The Glade 4.0

The problem with labeling people atheist is that people usually leave out the agnostic or gnostic part of it. Most self-labeled atheists are some degree of agnostic atheists, but the vocal minority ("I'm positive God doesn't exist") are gnostic atheists. Don't attribute belief where there is none. It's like saying all Christians are assholes because of the WBC, or all Muslims are terrorists.

I believe this has been linked here before: http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/09/25/8419/

If I have to subscribe to a set of beliefs or religion, let it be the scientific method.

I think you need to read some more Baudrillard and Derrida and Foucault and maybe some Genet.

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Come on man, they're ALL French. Probably gave up half way through their own books.

Lack of belief isn't a religion. That's also, speaking generally, agnosticism, not atheism.

Atheism is an active disbelief in a god or gods. Key word there is active. It isn't saying, "gee I don't know." Or "gee you can't prove it." It's definitely saying: "there is no god." To say that requires belief. That believe drives standards and behaviors, and is therefore, under definition 4 from the source above (which I have no reason to dispute), a religion.


Using the same source (just for FYI purposes):

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Strictly speaking both of those definitions are wrong. Disbelief is active; atheism comes about by a negation of absence "a-". "Agnostic" indicates lacking belief in a transcendental reality and thus precludes the possibility of any god or gods. Strictly speaking of course ...

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Generally, I agree. However, those definitions are functionally useless, because the "gnostic atheist" is such a rare beast as to say they don't exist. It's about as common as the flat earth society... more often than not it's a strawman argument placed there by religious types who want to call atheism a religion. Richard Dawkins, as an example, is one of the most dogmatic anti-theist scientists in the public eye, and yet functionally, this self-avowed atheist is an agnostic. He freely and openly admits that the concept of God can not be dealt with logically, that there is no evidence to prove or disprove the existence of the divine. He (quite correctly) compares God's existence with garden fairies; you cannot prove those exist or don't exist either, with equal credibility.

As so often happens, we're caught up in a semantic debate here on the glade. The simple fact is, the positive atheist who believes surely that God does not exist simply doesn't exist with any great frequency, certainly not in scientific community. While that type of atheism is religious in nature, it's not the norm.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

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Holy shitsnacks!

Choosing the Pope took 2 days. None of those things happened in two days. Cute but inaccurate.

Perhaps "All of these press releases" in the time it took to choose a pope.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Semantics is not, by itself, a useless effort. Defining things is actually important.

In addition, regardless of assertions to the contrary, the behaviors exhibited here, including laughably large amounts of deliberately abrasive and hateful attacks in any thread that even vaguely mentions organized religion, are fully atheist. That is to say, reflective of an active disbelief in a god or gods.

Additionally, Dawkins arguments generally come down to fallacies, which is itself hilarious considering his stance on how logic and science are king.

So, as I said, before we got off into defining atheism and agnosticism once again: I find the arguments between the religion of atheism and the religion of Christ to always be interesting here on the Glade.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

As an ancestral worshipper of both the Dagda and Wotan, I find all of your arguments to be without merit.

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Agreed, although we seem to degenerate into arguments about semantics, rather than the issues themselves.



I would caution you avoid associating the (in my opinion entirely justified) animosity toward organized religion, with an "active disbelief in a god or gods." There are many religious people who despise organized religion, and likewise there are many atheists who have no such distaste for organized religion at all.



I agree. Most of Dawkins arguments are fairly well thought out, until he tries to use them to support a position beyond what they easily support. For instance, the chapter in The God Delusion titled "Why there almost certainly is no God" doesn't explain anything of the type. You cannot assign mathematical odds to anything that is thoroughly and completely unfalsifiable. You can accurately compare belief in any God to any other random unfalsifiable supposition (see "Pixies in the Garden"), but you also cannot calculate the "likelihood" of those either. You are not starting from a premise founded in empirical evidence or logic, so you cannot successfully apply logic or mathematics to the chance of their existence. To do so is a logical mistake.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That begins with a rather flawed premise. For instance, while we do not have units with which to measure the amount of Jesus within a system, we can organize systems according to relative amounts of Jesus much like how the Mohs hardness scale works. The possibility then exists that Jesus measurements could be taken, which would then allow us to determine Jesus coefficients and densities. All that is really missing is an agreed upon Jesus metric, and a mathematical relationships between Jesus and other variables.

While I've used Jesus for the sake of familiarity, one could just as easily use Mohammad, Krishna, or Ishtar as the value being compared.

For example, Utah has 19.24 Mormon/mi^2 according to Wikipedia.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I wouldn't do that. Then somebody will need conversion rates, and it's all downhill from there.

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Are you using the metric Jesus or the imperial one?

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Holy shitsnacks!

I find it quite funny that we're talking about religious conversion now.

That being said, the Hindus are definitely guilty of artificially manipulating the value of their gods, whatever metric you use.

Well, that's what happens when you have a Fiat Religion.

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Holy shitsnacks!

No doubt. My father worshipped those things and he totally over valued those pieces of ****.

Man, I totally wanted an X-1/9 when I was growing up.

Mine handled so well. I miss it. Don't miss the mechanical problems, but when it drove, it was fun to drive.

Sounds like my Lotus Esprit.

Win.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Whatever, man. Fiat is an Italian company. The pope is in Italy. It's relevant.

Didn't the trains run on time in Italy? That's where the Vatican is.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Plus, that train is spewing white smoke, so it's really just celebrating the whole haberdasher pablum thingie.