B
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Post by B on Nov 22, 2011 15:24:33 GMT
Atheism is just another belief system as far as I'm concerned. They believe that there isn't a god, and yet they refuse to acknowledge that it's a belief. Amazing. I'm more amazed at how you were misled or perhaps you're deliberately being ignorant? Atheism is NOT a religious nor a "belief" system. It's not even a 'system' like the hierarchical Church. Being an atheist just means you LACK religious beliefs and that you do NOT believe in gods. No irrational faith involved. Hence the 'a' in 'atheist'. Nice try though, Theist #6983010-Who-Tried-To-Prove-Atheists-Are-Theists. Derp. Amazing what reading a definition from a dictionary can do right?
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Post by Darius on Nov 22, 2011 17:10:13 GMT
It's a belief system.
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Bayes
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Post by Bayes on Nov 22, 2011 18:28:38 GMT
Atheists believe in the lack of gods.
It's agnostics that don't believe in god (or in the absence of gods).
Atheism is a belief system, agnosticism is a disbelief system.
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B
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Post by B on Nov 22, 2011 18:37:24 GMT
Darius: Your baseless assertions and subsequent ignoring of my post are noted.
Bayes: How do you *believe* in the "lack of gods"?
Perhaps you meant to say, "Believe there are no gods"?
Then yes, taking the two separate definitions of "believing", as in, "I believe that women should have more freedoms in Kuwait"
and
"I believe in a god", then we perfectly understand each other.
And no, agnosticism is neither a "disbelief system" nor a "system". Please show how either atheism or agnosticism are "systems" or even religious ones at that instead of saying they are.
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Bayes
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Post by Bayes on Nov 22, 2011 18:40:44 GMT
Atheism makes a positive assertion that there are no gods. There is a positive belief at the root of Atheist philosophy even if that belief is in an absence.
A similar example would be the birthers, they believe in the lack of a legitimate birth certificate for President Obama.
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B
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Post by B on Nov 22, 2011 18:46:08 GMT
Lack of belief. You can't believe that you don't believe (religion wise). You just don't have beliefs. No need to assert that there aren't *gods*. Infants, for example, are atheists.
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Post by veks on Nov 22, 2011 19:19:46 GMT
Atheism is just another belief system as far as I'm concerned. They believe that there isn't a god, and yet they refuse to acknowledge that it's a belief. Amazing. I don't believe in leprechauns. Does that make me an aleprechaunist? Is my nonbelief in leprechauns a belief system? Let's say you don't believe in unicorns. How would you feel if I typed this: Aunicornism is just another belief system as far as I'm concerned. They believe that there aren't unicorns, and yet they refuse to acknowledge that it's a belief. Amazing. Come on. It's rather silly to say nonbelief is a belief system in itself.
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Post by veks on Nov 22, 2011 19:32:04 GMT
Atheists believe in the lack of gods. It's agnostics that don't believe in god (or in the absence of gods). Atheism is a belief system, agnosticism is a disbelief system. This isn't correct. Atheism deals with belief, agnosticism deals with knowledge. Theism: belief in a god. Atheism: lack of belief in a god. Gnosticism: certain we can know a god/gods exist or not. Agnosticism: uncertain we can know a god/gods exist or not. This is why you can have gnostic theists, agnostic theists, gnostic atheists, and agnostic atheists. I'm an agnostic atheist when it comes to a deistic type deity- I don't believe one exists, but I dont' know for certain. However when it comes to dogmatic gods that have a love for burnt animal sacrifices, blood sprinkling, and other barbaric nonsense, I'm a gnostic atheist. Hope that helped clear things up.
