Is atheism a belief?

[The Grand Nudger]

That's not all that you're claiming, Bel..or, if it is, then you need to pursue more accurate language.  You're claiming that a bunch of people who don't hold the beliefs that I do....do.

They don't.  I don't know what else to say...do you think I'm just lying to you for shits and giggles....what?  I...and every other human being alive, is capable of positively disbelieving some story you tell about breaking the sound barrier..without that necessitating that they hold some antithetical belief against the existence of supersonic jets.  Your god is fucking stupid.  OFC there are people who positively disbelieve in that nonsense...that doesn't mean that they positively disbelieve in gods.  They tell you that...I, as a person who's argued with them...tell you that...you...maintain otherwise.

Honestly, wtf?  What's the point?

You're bringing in a lot of concepts that aren't relevant to the point I'm making. I don't know why you're doing that.

More like your pigheaded insistence can't reckon with those relevant facts, I think. 

I'll try to state it another way, in simple language, and then I'll give up.

A religious person makes an argument regarding the existence of God. Do you find this argument persuasive? 

If no, you are still an atheist. 

If yes, you are no longer an atheist.

If you chose no, did you find the argument unpersuasive because you have reasons to find it unpersuasive? Or did you reject it for no reason? 

Haven't I already answered this?  Whatever reasons I now possess, I didn't possess before.  I've been an atheist, however, the entire time. The only thing that atheism entails..is that a person doesn't believe. Atheism doesn't make demands on why that's the case, it doesn't specify any particular reason for being in that state, or even demand that there must be some reason for one being in that state.

Possible Atheist B simply doesn't believe in your silly stories..thus wrecking your entire thesis on the subject. Too bad, them's the breaks. Your feelings on the matter reflect your own peculiar biases, not atheism. You find yourself locked in some sort of ideological battle with the boogeyman of science. I'll simply note that..if you carefully read many of the deconversion stories here..you'd find that people commonly lose their beliefs before they ever find whatever bit of science you think lead them to that. A constant trend is "I used to believe....and then I read the bible" not "and then I read a short history of time". By and large, people go searching for some other explanation -after- the one they previously possessed fails..not beforehand.

It's a interesting thing to me, I enjoy reading those stories...because they describe something I've never experienced, and probably never will experience. There was no need for me to rationally pick apart religious beliefs by reference to scientific facts. I can do it today, sure...but..again, five year old me wasn't exactly well read on the matter. Five year old me liked ghost stories and fairy tales, and I sill do..and, just as I did then...god stories are simply lumped in with ghost stories and fairy tales in the same way that you subconsciously categorize stories about talking donkeys as fantasy.

[Angrboda]

My word but you are wrong a lot. 

I am sure that I am wrong a lot!

Please help me to understand why you think I'm wrong.

 Atheism is a belief in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby or bald is a hair colour.

Let me clarify what I'm saying here, and then I hope you'll tell me which of my statements is incorrect.

~ All adult atheists have heard claims made by religious people. For example: "God made the world." 

~ All of us reject these claims. We do not find them persuasive.

~ We reject these claims because we have solid convictions about what constitutes good evidence. For example, "scientific evidence is better than revelation, and there is no scientific evidence that God made the world." 

~ Therefore, all adult atheists have commitments concerning the way we evaluate truth claims, and these commitments lead us to reject the claims made by religious people. 

~ If we didn't have commitments concerning the way we evaluate truth claims, it would mean that we reject religious claims based on no reasons, but merely on a whim or by personal preference. 

If any of this is wrong, please explain why. Thanks.

False. Your generalizations are unfounded. As a teen I was an atheist because I didn't believe that a god existed. I had no position on the evidence, and indeed was largely clueless about what the evidence does or doesn't show. Many Buddhists are atheists, or at the very least, atheistic, because they embrace the worldview of Buddhism, not because they reject Christianity per se, or find something lacking in the evidence. Both the Buddha himself and Confucius were agnostic about the possible existence of higher powers and gods. They were in essence agnostic atheists, not because of any reaction to the traditional gods, but because they were skeptics who embraced a different metaphysics and philosophical outlook. And many of the "nones" that don't believe in God are also equally as uninformed about or uninterested in the evidence. (A recent article on the growth of the nones in the younger demographic suggested that the nones were not so much rejecting religion as they were, instead, simply ceasing to care, as suggested by their poll answrs.)

So, no, a rejection of the evidence which belief is based on isn't a universal commonality among atheists. Far from it. You're simply being ignorant.

