Atheism is not a belief, so why would anyone lie that it is?

[Valjean]

Atheism is an opinion. Opinions are beliefs.

How is lack of belief an opinion?
I'll bet you don't believe in the ravanous bugblatter beast of Traal. Has this lack of belief always been your opinion/belief?

 

[IndigoChild5559]

When I became skeptical of my religious beliefs I became an atheist through that process, but I still identify as a skeptic, rather than as an atheist.

If you are an atheist, why are you self-identifying as a chrsitian for your RF account?

 

[lukethethird]

If you are an atheist, why are you self-identifying as a chrsitian for your RF account?

I'm a true Christian.

 

[lukethethird]

Something tells me they should watch out... lest some of their "flock" ends up starting to truly believe, practice and go about the business of trying to inform the world of the correctness of it all. I think we can all sincerely admit that we have heard of stranger things happening...

I can't find their website. If I recall we know it's invisible because we can't see it and we know it's pink because we have faith. It was a good visit, all tongue 'n cheek.

 

[Truthseeker]

If God isn't knowable, how can you assert it exists and has an essence?

Wouldn't you like to know.

 

[F1fan]

Wouldn't you like to know.

A little less than believers.

 

[We Never Know]

Clearly atheism is not a belief, one has only to look it up in any dictionary to see this. So lets see if anyone wants to misrepresent it as a belief in this poll.

Just for fun......
If atheism is "lack of belief"
Is Christianity "lack of non-belief"

 

[Augustus]

How is lack of belief an opinion?

If you can comprehend the statement 'god(s) exist', you hold a belief/opinion on the existence of gods.

The act of comprehension compels belief formation, as we cannot remain 'neutral' until the point we choose to form an opinion like many people assume is the case.

"Is there a difference between believing and merely understanding an idea? Descartes thought so. He considered the acceptance and rejection of an idea to be alternative outcomes of an effortful assessment process that occurs subsequent to the automatic comprehension of that idea... if one wishes to know the truth, then one should not believe an assertion until one finds evidence to justify doing so... One may entertain any hypothesis, but one may only believe those hypotheses that are supported by the facts.

According to Spinoza, the act of understanding is the act of believing. As such, people are incapable of withholding their acceptance of that which they understand. They may indeed change their minds after accepting the assertions they comprehend, but they cannot stop their minds from being changed by contact with those assertions. [He believed] that (a) the acceptance of an idea is part of the automatic comprehension of that idea and (b) the rejection of an idea occurs subsequent to, and more effortfully than, its acceptance."

... experiments support the hypothesis that comprehension includes an initial belief in the information comprehended.

(From: You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read - Daniel T. Gilbert, Romin W Tafarodi, and Patrick S. Malone & How mental systems believe - D Gilbert)

https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/Gilbert et al (EVERYTHING YOU READ).pdf

 

[IndigoChild5559]

I'm a true Christian.

You cannot be both a christian and an atheist. so which is it?

 

[Subduction Zone]

You cannot be both a christian and an atheist. so which is it?

Why not? Is it because he forgot the TM?

 

[oldbadger]

Not trying to be offensive, but you do believe in God. Just because your idea of God is substantially different than the God of Abraham doesn't mean you are an atheist.

I see it differently......
As a Deist I do not belief in any kind of interested, aware or involved God.
So I am a Non-Theist......... that's not so far away from A-theism.
But I don't think that Atheists have completely thrown all gods out of the window...... they would have to be A-Deists to achieve that......

Poor old atheists......... not the full shilling!

 

[oldbadger]

Oh my... that is much, much worse.

Oh, I don't get too upset by all that........ When in the midst of some wicked debate an atheist (for instance) makes some error by assuming that I'm Christian or whatever, it just amuses me.

By the way.......... how certain are you about atheism? Do you have certitude about all this?

 

[oldbadger]

You can still come and drink with us of course. My latest favorite is an imported IPA. All the way from Colorado. Voodoo Ranger by New Belgium. And it has a kick. 9% alcohol by volume.

Ah yes....... that would do the trick. I wouldn't need too many pints of that before I would be hugging agnostics, even........ well, the nice ones!

 

[oldbadger]

My atheism isn't a belief, and though I have a worldview, and it must necessarily be atheistic, atheism is not a worldview, anymore than not believing in unicorns is a worldview.

Question:-
How certain are you in your atheism? Would you have certitude about it? Or not?

 

[oldbadger]

Is it a cocktail? Sounds delicious...

