Atheism: A belief?

[Orias]

What, atheism as a belief? Sorry... :sorry1:

But isn't that kinda like a "true Christian" kinda thing? I dropped in, shared my perspective, but in all honesty; I ain't an atheist.

You're doing fine. I just stuck my nose in, saw something I could take a bite outta, but if I'm slowing your roll; consider my friction - less.

Please read the first post (you don't really have to though).

Any input would be nice.

Do you view atheism as a belief?

 

[ellenjanuary]

Gee I don't know, maybe the ONLY "God" spoken of in the Christian bible.

YHWH? Are you kidding me? Christians don't know jack about YHWH.

Let's take it outside, you wanna dance :fight: This is Orias's thread.

 

[Where Is God]

In a perfect world you would be right. But the Christians who sent up the English language set it up like I have told you. I see your side of it but I do know a little about the topic.

 

[Wombat]

I don't know, the Bible gave me my Authority. From Genesis 1:26 to Job 1:7, to finding an Aspect of personality deep within after numerous trials of burning the self.

I am Lucifer.

Can even bring the Aspect out, have some fun with it. But if you mean, "oooh, evil! Satan, satan, satan!" like the sheeple bemoan; yeah, you got a point. I mean, jeepers crow. We're already burnt with original sin... we're supposed to shy away from "forbidden knowledge?" Sounds to me, like we didn't learn nothing that way. It's obvious, even from a sheeperson perspective, that Eden was a set-up... we supposed to whine at god - you tricked us! Or, are we supposed to appreciate the wisdom of god, in knowing that somethings cannot be taught, they must be learned.

Am I in rebellion against god? Hell, no. I am god's little monkey. Sure enough, though, I rebel against religion.

Well said, well played.

But- ">I< am Lucifer"!.

'Jack'...cured of being God-
[youtube]KOcJ338qYno[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOcJ338qYno&feature=related

 

[Orias]

Someone please direct the OP.

 

[Where Is God]

YHWH? Are you kidding me? Christians don't know jack about YHWH.

Let's take it outside, you wanna dance :fight: This is Orias's thread.

I can't be threatened with violence. I'm a pacifist. Love you buddy. If Orias wants to ban me from the thread, fine. Until then I will speak my mind.

 

[Copernicus]

Then it's impossible to reject all gods, or all beliefs in gods. Is nobody an atheist?

I do not buy your assumption that you have to examine every god in order to come to the conclusion that they are mythical beings.

And that might work if you were defining atheism as "rejection of belief in the majority of gods"... are you?

No. I do not think of the meaning of "god" as a collection of beings but a kind of function that generates models of all possible gods to compare against the the object you are classifying. That's an oversimplification, but it differs markedly from your approach, which seems to ignore the difference between the function that generates a set (intension) and the elements generated (extension). Meanings are more like set intension than set extension, and you can reject belief in a category on the grounds that beings with the features that describe it are not likely to exist. It is on that basis that I reject belief in gods.

Hmm. Okay... for the purposes of this discussion, that probably works. It might be overly broad - IMO, it probably includes some things like spirits, djinns, kami and the like that aren't normally considered gods - however, if you reject them while rejecting all gods, it's no skin off my nose.

I accept the fact that word meanings are fuzzy around the borders. There will be speakers who think of djinns and kamis as gods. Remember my discussion of "mountain", where countability depended on sometimes arbitrary criteria of height and separability from neighboring mountains. The concept of "god" also has some vagueness in terms of how much "godiness" an entity possesses.

Now... can you actually use this defintion as the basis for a rejection? Are you able to reject all things that meet this definition?

Up to a point, but it is hard to judge every case because of semantic vagueness. I do think that it oversimplifies rejection of belief to think that we base it just on features of meaning. For example, not all gods are mutually compatible with each other, so some of them--the vast majority, in fact--must not exist. Therefore it is unlikely that any particular god someone believes in really does exist. People are prone to making up gods. Then there is the fact that prayer fails so frequently, and so on.

So... in your view, someone who lived centuries ago, who espoused beliefs that we now recognize as being completely in keeping with communism, but never heard the word "communism" cannot be called a communist validly?

