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RE: First Atheist
December 6, 2011 at 5:13 pm
(This post was last modified: December 6, 2011 at 5:14 pm by Cyberman.)
(December 6, 2011 at 12:31 pm)LastPoet Wrote: Well, for my two cats I'm sure I'm a god, I mean, I feed them, I pet them, I clean their shit, what else could you get from a god? And we humans that have a mind capable of conceiving gods, think the same, that there is something out there taking care of us. Yet, instead of taking care of us alot of us spend lives seeking superstition.
This reminds me of when my nephew was a kid (he's 22 now) and he had a pet hamster. Instead of a cage, he was kept in modular stack housing (the hamster, not the nephew), which consisted of several distinct housing units connected by a system of tunnel tubing. The way I'd built it meant that there was a main tunnel, horizontal with a slight upwards angle, connecting the primary living quarters with the unit containing his food bowl. A T-junction halfway along this tunnel meant that there was a small offshoot tunnel at the lower part of the T, with the nozzle of a water bottle poking through at the end of it (I hope I'm being clear in this description). Every day, almost without fail, we'd find food piled up around the nozzle. Presumably it was a convenient food store for the hamster, saving him a trip up and down the tube. However, it did make me toy, in an idle sort of way, with the notion that maybe it was a sort of sacrificial offering to the water gods. We never found any blood or disembowelled virgins or anything similar, so it seemed to be rather a benign form of worship if such it was.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: First Atheist
December 6, 2011 at 8:09 pm
(December 6, 2011 at 4:25 pm)AthiestAtheist Wrote: (December 6, 2011 at 1:44 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: (December 6, 2011 at 10:50 am)reverendjeremiah Wrote: The moment religion started, atheism started right next to it and has rode along side it all these thousands of years.
So you need theism for atheism to exist? In the same sense that the moment you create a magnet with a north pole, you create a south pole as well. I can sort of understand that. You can say that there was always atheism, and you can say that it started as soon as someone came up with the idea of a god and someone else did not believe them.
Actually any animal or humans default position is nothingness regarding god.
You can't be atheist by default because you have to have a proposition (a god proposed by theists) to not believe. You can't believe or not believe in something unproposed and unheard of.
You can't be a theist by default, obviously because you need to be taught theism.
You can't be even agnostic by default, because even that requires a subject to "not know" about.
If no one ever made up and proposed god, none of the 3 above would exist.
Effectively, you definitely need theism for atheism to exist, there is no getting away from that.
You are currently experiencing a lucky and very brief window of awareness, sandwiched in between two periods of timeless and utter nothingness. So why not make the most of it, and stop wasting your life away trying to convince other people that there is something else? The reality is obvious.
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RE: First Atheist
December 6, 2011 at 8:39 pm
Quote:Well, for my two cats I'm sure I'm a god,
Um, Poet. Cats think they are god. You are a fairly useful servant to them.
Gods don't change litter pans. Servants do.
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RE: First Atheist
December 6, 2011 at 10:37 pm
(December 6, 2011 at 8:09 pm)Norfolk And Chance Wrote: Actually any animal or humans default position is nothingness regarding god.
You can't be atheist by default because you have to have a proposition (a god proposed by theists) to not believe. You can't believe or not believe in something unproposed and unheard of.
You can't be a theist by default, obviously because you need to be taught theism.
You can't be even agnostic by default, because even that requires a subject to "not know" about.
If no one ever made up and proposed god, none of the 3 above would exist.
Effectively, you definitely need theism for atheism to exist, there is no getting away from that. It depends on how broad your definition of "atheist" is. There is the never-being-told-of kind, which applies to animals and I suppose some people, and there is the hearing-but-disbelieving kind. I would consider the "nothingness" and the "disbelief" kind to both be atheist.
"Sisters, you know only the north; I have traveled in the south lands. There are churches there, believe me, that cut their children too, as the people of Bolvangar did--not in the same way, but just as horribly. They cut their sexual organs, yes, both boys and girls; they cut them with knives so that they shan't feel. That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. So if a war comes, and the Church is on one side of it, we must be on the other, no matter what strange allies we find ourselves bound to."
-Ruta Skadi, The Subtle Knife
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RE: First Atheist
December 7, 2011 at 7:24 pm
To the OP,
At first I thought this was an dumb question but then I read Rev's reply and now I think it makes perfect sense. There has to be a proposition for it to be rejected i.e. for non-stamp collectors to exist there has to be those that collect stamps. T.V.s had to exist for "off" to not be a channel.
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