Then you don't lack a belief. An infant, lacks a belief. An ant, lacks a belief. You (and all self-described atheists) certainly have a belief, and that belief is that God (whatever God is) is exceedingly unlikely. Word games aside this is a definite position and it demands justification. I never claimed that an atheist must claim one hundred percent certainty, but I do claim they have a definite belief regarding God and denial of this by playing etymological games is, in my opinion, sophistry. You either believe in some notion of God or you do not.
Lack, as in, to be without.
To be without belief is what may classify someone as an atheist.
To lack, be without, a belief in God.
To not to believe is to disbelieve, correct?
Look at it this way, alright.
So you and your buddy are in an ocean on earth and you see an island with some trees on it.
Your buddy would say, "there's obviously animals on that island".
You would say, "I'll believe it when I see it".
Your buddy made the claim that "there's obviously animals on that island".
You simply wanted proof for that.
That's the basis of the default position to my understanding.
There are people out there making ridiculous claims all the time so you would obviously want them to prove those claims right?
Well when they say, "why don't you disprove them" it doesn't make too much sense does it?
The atheist belief, definition wise anyways, is simply the statement of "if you can prove it I'll believe it" to a religion.
But I guarantee you that like everyone, you're full of beliefs that don't lend themselves to empirical investigation. Moral, political, philosophical and all those hidden, deeply embedded cultural assumptions you're not even consciously aware of. You may have read about evolution, you may have thought about God and morality, but the idea that you run on purely rational motives and assumptions is nonsense. We all reason, but no one is rational alone. If you believe that you're completely rational, then frankly you're naive.
To put it very simply I understand fact and opinion on an advanced level.
The morals I follow I realize are just my opinions or opinions I agree with, I'm not above that.
I doubt there are embedded cultural assumptions in me as I realize what an opinion is, and do not believe it to be a fact.
Like how many people think the southern states in the USA are full of gun firing redneck republicans, and that is untrue.
I never thought that way personally, I refrain from thinking about such things without any evidence.
Like I said earlier, the way my head works is most certainly not normal. I tend to have more... control? Easiest word to use.
I am not always a rational person.
I get angry and happy about little things, and impulse buy stuff I never use, I can also be selfish and narcissistic.
But I do make a physical, and sometimes visible depending on who, effort to be rational.
It's just the type of person I am, simple as that.
I really doubt you have a deep technical understanding of all the empirical science that you accept. Yeah, sure, evolution is conceptually easy to grasp, but I doubt you can explain the math behind general relativity, even if you understand it conceptually. That's what I mean. There's understanding, then there's understanding.
I am aware of the various levels of understanding.
I only ever saw math as numbers created logically to deduce things.
But one day I read an article on math being the "universal language".
I've seen it a different way since then, how it breaks things down and shows you what variables mean what and where they go, why they go there.
But that might not be the understanding you are talking about either.
If you want me understand something of a spiritual nature then you're SoL, my friend.
I don't have an affinity for anything spiritual in any way, it just doesn't process in my brain the way it might for you.
I do have a much deeper and much more technical understanding than most people can say.
It's my hobby, it's what I'm learning in college, it takes up many hours of my free time.
It has done so for almost 4 straight years, with very few days without.
Like I said, I am a avid lover of the sciences.
Sure, it's the negation of theism. Yet when it suits them, they deny that negation and claim an agnostic 'not applicable'. My contention is that even of we accept the atheist definition as a, lack of belief, such a lack of belief does not exist practically. I'm saying there's no such thing as a true agnostic, only varying degrees of certainty.
Well definitions are not dogmatic, it is a science so it may be changed to suit the times.
But it is as it stands now.
Only varying degrees of certainty, you could almost say only varying degrees of skepticism.
No, atheism address only one question, the existence of God. Facts, reason and science have nothing to do with it. Some atheists may take a wordview which they claim is supposedly scientific, but now we're in the realm of ideology and not 'atheism'. To claim that atheism and philosophical naturalism are the same thing is an equivocation.
Hm, but I wasn't talking "atheism" originally, I was talking "atheists".
Atheists are the followers and practitioners of atheism, but while they may follow that it is not the only thing they do.
I say that such atheists that had become atheist after some time being religious did so due to skepticism and their want for a "proof" you could say.
So for many atheists, practicing science and what not is commonplace due to who they are as people.
And who they are as people has also lead them to identify as atheist.
(not gonna spell check just gonna yolo it or whatever idiots in social media say)
