The Glade 4.0

Incorrect. Remember that faith requires belief in absence of evidence. There is plenty of evidence that God, Buddah, Allah, etc are all bunk. We know, for example, that the world is significantly older than the Bible claims. We know that human beings have never lived to be as old as the Bible claims. I don't have faith in atheism. I simply observe the evidence and draw a rational conclusion.

The Bible, while perhaps an interesting work of literature containing plenty of useful allegories and moral lessons (and many useless and outright disturbing ones), is bunk. It is also the basis of that religion. I reject the Bible, and the religion on those evidential grounds.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

You are confusing disbelief in Christianity and other distinct religious institutions with Atheism. That is not in keeping with the concept of Aetheism.

What evidence? Your anecdotes don't count and are easily discredited.No, we don't: 1) the Bible makes no specific claims as to the age of the Universe, the world, or anything else; 2) our mechanisms for approximating the age of something are neither exact nor perfect. Consequently, you simply have the guess that the world is older than the Bible "claims."Except, you measure years in terms of the Roman Calendar. Since all the people who lived to inordinate ages pre-date Roman and Gregorian time keeping, and there exists little evidence of how those cultures tracked time, it is quite possible that those numbers merely don't translate into your understanding of time.Except, what you are calling "evidence" is your subjective interpretation of a text for which modern analogs likely do not exist.Rejecting a religion is not disproving its god. If you say, quite frankly, that the Christian God does not exist, you are making an assertion for which you have no evidence.

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There is no such evidence. We do not know that the world is older than the Bible claims because the Bible claims no age for the world. We do not know that people never lived to such ages; there are only a few dozen with such claimed longevity.



No you don't. You're rejecting them based on your own assumptions about the evidence.

In fact, what you're really doing is rejecting certain claims about what the Bible says that have been made either in the past before science had advanced to its current state or which certain types of believers make. Claims that the earth is literally 5,000 or so years old are not biblical; they're interpretation. Rejecting those interpretations is all fine and good and perfectly supportable but it does not impeach the evidence in the text itself; it only points out the incompleteness of that evidence. It certainly does not constitute any evidence that God does not exist.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

In my opinion, looking towards the Bible in an effort to "disprove" the existence of a god misses the mark at best, and is nitpicky at worst. Looking at the big picture of existence, Christianity specifically isn't important at all.

As loathe as I am to blindly link Wikipedia, especially from an area I haven't studied, I'd say that Deism gets right to the root of things.

If magically in a year from now science discovers proof of a god, the headlines won't say "Actual god not like Judeo-Christian god!" but instead "Holy crap guys there really is a god!"

And probably in small print underneath "pun not intended".

Just a minor nitpick I have since a close friend doesn't believe in God because of problems similar to those who lost faith as a result of the Holocaust. I do think the distinction is far more relevant than most people give it credit for, however.

I disagree. You and others are acting as if belief in some sort of supernatural power is the default state, and that disbelief is an active choice. I don't merely "disbelieve" that God does not exist. I do not take on faith that he does not exist. I look at the evidence, and I draw a rational conclusion that he does not exist.

The only act of faith is believing in a supernatural deity. It is an act of faith because in order to hold that belief, you must do so in absence of evidence. There is no evidence - none what so ever - that a supernatural being exists in the way that we describe them. In fact, there is no objective evidence - none what so ever - that a supernatural creator being exists at all.

People take that on faith. They take the idea that this God exists, or Allah exists, on faith. They believe it to be true without any objective evidence to back them up. It's irrational. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you. But it's not a rational conclusion to draw.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I am sure that word means something different than what you think it means.

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In time, this too shall pass.

You have my position confused then, as I have made no such statement about the natural state of a belief system, and if asked, I would posit the natural state is one of not knowing anything and therefore not having an opinion. Choosing to believe or not believe is an active decision.

That said, I made that comment solely because you chose to use to focus on the Bible and the "history" or "stories" contained in such as the basis for your disbelief. According to your expressed position, if those stories are false, then the existence of a supernatural being must also be false. That is not a valid assumption. as you are extending disbelief in the specifics of one institution to include all other possibilities. It is quite possible that every religious institution or belief structure on this planet is wrong about the nature of a supernatural being, or its characteristics. That does not mean it doesn't exist.


This is a tangent to my criticism of your statement before, but I consider the fact you exist to be evidence that something larger than our understanding exists. The nature of that, I have no clue and really don't care as understanding it likely won't have any impact anyway, but things don't start from nothing.

I love this line. People always claims conservatives and libertarians only think in terms of black and white. This is the most black and white statement I've ever seen. There's actually a middle ground here. Neither belief nor disbelief is the default state. Saying, "I don't know without any evidence" is the default state. And your last line is laughable. What evidence is there that no deity exists? Please tell me because I'm missing out on that. Disproving evidence a higher power does exist doesn't prove your point that a higher being doesn't exist. It just disproves that one does. And in this case, a Christian god at that with extremely flimsy proof. Only certain Christian sects take the Bible literally. You're lumping all Christians into that category.