[Belacqua]

Possible Atheist B simply doesn't believe in your silly stories

Does he reject them for reasons, or for no reasons?

---

they were skeptics who embraced a different metaphysics and philosophical outlook.

Right. The different metaphysics and philosophical outlook to which they were committed made them doubt the claims of the people who said there were gods. 

In other words, when presented with the claims of religious people, the skeptics rejected those claims based on prior intellectual commitments (i.e. beliefs).

[Angrboda]

This is the only claim I have been making: those atheists who have heard and rejected religious claims have reasons why they reject them. And that these reasons are the things that they believe. 

Well, first I'll note that you've moved the goalposts. First it was all adult atheists (because presumably child atheists can't grow into adults without having heard and rejected religious claims for evidentiary reasons, for some unknown reason; and we all know that children aren't real people or real atheists anyway). Now it's "all atheists who have rejected religious claims." Well, now you've moved the goalposts far enough that what you've stated is a tautology, necessarily, "all atheists who have rejected religious claims" are a) atheists, and b) people who have a belief that religious claims are worthy of rejection (though even 'b' doesn't follow necessarily). I'm highly unimpressed. As pointed out, there are and have been many atheists who don't fit that category, and, even if there are some that do, that isn't a necessary part of their atheism, which is what you originally claimed.

---

they were skeptics who embraced a different metaphysics and philosophical outlook.

Right. The different metaphysics and philosophical outlook to which they were committed made them doubt the claims of the people who said there were gods. 

In other words, when presented with the claims of religious people, the skeptics rejected those claims based on prior intellectual commitments (i.e. beliefs).

Which had nothing to do with believing that the evidence of religions other than their own was insufficient, which was your original claim. Do you not read your own shit, or are you just terminally stupid?

I'll repaste your prior statement because apparently you don't read the shit that you yourself write.

~ All adult atheists have heard claims made by religious people. For example: "God made the world."

~ All of us reject these claims. We do not find them persuasive.

~ We reject these claims because we have solid convictions about what constitutes good evidence. For example, "scientific evidence is better than revelation, and there is no scientific evidence that God made the world."

[The Grand Nudger]

Possible Atheist B simply doesn't believe in your silly stories

Does he reject them for reasons, or for no reasons?

That's the rub, Bel...it doesn't matter.  He's an atheist either way. Not all atheists are atheists for the same reason..or even any discernible reason whatsoever. That they're all atheists only establishes a single line of commonality.

---

-and, just to repeat this..I still don't understand what the point of this is?  I'm still right here, still the kind of atheist you insist that all atheists must somehow be, even though my own reasons for positive disbelief in your god aren't the ones you think are common.  They're literary, not scientific, lol.  

It's because I know what gods are that I can say with certainty that they don't exist as the faithful use that term...not because of the age of the earth or evolutionary biology or what have you. At best, the latter would rule out a tiny fraction of stories about a tiny fraction of gods..in the same way that it would rule out any claim that I'd jumped so high I touched the moon. It still wouldn't rule out the existence of the divine anmore than noting that I couldn;t have jumped so high I touched the moon rules out my own existence. It's the insistence of the faithful, in point of fact..that those types of stories be true or their god is bullshit, that rules out those gods.

Magic book itself gets in on -that- action. When people insist that their god is a god that did things that never happened, they make themselves into fools - "and if christ did not come, then all of our preaching has been useless".

[Deesse23]

~ All of us reject these claims. We do not find them persuasive.

Not accepting a claim (= *rejecting*) is not equal to believing its wrong....

I want to show that any thinking adult who has heard and rejected the claims made by religious people has rejected those claims based on beliefs that he has.

....Therefore this statement is not true.

Unless of ocurse *rejecting x* equals *believing x is untrue* to you. In this case i bet many atheists arent like you and *reject x* (= believe x is wrong), but just *dont accept x*.

Edit: just re-read the past few pages and found this:

A person may not believe your story..or a person my positively disbelieve your story...

That's right. That's what I mean by "rejecting a claim."

Jörmungandr obviously has been spot on. Belaqua actually didnt conflate "not believing in x" with "believing x is false", but he went full retard by relating the way how somebody arrives at aheism (aka. reasoning, epistemology) directly to atheism.
Well, yeah, no shit sherlock, we all base our existence on some basic belief, like believing we are alive, or believing there is a (common) reality we live in. That doesnt make atheism a belief. If we go by Belaquas reasoning, everything is just a belief, which i bet the thinks to be a very deep statement. If anything is a belief, then you may as well delete the word "knowledge" from your dictionary, since you may just believe in tangible evidece for any claim, because.....you just believe we arent brains in vats.