Yes, and people do that all the time. For example, it is sometimes said that the Pythagoreans were the first cases of communists (small "c") on record. Besides being a believer in the principles of communism, a communist can also belong to the Communist Party. The category of "communist" can be as various as the category of "god". It is actually not a bad comparison, because communism is something of a rival belief system to religion.

Okay... can you give an example, then? Give me a word that, like your definition of communism, requires that the person make some express action or decision (e.g. rejection) for an entire category of thing (e.g. gods). Once you do, we'll see whether it has the same problems as your definition of atheism does.

Such examples are hard to come by, because god-belief is so ubiquitous that rejection of gods is a very noticeable thing. Rejection of belief in leprechauns or fairies is not as socially significant an event, so we don't need special words for that class of people. However, we are talking about the belief that gods are all probably mythical beings, and I see no reason why it should be so hard to imagine someone coming to that conclusion, based on the scarcity of corroborating evidence, elaborate efforts to "keep the faith", and other behaviors surrounding the belief.

Just as an atheist is someone who only believes in things that are not gods, an "a-geologist" is someone who only studies things that are not rocks.

If you say so, but the prefix "a-" does not productively attach to nouns in English. It attaches to adjectives. Perhaps if "geologism" were an accepted word, you could get away with an analogical attachment of the prefix.

The issue isn't with the word "door" or "god"; it's with the issue "reject" and how it requires us to apply it to the thing in question. And if anything, I think it's you who's engaging in special pleading and me who's asking for consistency.

OK. We disagree on that. I think that you are trying to treat the word "god" as if it did not have the same level of vagueness that a great many other nouns do in the language, and I think you are just wrong about that. Having studied lexical semantics all my life, I actually don't have any doubt about it.

Rejection is a volitional act. If I say that I reject an entire category of things, then this means that I reject every single thing within that category...

True, and wouldn't you say that you reject belief in cartoon characters? You have not seen every one of them, yet you can be pretty certain that they do not exist as real beings in the real world. At least, I hope you can. If you want to quibble, you can always qualify yourself as a "conditional atheist"--one who rejects all gods that you have so far heard about.

I mean just what I touched on above: there are very few terms that require a person to perform an express act (e.g. rejection) on an entire category of thing (e.g. gods).

I can't think of many, but the world is full of all sorts of skeptics. Usually, we do not use the prefix "a-", but we do have "holocaust-deniers", "moon landing deniers", "climate change deniers", etc. The suffix "-denier" is pretty common for a person who rejects belief in an overwhelmingly popular point of view. I take "atheist" to be a synonym for "god-denier", although we don't really need "god-denier" when we have "atheists" to kick around.

I thought about it more, and I came up with a couple... however, they seem to generally apply to cases where the category of thing is quite rigidly and narrowly defined, for instance: "vegetarian" (someone who refuses to eat all meats) or "teetotaller" (someone who refuses to drink alcohol). In these cases, it's easy enough to use the word, but these terms work only because the distinction between "meat" and "not meat" (or "alcohol" and "not alcohol") is quite clear. This clarity is missing with the term "god".

I think that "teetotaler" might be clearer, but "vegetarian" is not. There are people who consider eating eggs non-vegetarian and those who disagree. My Hindu Sanskrit professor nearly took my head off once, because we were in a cafeteria and he ordered pie. When I helpfully pointed out that the ingredients might have contained eggs, he basically told me to mind my own business. He liked his pie.

That doesn't even make any sense!

You asked: Exactly who else is deciding what I mean when I communicate, then? The audience you are talking to is deciding what you mean. That is the nature of language. As one of my mentors (Charles Fillmore) put it: "Language is word-guided mental telepathy." It is all about a belief that you and your listeners share an understanding of the world.

How exactly can I, reading your posts after you've written them, go back in time, climb inside your head and decide what you meant to say?

Word-guided mental telepathy.

Certaintly, we normally try to take the other person's understanding into account when we communicate, but ultimately, my intended meaning is mine alone.

Yes, but we still have faith that intended meaning is not the speaker's alone.

Exactly what grounds do you have to "move the set"? It's an empty set; there's nothing to pin its location down anywhere.

