If I were an Atheist

[Edwardo Piet]

Santa Claus doesn't have a thousands year old Holey Babble. God is suppossed to explain the universe but just complicates matters further. How many believe is irrelevant, God is probably even more improbable than Santa - at least Santa isn't erroneously used to explain the universe when he just complicates it. Both are magically said to be outside of space and time without explanation. The silliness of Santa is irrelevant it's not about personal incredulity. Weak atheism is just intellectual honesty + atheism.

[rexbeccarox]

Hatsepshut, your usage of smilies and hearts doesn't hide your usage of straw men and tu quoques. Get over yourself. You don't know anything about me, except that I'm an unbeliever; an atheist- meaning I lack belief in deities. Stop pretending you know more. You're bordering hardcore on trolling with this, which you've done across other threads too. Stop it, or you'll end up gone from this forum you're so superior to.

[robvalue]

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.

[downbeatplumb]

"We make no claims" is another of my favorite dodges.

Setting up the strawman there.

If no claims, why a media? Why a forum? Why all the arguments?

Because theists can't keep there stupid ideas to themselves and love to impose their views on everybody else.
They always have done always will.
If you could keep your meddlesome noses out of everyone elses business that would be super

 At minimum atheists must make the claim that belief in deity is unsupported by available evidence.

Not really. All that required is not to believe. Some of us have learnt more but it is not required.
Your minimum is more than is required.

I see nothing wrong with making a claim anyway. Ideally, the claim then stands or falls on its own merits. Where I will differ from most atheists is that I don't think the evaluation of merits for a deity claim should be restricted solely to scientific criteria. Conceptions of god involve more than just what we know about the natural world.

Science is the only method we know to get to the truth of reality. If you are saying science can't evaluate it than this is the same as saying it does not exist.

Of course the agenda the Evangelicals advance is so ridiculous I'm not surprised to see atheists ridiculing it. Nor do creationism or Noah's Ark have any place in public schools except as literature. So, I'd rather see atheists making a few claims than none. And while the big bang and neo-Darwinian evolution aren't necessary for atheism, I'd be willing to bet that about 98% of atheists subscribe to both these theories, going as far as to draw existential inspiration from them. Call it a deep human need for love. 

Interestingly there have been many atheists through history.
They are even mentioned in the bible.

Psalm 14.1 The fool says in his heart there is no god.

Those people did not know about evolution or the big bang, and the Jews Moses lead out of Egypt in that weird myth could not wait to worship anything but Yahweh as soon as moses was out of sight i.e. these people who were supposed to have witnessed directly "god" at his most interventionist were not convinced.

[robvalue]

My chainsaw has been on overdrive, I'm starting to bore even myself. Sorry about that This is kind of my pet subject at the moment.

Time to go scare some children or... what else do we do? Go leave strange marks on windows.

[Angrboda]

There is nothing to stop atheists believing in paranormal things or out of body stuff.

A lot don't but it is not required.

A lot of Muslims drive white BMWs but that is not required as part of Islam.

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

[Edwardo Piet]

If I were an atheist I would be identical to the atheist that I am now. Huzzah! Hypothetical and actual reality coincides for me!

Fun game let's play more later.

[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.

---

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).

[robvalue]

Sure, atheism isn't about deciding once and for all. Atheist can be undecided about all of it. Well, unless you take the gnostic stance, which I don't in general. I'm open to anything, if evidence is presented. It could be proved there was a god once, I'd accept it if there was evidence. There could be one now, likewise. Could be one in the future.

It's more reasonable to think there was one in the past than there is one now, but not much more reasonable. The "evidence" of tatty books written by desert nobbos means nothing to me.

The main problem is that there isn't a coherent claim of what the evidence would even be for.

[AdamLOV]

Sure, atheism isn't about deciding once and for all. Atheist can be undecided about all of it. Well, unless you take the gnostic stance, which I don't in general. I'm open to anything, if evidence is presented. It could be proved there was a god once, I'd accept it if there was evidence. There could be one now, likewise. Could be one in the future.

It's more reasonable to think there was one in the past than there is one now, but not much more reasonable. The "evidence" of tatty books written by desert nobbos means nothing to me.

The main problem is that there isn't a coherent claim of what the evidence would even be for.

Inconsistency of claims need not entail that one reject the veracity of those claims. On this basis, one would have to reject scientific laws as fallacies or, at best, social constructions that have no more claim to truth than so-called "hard" science (a la Bruno Latour). My claim would be a more generous one; at different times in history, humans have believed different things about basic, unprovable ontological precepts. These have competed with one another, and over time, one worldview became predominant, the "scientific" one (although there is, at present, no unitary view of the universe because of the multiplicity of theorems expounded by physicists since Antiquity and, in any case, this view, whatever it was, never was the exclusive one). Just as various religions compete, so various scientific hypotheses comepete with one another, until the strongest wins out. Just because a worldview has, momentarily, carried the day, as Atheism has in a few technologically advanced areas of Earth, does not make that view truer than those it has defeated. There will always be a multiplicity of views. In my opinion, which is, of course, merely an opinion, what we take to be evidence is culturally relative. Objective, culturally independent evidence does not exist. An extensive network of machines, cultural norms, cosmologies, instruments and assorted paraphernalia are required to elucidate a view of the world that either

A). asserts that the world we live in is inhabited by gods, malignant spirits and the Peruvian hairless dog affords some kind of special protection from these malignant demons.
Or
B). the world we live in is not inhabited by gods or malignant spirits, and the Peruvian hairless dog contains no mystical properties, i.e. it is just a particularly smart breed of dog.

What constitutes evidence for one subscribing to View A (let us call that person the pre-Inca) is completely different than what constitutes evidence for the one who believes in View B (let us call that person the Atheist American Tourist). They have different sets of truth-verification tools at their disposal. Now in the debate between A and B, I am an adherent of the following:

C). The world we live in is, to the best of our own knowledge, uninhabited by divine beings. However, this is not to say that other cultures might not be capable or might not have been capable of detecting such mystical agencies, hidden forces. We lack the cognitive instruments that would make access to such beings possible. To us, the Peruvian hairless dog is merely an animal, one of man's best friends. For me, that knowledge is enough. I do not really care about the hidden, mystical properties of the dog pre-Inca cultures discovered. Therefore, our best guess is that they do not exist. However, this in no way implies that we know better than the Inca or, for that matter, that the Inca knows/knew more than us. However, it is an interesting thought that the Peruvians breeded the Peruvian hairless dog, and therefore, they might have access to other realms of insight into the dog that we could, perhaps, lack.