Imagine that........ brushing the doors aside and strutting up to the bar, sliding a silver dollar towards the bartender and grumbling, 'Pour me a double invisible pink unicorn wiki .....Hell, just pass the bottle!'

 

[Hockeycowboy]

I believe Mickey Mouse does not exist.
I am an amickeyist.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Then you have never spent much time with the scientific community.

I spend almost all my time within scientific communities, as I am a scientist. My background is mostly in theoretical physics (especially quantum foundations) as well as the statistical physics of complex systems, but years ago when I was just starting out in graduate research I worked as an experimentalist on the NMR physics of neuroimagining with neuroscientists (mostly cognitive neuroscientists) and had planned to transition into something like neuroscience from physics. I never did end up doing this, but I did nonetheless work on more than a few studies even then having to do with the neural representation, processing, etc., of language. In particular, I spent hours and hours trying to balance certain lists of particular types of words for controls we'd program in both for pre-scan trials and during actual scanning for things like ROI methods or even just for control/contrast. Thus it was vital, for example, that words or phrases chosen had to be about the same (i.e., balanced) in terms of their general usage, and not just similar in terms of length, online processing (primarily visual but we were still often concerned with pronunciation as a precaution), or ( and probably most importantly) category (not just part of speech but more particularly conceptual categorization as in e.g., "tool" vs. "kitchen appliance").
Most of the rest of the work I've done in linguistics or the neuroscience of language has consisted of consulting on statistical methods and research designs/methodologies, but I still try to keep up to date in the most relevant and/or interesting (to me, at least) literature in cognitive linguistics, corpora construction and analysis, the neuroscience of language, etc.
True, at this point such things are almost entirely just hobbies for me, as virtually all of my time is spent in physics and what time is left over professionally rarely concerns linguistics (let alone corpora). I don't even recall the last time I attended a linguistics conference, but that doesn't make your quoted comment above any less wrong and wholly inaccurate in just about every sense possible. I get to spend a great deal more time in scientific communities that are outside my area of expertise on consulting work and because this involves methodology and statistics used in fields from social psychology and linguistics to astrophysics and HEP/particle physics. So I get to spend lots of time in a wide variety of scientific communities, attend conferences that have nothing to do with physics, and visit labs and research groups that also have nothing to do with physics, working with scientists from diverse fields outside of physics.
If you had accused me of not spending a lot of time with theologians that would have been a fair statement.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Why not? Is it because he forgot the TM?

Why not? Is it because he forgot the TM?

Because you cannot have a can of corn and expect me to approve of putting a label on it that says carrots.

 

[PureX]

When I became skeptical of my religious beliefs I became an atheist through that process, but I still identify as a skeptic, rather than as an atheist.

The two different words apply to two different states of mind. The skeptic is undecided, but open minded. The atheist is decided, and not very open minded, if at all. And humans can vacillate.

 

[PureX]

Oh boy. I bet you never learned about "Gerble-snipes" did you? Well? No... you haven't. Because I just made them up. You see... there is a lot of use (and time savings!) in figuring out which stuff actually comports with reality,

... With reality as you presume to know it. And the more biased you are in favor of this presumption, the less able you will be to change or adapt that paradigm.

I've had these questions and problems with all this theism crap since I was a child.

Presuming it's crap isn't going to help you resolve those questions and problems.

Never not a time I didn't question all the ridiculous claims all sorts of people around me kept making.

Again, that negative bias doesn't indicate much honest questioning going on. What I don't get is why you waste so much time attacking the beliefs of others for not comporting with your own, and so little time actually considering your own? Even denying that you have any beliefs of your own when clearly, you do, or you wouldn't be so antagonistic toward everyone else's. .

Couldn't make sense of any of it - and no one (not a single person - including YOU, bud) has ever provided me with any sort of compelling reason I should make my thoughts line up with this stuff.

I really don't understand why you think this is anyone else's responsibility.

People come to me with their beliefs. Or they react oddly when I tell them I don't believe. Some of them even get incensed, and start thinking weird things about me.

I don't know where you live, but around here this NEVER happens. No one ever tells me about their theological ideals unless I ask. And I don't ask. So I think you are wildly exaggerating, or you live somewhere very strange.

Or, you're referring to this site, where discussing theological ideals is the order of the day. In which case you're inviting this discussion just by being here.

Obviously I understand this... this is precisely why I'm not going to allow your stupid thoughts about god to sway me in any way, shape or form.

So your mind is absolutely closed. Got it. You are not skeptical, and you are not open to there being any possibility of God's existing. And yet you somehow don't see this as a belief on your part. The belief that you use to negate all others.