I haven't moved anything. The set of beliefs that the baby has rejected is non-empty, since a baby's brain is programmed to form and reject hypotheses about reality. It just does not include the set that you label "gods". Why should it? The baby has not rejected belief in gods, even the set of gods that has the null set as its extension.

Yes, and judging by how the survey's gone so far, it seems that the general consensus is going against you: as of right now, the majority of people who have responded to the survey have said that the term "atheist" does include babies.

Well, you wrote this before the stats changed back to roughly a dead heat. On the two other boards that I've tried this on ([email protected] and Secular Cafe), the stats are now running 2-to-1 in favor of "neither label applies". In the case of those experiments, there was no discussion to skew the results. I just asked the question without expressing any opinion. On Secular Cafe, the results were totally in favor of "neither label" until someone piped up with the "lacks belief" definition. At that point, the "atheist" category started to ramp up a little. I still think that people are letting an ideological position influence how they categorize "igtheist" babies.

But you ought to face the fact that your definition is only going to be popular in a venue where people argue about what atheism really means. In the general public, the perception seems to be that atheists positively reject belief in the existence of God(s). On Secular Cafe, one atheist has even pointed this out without any prompting from me.

Of course, it's not even a matter of a majority, is it? Even a sizeable minority would be enough to establish that it's a valid use of the term, right?

Right, but the results are still limited to discussion boards with a heavy presence of non-believers. And this is the only board where the results are even in a dead heat.

 

[ellenjanuary]

Please read the first post (you don't really have to though).

Any input would be nice.

Do you view atheism as a belief?

I read it again. My perspective comes from a sense of "positive and negative." In that a "negative belief atheist" would be one I would have to find and question to discover the self-appellation "atheist." Whereas a "positive belief atheist" would be one I would have to ask no questions of, that one would tell me "I am an atheist." In this sense, I cannot help but conclude that atheism is a belief.

But as to what I posted above, I believe in my Gwynnies; meaning I have a very specific belief system, one that has been continuously scrutinized and one that has only benefited from the scientific method. Meaning that, if an individual has defined himself or herself as atheist - including the stance that atheism is not a belief - then it is really not my place to tell them otherwise. I am not an atheist... I'm a Pauline Israelite.

 

[ellenjanuary]

I can't be threatened with violence. I'm a pacifist. Love you buddy. If Orias wants to ban me from the thread, fine. Until then I will speak my mind.

Ahh... you need a hug. It ain't a threat of violence, it's just silliness.

And just an invitation to start your own thread addressing these concerns, so that Orias may keep the discussion to atheism here.

 

[Where Is God]

I'm not an atheist. I worship Serj Tankian.

 

[Where Is God]

Ahh... you need a hug. It ain't a threat of violence, it's just silliness.

And just an invitation to start your own thread addressing these concerns, so that Orias may keep the discussion to atheism here.

I was posting about atheism until he decided he was the Devil.:sorry1:

 

[Orias]

I read it again. My perspective comes from a sense of "positive and negative." In that a "negative belief atheist" would be one I would have to find and question to discover the self-appellation "atheist." Whereas a "positive belief atheist" would be one I would have to ask no questions of, that one would tell me "I am an atheist." In this sense, I cannot help but conclude that atheism is a belief.

But as to what I posted above, I believe in my Gwynnies; meaning I have a very specific belief system, one that has been continuously scrutinized and one that has only benefited from the scientific method. Meaning that, if an individual has defined himself or herself as atheist - including the stance that atheism is not a belief - then it is really not my place to tell them otherwise. I am not an atheist... I'm a Pauline Israelite.

Thank you for the input.

I understand what you mean by "it's not my place to tell them otherwise", but I think hypocrites should be told that they are hypocrites before going about and expressing a perspective that resorts to special pleading. As of right now, they are denying the entirety of this Aspect.

Oh well

 

[Orias]

I was posting about atheism until he decided he was the Devil.:sorry1:

I shall express myself with smilies!

:rainbow1::bat::ymca::magic::devil:

 

[ellenjanuary]

Thank you for the input.

