How can you possibly be an athiest?

[Ari Rahikkala]

GRAH!

Would you please, please, please, please repeat this after me a couple hundred times:

Agnosticism does not mean that you aren't sure about the existence of (a) god. Agnosticism does not mean that you aren't sure about the existence of (a) god. Agnosticism does not mean...

Agnosticism means that you believe there is no proof about the existence of (a) god. More accurately, weak agnosticism means that you believe there is no proof about the existence of (a) god, while hard agnosticism means that you believe there can't ever be any proof about the existence of (a) god.

Let's try to pound this into your thick minds with a couple of examples:

Person A: "I believe in Lord God and I can feel his eternal love for mankind. But for reason only He can understand, He has chosen to not give any proof to men about his existence. And I know I do not need any proof to believe. I am already sure of it. I have faith."

Person B: "Nobody has ever given me any proof about the existence of a god, therefore I do not believe in one. However, if Allah was to give me an irrefutable proof of his existence tomorrow, I would believe - heck, I would do all that praying-five-times-a-day stuff and all that. I do want to live forever, it's just that as long as I know that this earthly life is all I've got I'd rather spend it as well as possible."

Person C: "I don't really know about it. I was raised a catholic, allright, but lately I've been pondering this whole God thing a lot. OK, I do believe that He exists, in fact that has been proven to me beyond any practical thought by a series of events when I was young that just could not have been a coincidence, but I don't know if all these rituals and dogmas are really right. I've been reading a lot about other religions lately and there's some really exciting stuff in some of them!"

OK... now. The hard part. Which of these people are agnosticists? A and B. More accurately A, the believer, is a hard agnostic while B, the atheist, is a weak agnostic. Person C is not an agnostic at all. How can this be? Because AGNOSTICISM DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU AREN'T SURE ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF GOD! IT IS NOT A DAMN THIRD WAY! IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHETHER YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN A GOD OR NOT!

OK... finished whining about pet peeve, /me can go to sleep...

[Starchild]

I found an old essay I had written on Atheism and what it truly means to me. No science, no trying to debunk religion, just what I believe as an atheist:

Atheism, to me at least, is not about the pursuit of nothingness and extending the void. It is about people, all six billion of them crowded onto this world. With no God or gods, it falls down to us to strive to be better than what we currently are. I have to believe, if that is the right word to use, that the vast majority are honestly and truly good inside. That our species is nobler and kinder than we seem to be.

We are a flawed species, with half a dozen wars for each peace treaty and the cries of the innocent for each symphony. We have many, many shortcomings that are our responsibility. We are to blame for every atrocity, every injustice.

Yet this also means that every achievement, every thing of beauty that we've ever made, is our's and our's alone.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Sava

Atheism does not proclaim there is no God. It fosters an absence of belief. It's more like, we don't know if there is a God, we choose not to believe in one.

That's agnosticism.

Atheism posits the non-existence of an external reality to the physical world. We know there are no gods in which to believe. There no heaven. There is no hell. There is no astral plane.

[Spiffor]

Ari :
Thanks, that was interesting and instructive. I didn't know that.

[Sava]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


That's agnosticism.

Yes and No. It's a Venn Diagram, they share certain parts. You can be an atheist and disagree with the statement, "There is no God".

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Sava
You can be an atheist and disagree with the statement, "There is no God".

No you can't. The very definition of atheism is no belief in gods. A=none, theism=belief in deities.

[Jaguar]

I cannot prove that there is a unicorn on the moon right now dancing to hip hop music. However, I cannot prove that there isn't. However, I think it is more difficult to assume that there is one then that there isn't. So until I get some sort of proof that there is a unicorn on the moon, I will assume otherwise.

Same applies to God.

[Sava]

I don't believe in any Gods.... I am an atheist.

But I don't believe there is no God.

Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

[Az]

Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

That's a fallacy. Try again, Sava. ( I support you, kind of, but this is not a valid debating technique )

[Jaguar]

Originally posted by Sava
I don't believe in any Gods.... I am an atheist.

But I don't believe there is no God.

Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

So you think there could be a God but you don't know what/who he/she is so you've decided **** it, I won't believe in anything?

[Az]

If it is so, it's great.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Sava
I don't believe in any Gods.... I am an atheist.

But I don't believe there is no God.

Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

You're an agnositic, then.

At a Catholic university.

Atheism is a philosophy, so your religion courses don't mean didly squat.

Not only does atheism posit that there are no gods, it posits there cannot be any. It is simply irreconcilable with the laws of reality as we know them.

[Sava]

You're hopeless.

[St Leo]

Atheism to religion is what sobriety is to intoxication. It is an absence of something.

Asserting that atheism is some sort of a religion of science is absurd because theists also accept science. It is not an either/or proposition. Televangelists like the electromagnetic spectrum, but it doesn't make them into atheists.

There may be a significant correlation between atheism and an appreciation of science, but that doesn't make the two phenomena one and the same.


Where did the "big bang" material come from, if you go that direction?
Poof ?

There was no "where" or "when" before the Big Bang. Ergo, your question is invalid.

[Sava]

I don't believe in the Big Bang as the starting point for all matter in the universe. I tend to think that massive blackholes collapse into each other until a critical mass is reached, then the mass expands like a Big Bang. Assuming the universe is infinite, the Big Bang that was responsible for our region of the universe was localized. I think these events are cyclical. Expanding, contracting, repeat, etc. And assuming the universe is infinite there are an infinite amount of these phenomena occuring. In fact, there's one going on right now some where out there.