Your conclusion is far from rational, as I've pointed out on numerous ocassions, especially when we discussed epistemology.

Part of the issue here is that when people in this country talk about atheism, it's almost always in reference to a disbelief in the various formalized pantheons out there. So the "evidence" that is provided is the usually the Bible, Koran or other religious texts and various annecdotal claims of the divine. So typically when one states they are an atheist in the US what they really mean is that they don't believe in the formalized religions take on god. Technically not a completely accurate use of the word, but there you have it.

Except that there is objective evidence for the existance of various gods of various religions. The existance of written histories documenting their interactions with humans is evidence. You cannot claim it's not evidence based on the fantastic nature of what they describe; it's something supernatural that it's supposed to be showing the existance of.

You are not looking at evidence to draw a rational conclusion that He does not exist. What you are doing, is seeing the evidence, dismissing it, and deciding to take on faith that He does not exist.

You're doing a good job of convincing yourself that your conclusion is rational, that evidence is not actually evidence, and that you're being objective, but you are not. You're just saying that to make yourself feel better and superior to those who disagree.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Putting quotes around the word evidence does not make it not evidence.

Arguments that there is no evidence are inevitably circular. They always rely on a hidden premise that the conclusion (God exists) can't be right, so anything that is evidence towards that conclusion really isn't evidence because the conclusion must be wrong.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Fair enough. Probably a bad habit of mine, as much of the evidence that I've seen produced as examples of God are so amazingly bad and contrived they make me cringe. And I'm not talking about the various religious texts, etc. mostly peoples annecdotal evidence.

It's still evidence.

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IMHO, there's a big difference between believing that any supernatural being could exists and believing that a very specific God exists. Believing in a specific God is problematic because most branches of science and all our technology are based on the assumption that the physical laws that govern the universe (whatever those laws are, not necessarily our current understanding of them) do not change. However, since the things described in basically every major religion could not possibly happen without the physical laws changing, accepting a specific God basically forces you to reject science.

Unless you adopt what my experiences with most Christian scientists (not to be confused with Christian Scientists) have involved; the concession or assumption that what we deal with in our science is a subset of some larger whole, and that the divine (whatever form you believe it takes) interacts outside that subset, but still within a set of rules.

That implies that science is still valid, barring "miracles" or "divine influence" or whatever. It doesn't require changing anything we know or think we know about science, it merely narrows its scope to be more in line with what we can really assume.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

No it doesn't. This is completely absurd; in fact it's nothing more than a cheap-ass attempt to make it appear that religious people must choose to either reject science or be dishonest.

Science concerns itself only with the universe; within the universe physical laws are assumed to be constant. When God does choose to intervene, He is an extrauniversal force that has the power to change those laws. Physical laws therefore only change at the specific times and places that God wishes it so, and return to what they normally are when He does not. He can do this as frequently or as infrequently as He wishes; they only way we can know they have happend is by the accounts of those that witnessed them.

Science is concerned only with that "normally are" condition. It is based on the idea that the universe cannot change its own laws; whether anything is outside the universe can is not a matter science concerns itself with - or at least it shouldn't, if people wish it to remain science.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The universe is an MMO. We are all players, and God is a GM.

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Pretty much every scientist I know knows that these "laws" can and do change depending on various circumstances. We just pretend they don't to make things look prettier for our math to work.

We'd all be dead 1000 times over if that were the case

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Tell Him to quit nerfing asians, black people need their talent tree rebalanced and Palenstine/Isreal erroroneously does not display as a contested territory.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

No? I'm confused, but it really doesn't matter. I just wanted to understand other people's way of looking at it. I'm still confused.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That is not what I am saying.

I am saying that there is no objective evidence that said deity exists, and that there is a great deal of evidence that debunks the claims of that religion. As a result, it is rational to conclude that said religion is incorrect, that their deity does not exist in the form they claim, and that there is no evidence to indicate that such a deity exists regardless of the form that deity takes (Allah, God, etc).

Given the lack of objective evidence backing up the claim that such a God exists, and the overwhelming amount of evidence that contradicts the claims of that religion, it is only rational to conclude that said deity is not real. One is forced to make an irrational decision to believe that such a God exists in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Again, it does not require an act of faith to come to this conclusion. It only requires that a person look at the evidence and lack of evidence objectively and draw the only rational conclusion.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

There is, and that's what the arguing is over.

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Except that there is no evidence that debunks it, and there is objective evidence that God does exist. Your given is not a given, You're simply proclaiming it, and claiming you're being rational based on that.

No matter how rational the chain of though after that is, the start point is not rational. It is a denial of the facts.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."