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timo
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Post by timo on Nov 22, 2011 21:26:10 GMT
Atheism is just another belief system as far as I'm concerned. They believe that there isn't a god, and yet they refuse to acknowledge that it's a belief. Amazing. Nah, not really. To begin with, and as others have already pointed out, atheism really isn't the assertion that no gods exist. Though there are certainly atheists that will make that assertion. Personally, I take the position that the gods that most people seem to believe in probably don't exist. This really isn't so much a belief system as a single belief. Or better yet, a tentative conclusion based on the evidence currently available to me. If there's evidence that would show that my conclusion is wrong, I'll be happy to give it a look and perhaps re-evaluate my position. I don't exactly have some kind of stake in maintaining my atheism. And it wouldn't be the first time I was proven to be wrong about something. I should also say that I'm open to the notion that there may be some other sort of deity out there that's nothing like the deities that I know of. For example, I'd bet that contemporary Abrahamic monotheism would be almost completely foreign to many practitioners of proto-Jewish Yahwehist religions, who like most practitioners of polytheistic and monolatrous religions, seemed to conceive of their deities as being much more like humans. And this is because the two groups conceive of God in fundamentally different ways--ways that many subscribers of Abrahamic religions might prefer we didn't notice. (And I think a lot of folks ignore the extent to which Greek thinking informs modern Christianity, Judaism and Islam.) In any case, the notion that even the assertion that no gods exist is a belief system unto itself is kind of laughable if you take a look at different groups of atheists. There are Buddhists, Jains, Jews and Christians that are atheists. There are forms of paganism that conceive of the gods as metaphors that are basically atheistic. I don't follow any of those religions or any other and I'm an atheist. There are atheists that believe in the supernatural. There are atheists, like me, that don't. I know that some believers like the idea that they can pull some jujitsu move to label atheism a belief system, thereby rendering null some of the critiques leveled against their particular faith. I know that there are agnostics that make this assertion so that they can feel special. But it just doesn't work. In the same way, theism in and of itself really isn't a belief system either. It's only when you start describing what your god is like, what it wants, how it relates to us, etc that you really start to have a belief system. Hope that helps. Peace
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Post by ksen on Nov 22, 2011 23:32:37 GMT
quote author=b board=ath thread=2 post=73 time=1321795757]Yet he is not recorded by contemporary historians. Strange.[/quote]
Hardly anyone from back then is mentioned by contemporary historians. So I guess hardly anyone existed?
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timo
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Post by timo on Nov 23, 2011 0:13:22 GMT
Yet he is not recorded by contemporary historians. Strange. Hardly anyone from back then is mentioned by contemporary historians. So I guess hardly anyone existed? Very true. I've got no problem with accepting the idea that there might have actually been some figure around whom this whole Christian movement developed. My main thing is that I just don't see any reason to believe that the gospel narratives provide us with anything that's actually historical since there's 1.) no independent witnesses and 2.) some of the events described in the gospels (like people coming back from the dead and wandering around Jerusalem!) would have almost certainly been recorded by someone else if they actually happened. But yeah, the idea that there was actually a real live guy named Yehoshua ben Yosef who was seen as a cynic sage, a wise rabbi or something and was martyred doesn't strike me as at all far fetched. The idea that the only thing this person left behind is the tradition that he became the central figure of doesn't strike me as improbable either. I just think that if the gospels are actually based on a real person then all we're left with is the end product, the Greek Christian Jesus, and we'll never know what the Judean Jewish Yehoshua was actually like. Peace
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Post by ungod on Nov 23, 2011 6:55:48 GMT
[We don't believe in gods. Next question. Okay but do you believe the flesh-and-blood Jesus existed? We will when you provide some credible evidence.
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Post by spraidor on Nov 24, 2011 11:46:42 GMT
Okay but do you believe the flesh-and-blood Jesus existed? We will when you provide some credible evidence. That's intellectual laziness.
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B
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Post by B on Nov 24, 2011 20:27:32 GMT
No, if you're claiming that a miracle-healing Jesus existed then it is up to YOU to prove that he existed. No one else is claiming that he existed except for Christians and others who acknowledge Jesus as a prophet (Muslims).
A person who went around Roman owned Palestine, healed blind people, cripples, resurrected the dead, and as a result of his death cracked open the graveyards and crypts of Jerusalem revealing resurrected people, had the sun stopped for a day and other things and was NOT mentioned by contemporary historians or any other source until well after his time is pretty damn hard to believe to have existed.
By your reasoning I am supposed to be inclined to believe that simply because every person of the current ~7 billion population is not being recorded by historians or their own biographers, they will not exist as people in history in the future. We know they do and will have existed by censuses, data and other methods of gathering information.
But will we know each and every of their life stories? Of course not. That's where you draw the line. Important people are extensively bio-graphed and wrote about, not the every day common people. Jesus was important, was he not?
No, what I expect of a real, miracle, God-embodied Jesus is evidence that he actually DID perform miracles and went around doing divine stuff, not some edited book that contradicts itself dozens of times and is seriously flawed in the basic understanding of the world.
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Post by cuckingfunt on Nov 25, 2011 0:11:40 GMT
Bollocks.
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