The classic example is Przewalski's horses (wild horses), domesticated horses, and donkeys. Horse-donkey hybrids are almost completely sterile (except for the rare fertile jenny) due to how genes are distributed between chromosome and chromosome counts, but crosses between Przewalksi's horses...
How so?
We are using the analogy of people who believe in leprechauns and those who don't. The obvious parallels here are those who believe in gods and those who don't (i.e. theists and atheists). I fail to see how the analogy is helped by the nuances of theism.
In common parlance I think...
I have yet to see a case where any college was able to silence any speaker. These same people continue to voice their opinions all over the place without any college being able to stop them. I may even agree that they are misusing their discretion when it comes to who speaks in their forums...
If students are prevented from voicing their opinion at public sites then that would be a problem. I think there is a difference between feeling ostracized for voicing an opinion and actually being prevented from voicing an opinion. There is also a difference between the public square and a...
The point I am making is that the reasons and the lack of belief are separate entities. Atheism itself isn't a belief system, but as you have stated, there are belief systems that atheists use. I think it is worthwhile to understand the difference between the two.
How people want to be governed is determined by the people who are living, not those who have died before them. The moment we try to treat laws as unchangeable edicts is the moment that we ignore what it is to be human.
Those don't seem to be necessary beliefs that an atheist would need to have. I am sure that there are many, many reasons why people have arrived at atheism, and those reasons may very well differ from yours.
I don't believe in gods, but I also don't believe that gods are necessarily the contructs of human minds. There seems to be a contradiction in your definition.
That is all I was getting at. :)
On a bit of a tangent unrelated to burden of proof . . .
This is where skepticism enters into the picture. All humans, including myself, are easily fooled. We all have human biases that cause us to reach false conclusions. This is why we came up with the...
Given the obvious parallels between the Genesis flood and the Babylonian myths it is fair to say that the Genesis myth has Babylonian roots. Babylon sat in the middle of the Fertile Crescent which got its name from the rich soils found in the flood plains of the Tigres and Euphrates rivers...
Most of the confusion occurs when we try to use paraphyletic colloquial terms like monkey, ape, and fish to describe monophyletic groups like Catarrhini, Hominidae, and Vertebrata respectively. The colloquial terms are "wrong" in a biological sense which makes it difficult to incorporate the...
There appears to be a difference in chromosome counts between foxes and wolves which prevents crossbreeding, and the only accounts of hybrids I can find from a quick internet scan don't appear to be that reliable.
NOTE: It is still possible for species to interbreed with different chromosome...
You act from your beliefs, do you not? Does that make you an atheist?
That would be humanism, not atheism.
The problem is that atheism is not a belief.
I am an atheist and I don't hold either of those beliefs.
I agree. Part of my belief system seems to hold close to secular humanism...
I don't know where this universe came from and I don't claim to know. So why would I bear the burden of proof?
You claim that God created this universe, do you not?