I understand what you mean by "it's not my place to tell them otherwise", but I think hypocrites should be told that they are hypocrites before going about and expressing a perspective that resorts to special pleading. As of right now, they are denying the entirety of this Aspect.

Oh well

I got no problem with hypocrisy until I catch someone else doing it.

From personal experience, having it out like this, if nothing else, enables the self to know the self better. All to the good, I say.

 

[Where Is God]

Wait, if the Devil committed every sin... Wouldn't he have just killed himself then it was insta-win for God? Even God uses God Mode. ******* modder.

 

[Orias]

I got no problem with hypocrisy until I catch someone else doing it.

I don't mind people being hypocrites as long as they don't deny it

From personal experience, having it out like this, if nothing else, enables the self to know the self better. All to the good, I say.

Yes, some people are too busy trying to understand others than themselves

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu​

 

[Orias]

Wait, if the Devil committed every sin... Wouldn't he have just killed himself then it was insta-win for God? Even God uses God Mode. ******* modder.

No, because the Devil is "God". He is just too attuned to playing thumb wars with himself. :rainbow1:

 

[Where Is God]

No, because the Devil is "God". He is just too attuned to playing thumb wars with himself. :rainbow1:

 

[filthy tugboat]

You're right, I shouldn't of said "all atheists", many would of been more appropriate.

Agreed.

It's not just atheism, it's any label.[

And simply because of word association. Labels and language are extremely misleading, even if one is trying to be direct and consistent as they want, anyone can twist peoples words to best fit their needs.

A good example would be, what do you think of when you hear the term "God", or "reptile train"?

Every persons response would different, some people may associate "reptile train" with a long line of crocidiles or maybe even a seceret military OP.

To be honest, my intro to this thread would be the best advice you could adhere to in order to avoid this confusion. If someone is using a label or even just a word that can carry a multitude of meaning then take the simplest most general definition and if any further specification is required, ask them how they're using it.

Because there is nothing to perpetuate our knowledge.

Of course there is something to perpetuate our knowledge, even if we are not 100% confident in our knowledge. I am pretty sure not knowing is not a definition because of my own experience with many different definitions. If someone asks me what "God" is and I say "I don't know" I have not shared a definition, I have shared my lack of knowledge.

By definition they don't change, but by literal scientific opinion they do.

Labels and concepts change to best fit one's perception.

An example would be, "It was a fact that my walls were painted white, but that fact has changed since now they are red."

That example doesn't really fit because a fact didn't change. Fact: My walls were blue until I painted over them. Fact: My walls are now red. The original fact is true and can never be false or change, it has to be worded correctly.

 

[Orias]

To be honest, my intro to this thread would be the best advice you could adhere to in order to avoid this confusion. If someone is using a label or even just a word that can carry a multitude of meaning then take the simplest most general definition and if any further specification is required, ask them how they're using it.

I have been. The others tend to agree with each other that it is just merely defined as "lack of belief" rather than disbelief. And I have asked how they use it, and I get the same redundant and inane response, "Lack of belief" is all they say. As if that were truly the case, then they wouldn't care to argue with me. Because obviously saying that you don't believe in the existence of something is a belief, because it is followed and believed to be, until more persuasive or concrete "material" is brought forth.

Ugh:faint:

Of course there is something to perpetuate our knowledge, even if we are not 100% confident in our knowledge. I am pretty sure not knowing is not a definition because of my own experience with many different definitions. If someone asks me what "God" is and I say "I don't know" I have not shared a definition, I have shared my lack of knowledge.

There is nothing to perpetuate our knowledge besides the dust that will be our legacy.

And "not knowing" is a definition of "God", in reference to "agnosticism", which closely relates to "atheism".

It is simple, responding to the question is an answer, since the first thing that pops up in One's mind is the "Most Supreme", self evident, or uncomprehensible thought, which "God" is an Aspect used to describe.

Sharing anything is giving information about your perception. It lacks nothing except that which you are unable to describe.

That example doesn't really fit because a fact didn't change. Fact: My walls were blue until I painted over them. Fact: My walls are now red. The original fact is true and can never be false or change, it has to be worded correctly.

Yes, the fact that the wall was originally white does remain, but it has changed to the fact that now the wall is red