or negatively, with any honesty, and same goes for more specific gods. Granted, they're highly unlikely, and highly improbable- and believe me, I leave no room for them- but I'm not a fan of absolutes when I can't know absolutely.

Yeah, but there are a lot of things we can never prove absolutely, yet we treat as if they are not there with a certainty. Heck, some of them are beings that we may have been convinced exist at some point in our lives (Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Boogey Man, etc). The main difference, for me, turned out to be that no one ever took me aside and admitted that god was something they made up; I had to figure that one out on my own.

We rely on our senses and our ability to think and reason to get us by from day to day. In that day to day life, we constantly dismiss things and treat them as if they were impossible; we don't even pretend to entertain their existence. If someone was insistent enough, we would admit that we could not prove that a banjo-playing jackrabbit wasn't building a set of thrusters on the moon, which it planned to use to crash it into the Earth. But I am pretty sure we wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Right. Which is why I stated what's in bold

[Zidneya]