Incredible how some people desperately are looking for arguments to come to conclusions they seemingly already have made. The mental gymnastics to *show* that atheism is a belief are incredible, and i am wondering what the psychological needs are for people to do so. I can relate to why theists need to paint atheism as a belief, but why someobody who is a self proclaimed atheist does, we will probably never know.

Anyway, back to more pressing concerns of (my) life. Laundry needs to be done.

[Bucky Ball]

I was an atheist before I had any solid convictions about evidence, and even today, questions of whether or not some fucking fairy created the earth..as a gnostic atheist, don't have much bearing on my atheism.[...]

Here is a typical claim about God, which would be familiar to any Neoplatonic Christian, from Augustine to Simone Weil: "All good in the world derives from and ultimately points back to the form of the good, which is God." 

I assume you reject this claim. Would it be correct to say that you find it to be nonsense?

When you reject it (if you do) do you have reasons to reject it? Or do you reject it out of habit, or for no reasons?

I reject that claim. All the good in the world "derives" from Yahweh's brother, the Babylonian god "Sin". 

All the good except a couple things ...
1. the accident when Fleming accidentally dropped the mold in the Petri dish, and discovered antibiotics,
2. all the good, except when neurologists figured out (in the last 5-10 years), how to pull blood clots out of large brain vessels ... and stop strokes "in evolution"
Those were a little too tricky for the gods.

Yeah. It's fucking nonsense. All anyone has to do is look around.

[Belacqua]

Does he reject them for reasons, or for no reasons?

That's the rub, Bel...it doesn't matter.  He's an atheist either way.  Not all atheists are atheists for the same reason..or even any discernible reason whatsoever.

Some adults may be atheists because they have never heard any religious claims and haven't had to reject them. Most, however, have heard and rejected religious claims, and are therefore atheists because of the standards they have for accepting or rejecting claims. 

If they are adult atheists who reject claims for no reason whatsoever, they are just prejudiced nonthinkers, and I concede that a lot of people may be this way. I hope no one like that is posting here. Or they may be atheists for bad reasons, rejecting claims with logical fallacies like, "I wouldn't like it if it were true, therefore I reject it." 

So yes, people are atheist for different reasons. They have different reasons for rejecting the claims they have heard. 

But people are starting to "argue" this topic with personal insults now, so it's time to drop the subject.

[Pat Mustard]

Nomad, I suggest you look up the definition of the word belief.

Why? Nothing wrong in what I posted, belief only occurs when you have insufficient evidence to be sure either way. If you have sufficient evidence, you know.

---

My word but you are wrong a lot. 

I am sure that I am wrong a lot!

Please help me to understand why you think I'm wrong.

 Atheism is a belief in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby or bald is a hair colour.

Let me clarify what I'm saying here, and then I hope you'll tell me which of my statements is incorrect.

~ All adult atheists have heard claims made by religious people. For example: "God made the world." 

~ All of us reject these claims. We do not find them persuasive.

~ We reject these claims because we have solid convictions about what constitutes good evidence. For example, "scientific evidence is better than revelation, and there is no scientific evidence that God made the world." 

~ Therefore, all adult atheists have commitments concerning the way we evaluate truth claims, and these commitments lead us to reject the claims made by religious people. 

~ If we didn't have commitments concerning the way we evaluate truth claims, it would mean that we reject religious claims based on no reasons, but merely on a whim or by personal preference. 

If any of this is wrong, please explain why. Thanks.

Oh no, please don't tell me I'm talking to an Andrew Brown atheist.

[Angrboda]

That's the rub, Bel...it doesn't matter.  He's an atheist either way.  Not all atheists are atheists for the same reason..or even any discernible reason whatsoever.

Some adults may be atheists because they have never heard any religious claims and haven't had to reject them. Most, however, have heard and rejected religious claims, and are therefore atheists because of the standards they have for accepting or rejecting claims. 

If they are adult atheists who reject claims for no reason whatsoever, they are just prejudiced nonthinkers, and I concede that a lot of people may be this way. I hope no one like that is posting here. Or they may be atheists for bad reasons, rejecting claims with logical fallacies like, "I wouldn't like it if it were true, therefore I reject it." 

So yes, people are atheist for different reasons. They have different reasons for rejecting the claims they have heard. 

But people are starting to "argue" this topic with personal insults now, so it's time to drop the subject.