"In post 407 I wrote "Doesn't believe in GODS! GODS! PLURAL! AS IN ALL GODS! EVERY GOD! After all these posts you haven't even picked that up!?"
In post 430 you said: "OK. Got it." And here you go again. No short-term memory?
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
What do people think "atheist" means?
- Thread starter ArtieE
- Start date
In post 430 you said: "OK. Got it." And here you go again. No short-term memory?
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
"Lack in belief in God(s)" doesn't equate exactly to "Lack in belief in all possible and imagined concepts of God(s)." The first statement is vague. The second is more specific.
Unification
Well-Known Member
Lack of belief in an accepted definition of a word.
Did Wikipedia, Webster, etc. check, accept, validate "God's" or the "gods" identification card(s) to verify his/her/it's name and properties?
Belief in an accepted definition and lack of belief in an accepted definition simultaneously.
Cephus
Relentlessly Rational
Actually, nobody has done that, therefore anyone who believes that any gods have any defined characteristics is simply irrational. If you want to go that way, fine by me.
NulliuSINverba
Active Member
Psst! It probably goes something like: How can the atheist possibly not believe in what they cannot define?
...
It also conveniently ignores the fact that the theist is the one that's obliged to describe the god(s). It's sort of like having the snake oil salesman show up your front door and having him demand that you delivery his sales pitch for him.
Unification
Well-Known Member
NulliuSINverba
Active Member
"Look here you! It isn't my job to describe the theist's deity! That's just plain lazy theology you're pushing!
Now get off my porch before I call the cops!"
Unification
Well-Known Member
"Look here you! It isn't my job to describe the theist's deity! That's just plain lazy theology you're pushing!
Now get off my porch before I call the cops!"
At least avoiding to answer, while fending off Jehovah from your porch ... was quite humorous.
Desert Snake
Veteran Member
No, it isn't that at all. If atheism meant all ideas of gods, anything even similar to such, then the word atheism is quite purposeful. If the definition means specific ideas about gods, deities, then , the theism is being determined in context. for example, as in another thread; one definition of gods is given, voila! i'm an atheist! another definition is given, and i'm a theist.
So, you sort of have the idea right, but it's backwards.
Unification
Well-Known Member
NulliSINverba is hiring, handing out jobs and their descriptions left and right. You may want to shoot over your resume another time though, he/she is busy curling hair with a frying pan in his/her robe describing what he/she lacks belief in, in mind.
Unification
Well-Known Member
I understand your train of thoughts though bud, thanks for the response.
That's the entire point. This is simple (symbolic/formal/mathematical) logic. Or, alternatively, you could formulate it in set-theoretic terms, abstract algebras, modal logic, many-valued logics, etc. The result is always the same: negating the predicate (even a mental state predicate) is not only not equivalent to negating the argument/element of a relation/operator/function/etc. The difference with respect to a predicate like belief is that sentential/predicate calculi (classical formal logic) fails to be truth preserving here, which is why the most typical alternative is to use possible worlds semantics/modal logic. Personally, my familiarity with mathematics, empirical models, the cognitive sciences, etc., tends to make me more inclined to adopt e.g., belief functions (or their extensions into subjective or Bayesian frameworks) over and against non-classical logics, but the point is it doesn't matter. Whether I define the set X that contains all and only members with the properties of being deities/gods, some element god in a set of worlds W and a relation for a triple in modal logic, a belief function as below:
or any other method of treating mental state predicates or predicates involving "beliefs" in a consistent, truth-preserving, and logical way will consistently show that given any "blank space", variable, set, etc., that some person P doesn't believe in, we can make this hold true of all possible admissible variables or set members without defining each and everyone or even knowing these.
For example, consider the statement "I believe that there all real-valued multiples of 2 are even". I need not and cannot define all of these (there are countably infinitely many), but I can prove the truth of the statement. Likewise, when I say "I don't believe Elves exist" it is absurd to require that I name e.g., every elf in Tolkien's work. Indeed, to say that I don't in any single-celled mammals, I don't need to know any mammals or single-celled organisms.
Your basic understanding of a rather simple matter would be one issue.
