I believe there are no Gods

[Willamena]

Again i agree. But that is not what was being suggested.

What was being suggested was that then, there'd be a necessity of having a belief.

There is something to base upon a belief, but that thing(s) is not enough for all people.

Right. It is possible, and wise, to withhold belief (Falvlun might suggest that we do it by balancing percentages, but I don't know if it's even that complicated).

But this discussion began because some suggested that these 'people' *(like babies, rocks, and those who withhold belief) are atheist because they don't believe, and that I disagree with.

* Let's go with the word 'objects'.

 

[Badran]

Right. It is possible, and wise, to withhold belief (Falvlun might suggest that we do it by balancing percentages, but I don't know if it's even that complicated).

But this discussion began because some suggested that these 'people' *(like babies, rocks, and those who withhold belief) are atheist because they don't believe, and that I disagree with.

* Let's go with the word 'objects'.

Not sure that we're saying the same thing. What i meant by "that thing(s) is not enough for all people" was precisely that some people don't believe at all, since the 'points' they can come up with for either possibilities are not enough to swing them either way, for more than one possible reason.

If you meant that you disagree with the concept of describing rocks and babies as atheists based on lack of belief, then that's a separate point as those are irrelevant to the point i was making. Those would not be included under Sum's point since those can not understand anything to begin with.

Since you included 'those who withhold belief' along side them, however, i'm guessing what you object to is the notion of lacking belief, or not believing, when it comes to aware beings. In which case i would obviously disagree. I fail to see what necessitates belief in the situation Sum described.

 

[Willamena]

Not sure that we're saying the same thing. What i meant by "that thing(s) is not enough for all people" was precisely that some people don't believe at all, since the 'points' they can come up with for either possibilities are not enough to swing them either way, for more than one possible reason.

If you meant that you disagree with the concept of describing rocks and babies as atheists based on lack of belief, then that's a separate point as those are irrelevant to the point i was making. Those would not be included under Sum's point since those can not understand anything to begin with.

Since you included 'those who withhold belief' along side them, however, i'm guessing what you object to is the notion of lacking belief, or not believing, when it comes to aware beings. In which case i would obviously disagree. I fail to see what necessitates belief in the situation Sum described.

I'm essentially agreeing with you. I agree that "I lack belief" is an appropriate phrase for some people for whom an opinion about a thing(s) is not necessitated by a proposition. Others see it more black and white.

Sorry for the side-track into "babies and rocks."

 

[Badran]

I'm essentially agreeing with you. I agree that "I lack belief" is an appropriate phrase for some people for whom an opinion about a thing(s) is not necessitated by a proposition. Others see it more black and white.

Sorry for the side-track into "babies and rocks."

Ah, no problem; my bad.

 

[FlyingTeaPot]

Is there a giant meteor coming down to earth right now?

You can either believe yes or no, since you are aware of the question and understand it you cannot say "I lack belief on this subject"

Ah, but the question is framed incorrectly. In fact, the atheist position is a response to a claim, and not a question.

If you claim that a meteor is coming towards earth, I would not believe you unless you could prove your claim. Otherwise I have no reason to believe you, and hence lack a belief in the subject or content of your claim. I obviously cannot claim a lack of belief in the actual words you spoke to make that claim. There is a difference, see?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Is there a giant meteor coming down to earth right now?

You can either believe yes or no, since you are aware of the question and understand it you cannot say "I lack belief on this subject"

The fact that "I lack belief on x" is straining the English language at best (and possibly just incorrect) should provide a clue as to why the above is problematic. That it isn't "English" is shown through corpora searches. The phrase never shows up in THE corpus for contemporary American english at all (COCA). A search through Google's new n-gram viewer (which is a massive database from their long, long project digitizing books in whole or in part, and which allows one to search for phrases like "lack belief" as I did), shows that in over a century the words "lack" and "belief" never rise above 1 in 400,000,000 2-word combinations (n-grams are strings of n "words" put together; for example, "it takes one to know one" is a 6-gram, while "lack belief" is a 2-gram) even when combining all British and American English sources in their database. It doesn't appear at all in the free list of 1,000,000 frequent 2-grams put out by BYU. It doesn't appear at all in THE corpus for British English (the BNC).

Finally, a search through Proquest Central (which included thousands of newspapers, magazines, historical newspapers, government reports, and similar media going back decades and well over a century in some cases), with no limits on dates, resulted in a total of four examples of "lack belief on" (there were plenty of "lack belief" examples, but as this search wasn't through a corpus designed for n-gram searches or balanced to represent the language, all the "lack belief" examples were in phrases like "loneliness can cause ex-offenders to lack belief in themselves").

