Is Lack of Belief the Best You Can Do?

[Alex K]

Ok having quickly read the post, I agree that we can do better than the purely neutral stance. I reject contradictory God concepts and find most others so unlikely that I am willing to say that they most likely don't exist. Those things seem pretty obvious to me.

[ignoramus]

So basically, that's a diplomatic way of saying what our gut tells us.

That it's all a nice fresh steaming pile of ......... Mash potatoes?

[vorlon13]

And what of the religious folks, specifically, the ones specifically religious in one specific faith, and yet those individuals haven't spent one millisecond pondering any of the other 78,000 nominally Christian faiths, let alone anything outside of that narrow (OK, bloated) subset ??

Who isn't expending the best they can do now ??

[Bob Kelso]

Today I’m going to argue that this definition is confused, and should be retired. It is too broad to be useful, and that we ought to reserve the word ‘atheist’ for active disbelief in the existence of gods.

That's all I needed to see before I closed the tab, I couldn't care less for definition gymnastics and philosophical masturbation.

[drfuzzy]

[Redbeard The Pink]

Actually no. I positively believe there are no gods, and I believe that's true for good reasons.


All of man's named gods are demonstrably false, either because they are attributed contradictory/illogical qualities or because they're said to do a thing we now know to be natural (lightning, for example) or to be in a place where we can go look and see they aren't there (Mt. Olympus, for example).


Furthermore, science has been investigating religious and supernatural experiences and claims for a long time, and what it consistently finds is that human religion is essentially a complex trick of the brain. Everything from visions down to believing our prayers are answered is based on one flaw or another in how humans think about and construct reality.



The vague "higher power" that deists and some agnostics try to use is so vague and meaningless as to betray the fact that it's an obvious contrivance designed to evade everything up to and including having to be defined at all.


So, even if we do discover something in the Universe that we decide to call "god," it will not be one of man's extant gods, and it will not be the vague, made-up "higher power" that's truthfully little more than an annoying linguistic device. If we find something and decide to call it god, it will redefine the term. As it stands now, the word "god" necessarily refers to either a fictional character or a vague concept defended by a net of logical fallacies, and those things do not physically exist.

[Anomalocaris]

[robvalue]

I go further, I find a lack of coherence in the concept itself. It's not even well defined enough for me to give a sensible opinion about. Everyone has their own idea what it's meant to be. And I reject each individual one I have so far heard as being (at best) an unecessary assumption and (at worst) nonsense garbage that isn't even meaningful/consistent.

It's not my fault if people can't put forward sensible claims.

This here is clearly trying to shoehorn all atheists into a position where you can shift the burden of proof onto them.

[downbeatplumb]

“If a mere ‘lack of belief in god’ is sufficient to be an atheist, then babies are atheists. You might say “yes, they are, or at least were before religion got its mitts on them!” But on this definition chimps are also atheists. As are dolphins, dogs, and doors. They all lack belief in a god.”

So Chad do you believe in Kaparot?

If you don't know what it is I am guessing the answer is no.

This would by default make you an akaparotist.

But if I were to tell you that it is a jewish practice of grabbing a chicken by its neck to transfer your sins to it, then you can make a more reasoned take on it. That's were I am with the concept of god. I have seen, I have laughed and I reject it.

[Mr.wizard]

Even if it's not "the best I can do", it's certainly enough.