It is utterly irrelevant. The issue is what statements about belief entail and imply. When you can't distinguish between "doesn't believe" and "believe doesn't", the issues involved evaluating rational beliefs, epistemology, etc., are much too sophisticated, nuanced, and subtle.
Of course not. I'm not even saying that the statement "I don't believe any gods exist" actually means that "I believe no gods exist" (as this is incorrect). I'm saying that the statement "I don't believe any gods exist" has the minimal interpretation that "for any possible entity/thing X that I believe in/believe exists, X doesn't have the property of being a god". A stronger interpretation (that equivalent with "I believe no gods exist") is "for any possible entity/thing X, I believe that X doesn't have the property of being a god".
It's so utterly basic and incredibly important it lies at the heart of linguistics, set theory, logic, category theory, and in no small way the sciences. It is the root of cognition itself.
In which case, you're little reference to which gods one doesn't believe in is completely unfounded and irrelevant. After all, one possible way of describing the situation is that all "anyone who wishes to make assertions one way or the other concerning the existence of [gods] really needs to know is that there's no evidence", and not the names given to particular non-existent gods.
Your idiomatic definitions aside, agnosticism was quite literally defined by a single person and adopted more widely as a needed term to describe a belief regarding god(s) that wasn't non-belief/atheism or belief (theism, polytheism, deism, etc.).
Obviously.
As soon as you move into the area of god's actual "verdict", you leave the metaphor entirely. The point is that one can render (and in the metaphor/example indeed MUST render) a verdict yet need not (and in this case can't) know what the actual verdict should be.
Again, trivially and obviously so. Every belief can be phrased as non-belief and vice versa.
Heath Ledger's Joker's quote (from The Dark Knight). Not a typo.
Yes.
Then you cannot believe the proposition "there is nothing in the box that is a cabbage" is true, meaning that you are making claim about the nature of contents of the box, meaning that you claim to know something about the contents of the box. Every epistemic (belief) claim is a function of degree of subjective certainty regarding the truth of the claim.
I didn't say you did. You seem to have a difficulty with understanding the difference between an epistemic claim or belief and the truth of the statement that the belief/claim concerns. You can possess no knowledge about X proposition, but to say you believe that X is true is to claim that you have knowledge about (the truth of) X.
This is wrong, but I suspect you don't mean what you have implied and are just not used to the logical/formal linguistic issues with "any", so I'll refrain from commenting to give you a chance to look it over again.
Perhaps because, in addition to the problem I referred to immediately above, you've conflated theism with non-theistic beliefs, have failed to differentiate between the various demarcations among those who don't believe in any god(s) by incorrectly and inadequately shoehorning all such beliefs (which, as demonstrated above, you can't adequately evaluate/analyze) into the category "atheism", failing to deal with religious beliefs that involve no claims concerning gods, and finally failing to dealing with the quagmire that concepts in general have been shown to involve (especially since the work by Zadeh, by Rosch, by Lakoff, and by Langacker, although these and other pioneers make up a tiny amount of the work involved in the nature of categorization, conceptualization, fuzzy sets, etc.).
Augustus
…
If you can be an implicit atheist, then why not?
Someone can have a presence of theistic belief without conscious acknowledgement of it.
So seeing as we can't tell the difference between implicit atheists and implicit theists, shouldn't we just ignore both categories as pointless?
Can just imagine someone in the 1970s shouting out: "Hey chaps, I've got an idea. The current definition of atheism 'denial of the existence of gods' is silly as it is too precise and meaningful thus can't be used to describe the attitude of inanimate objects, babies, the non-committed, the unaware and people whose belief state is currently unknown. Wouldn't it be great if we could craft a new definition so that inanimate objects, babies, the non-committed, the unaware and people whose beliefs we don't actually know anything about would also be atheists too? Wouldn't that be much more logical?"
Desert Snake
Veteran Member
If one is going to call it atheism, it should, though. It looks exactly the same to me anyways; /no belief in deities/, wheres the complication?
And while we're at it why don't we change the definition of other words too?
Amoral definition:
b : lacking moral sensibility <infants are amoral>
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amoral
We could change amoral to mean only people who are immoral...
Augustus
…
We could also start to define words by discussing completely unrelated words as if it actually proves something.
Abasement - lacking basement