So if "lack belief" is intendeded as a way of bypassing the issue of beliefs recast as nonbeliefs and vice versa for all belief statements, it can only do this by a novel usage designed just for this issue.

However, the problems don't end there. As we can't rely on any conventional or idiomatic use of this phrase, it would appear that the only way this makes sense is by understanding the words as they are used individually.

"To lack" means to not possess, not have, be without, etc. In your example:

Is there a giant meteor coming down to earth right now?

You can either believe yes or no, since you are aware of the question and understand it you cannot say "I lack belief on this subject"

you frame the response in a way which artificially enforces your constraint. It's true that if asked what you ask, a response "I lack belief on this subject" would strain credulity and comprehension beyond that which the construction "lack belief" does on its own.

However, if I ask "Do you believe there is a giant meteor coming down to earth right now?" you could respond "I lack belief on this subject" in that you have no belief that there is such a meteor coming. You don't have the belief, which means you lack it, and thus you don't believe that there is such a meteor.

 

[Prophet]

Some questions before i attempt to address what you're saying:

1) I'm only partially understanding your criteria. I basically get that it involves seeing the physical world around us as an illusion, what i don't get is the other part. What does it mean to recognize that we're all connected? And, what is that conclusion based on (both this and recognizing that the physical world is supposedly an illusion)? As in, how did you reach this criteria?

2) Why do you consider selflessness to be a good thing?

1) Once you separate from the illusion that the physical is real, you get to plainly see what is real about the lives we live without all of the background noise drowning out your conscience. What actually is real here is our relationships to others. To know that we are connected is to know that other beings are part of ourselves

2) Honestly, I don't know where to start here, because selflessness being equivalent to goodness is completely apparent to me. I think I could give you a better demonstration were you to give a scenario where you feel selflessness can be shown to not be the equivalent of goodness.

I understand. Three things:

1) I wasn't saying whether or not your idea of god falls under the category of one's where evidence, or any particular type of evidence should be found. I was providing a general criteria.

2) To actually address your idea of god, or understand how you think it's reachable. I'm assuming you've used something to reach your interpretation of things. What was it?

3) If your interpretation of god includes the idea that those who do not seek him will be selfish people, then that is actually something that can be used to argue against your claim pretty strongly. As reality can (and actually does in my view) demonstrate otherwise.

1) Your cogent example last post made this obvious to me, so I resisted the urge to debate the distinctions of what should actually comprise evidence or non-evidence, and proceeded to the next step: Judging where the evidence should be found.

2) As you may imagine, I take a lot of heat here for my name. I may take the occasional inspiration from scriptures, but I write from my own knowledge.

3) You have my cause and effect mixed up. I am not saying people become selfish by not seeking God. I am saying people become blind by being selfish. Whether I am saying they are blinded to morality, love, or the existence of God, I mean the same thing.

I have no idea how morality came to be.

The idea the word is describing varies from one person to another. To me it's the core based upon which i deduce rules that i attempt to live by. That core differs from one person to another, despite possibly (and i think most likely) stemming from the same thing.

To me that core is my desire to be happy/fulfilled. The set of rules/standards i deduced based on that is to attempt to be as happy as i can, without stepping on other's happiness as best as i can, and to help others do the same, as best as i can.

And where does this happiness or fulfillment come from? If physical existence is all there really is, then I would argue that a hedonistic lifestyle should be the most fulfilling experience available to us. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. However, invariably, when beings make this mistake, their lives become pits of despair. Ignorant to their true identity, hedonists become slaves to the urges of their own physical bodies, losing all self-mastery. IOW, selfishness causes blindness which causes misery. Have you observed this as well?

If we are just separate beings in a meaningless universe that just popped into existence without any purpose, where exactly would we get the idea of meaning, significance, or fulfillment?

The answer to all these questions is some do, and some don't. In some cases, and in other cases not etc..

My argument here is fairly simple. If you demonstrate acts of selflessness just to beings you have affinity for and not to those who would spit on you, your selflessness is nothing more than hypocrisy. Likewise, if you display acts of selflessness in front of beings whose opinion you value and not in secret, your selflessness is still nothing more than hypocrisy.

But how did you jump from to that to concluding that all atheists are ignoring the supposed messages and so forth?

Do you understand that the "ignoring" that I am saying takes place is at the level of the subconscious, meaning that it is not consciously controlled? Do you also understand that I conclude that an overwhelming majority of theists (>99.9%) do the same? In all of history, I can only name a few beings who successfully brought their subconscious to light. I'm really not trying to single out atheists in this regard. In a world at war, we are all taught to ignore these messages in favor of selfishness.