Jamest is right!

[Animavore]

Of course you did. You replaced it with a belief that believing in God wasn't useful.

No. I just no longer see the use. You're reaching now.

I understand this. You replaced belief in divine origins and causes with belief in nature. Nothing wrong with that.

Nope. I always believed in nature even when I believed in God. It's right there. I just dropped one of them.

You replaced belief in God with belief in science. Unless you actually erase everything about God, including the very concept of God from your mind so that you are completely free of all such knowledge, you're merely setting aside one belief and erecting another in its place of prominence in your mind. That's the nature of belief. It's "confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof." When the subject of God comes up, you automatically assess the comparative degree of confidence between God and Science and make an unconscious determination that the degree of confidence in the existence of God as a proposition is small, or even nonexistent as compared to your degree of confidence in Science. You simply cannot avoid doing so, even if you don't know you're doing it at the time.

But the information remains in your mind and in order to keep it suppressed and keep the other belief in its place of prominence, whenever the issue of God comes to mind you inexorably and unconsciously evaluate the issue and weigh the evidence and make a decision as to which belief is stronger. You can't avoid doing so.

I never pitted science against God. Against miracles, resurrection, a floaty soul that animates the body, etc. Sure. But never against God itself. My rejection of God is not based in an acceptance of science. It's like you competely ignored the part where I told you I believed in both together at one point, and pointed out that many others do. I don't even see certain versions of God as incompatible with science. You also haven't even listened to the part where I told you I have no alternative to God. You don't care to listen to what I'm actually saying. Only about trying to win some sort of argument that I'm not even having with you.

[Seth]

But my point is that insofar as the motives and intentions of those who truly believe that hell awaits their children, they are not abusing them, they are attempting to protect them against a great evil and harm that might befall them if they are not warned off of the behaviors that result in such punishment. Philosophically it's no different from telling a child that if he murders someone he'll be put to death or locked up for life by the state.

If they were simply saying, "Don't do this because of that" I wouldn't have much of a problem. Sure I was told that crap myself. It is the lenghts these people go through to torment their children and wind them up and have them crying and frightened like whipped dogs I have a problem with.

My dad caught me sticking paper clips in the wall socket when I was about four. He went and bought an old crank telephone and put wires on the terminals. He made me hold the wires while he cranked. I got zapped. He made me do it three times. Then he told me that what was in the box was "little electricity" and what was in the wall socket was "big electricity." I was crying and frightened but I never, ever stuck a paperclip in a wall socket again.

If he did that today, they would put him in jail. But he thought, quite correctly, that the smaller hurt of the minor shock might very well save my life, which it did. It's a lesson I never, ever forgot, and I've never had anything but gratitude and admiration for his ingenuity in teaching me that lesson.

If you believe that the wages of sin are eternal torment, then it's pretty easy to rationally justify "winding up" a child and frightening him into compliance. I'm not saying that's the best or only way to go about it, merely that the intentions of the parent are important when judging the actions, as are the actual physical consequences of both doing something and not doing something.

[Animavore]

But my point is that insofar as the motives and intentions of those who truly believe that hell awaits their children, they are not abusing them, they are attempting to protect them against a great evil and harm that might befall them if they are not warned off of the behaviors that result in such punishment. Philosophically it's no different from telling a child that if he murders someone he'll be put to death or locked up for life by the state.

If they were simply saying, "Don't do this because of that" I wouldn't have much of a problem. Sure I was told that crap myself. It is the lenghts these people go through to torment their children and wind them up and have them crying and frightened like whipped dogs I have a problem with.

My dad caught me sticking paper clips in the wall socket when I was about four. He went and bought an old crank telephone and put wires on the terminals. He made me hold the wires while he cranked. I got zapped. He made me do it three times. Then he told me that what was in the box was "little electricity" and what was in the wall socket was "big electricity." I was crying and frightened but I never, ever stuck a paperclip in a wall socket again.

If he did that today, they would put him in jail. But he thought, quite correctly, that the smaller hurt of the minor shock might very well save my life, which it did. It's a lesson I never, ever forgot, and I've never had anything but gratitude and admiration for his ingenuity in teaching me that lesson.

If you believe that the wages of sin are eternal torment, then it's pretty easy to rationally justify "winding up" a child and frightening him into compliance. I'm not saying that's the best or only way to go about it, merely that the intentions of the parent are important when judging the actions, as are the actual physical consequences of both doing something and not doing something.

At least your father showed you somethng demonstable. Now imagine fucking up a child's whole life for something you can't even show. For making a gay kid suffer and send him to a "gay camp" because of something you think might happen.

It's abuse and nothing else and you're not going to change my mind on this. I don't care what pathetic excuse they have for doing it.

[Seth]

Of course you did. You replaced it with a belief that believing in God wasn't useful.

No. I just no longer see the use. You're reaching now.

I don't think so. I think if you carefully and rationally examine your own thought processes you will find that what I'm saying is true. It's implicit in your statement. You "no longer see the use" in believing in God, but you do see the utility in believing in science. One belief replaces another. I don't think it's possible for it to be otherwise.

I understand this. You replaced belief in divine origins and causes with belief in nature. Nothing wrong with that.

Nope. I always believed in nature even when I believed in God. It's right there. I just dropped one of them.

I disagree. I think you elevated one belief and demoted the other. I think that is an inexorable and natural functioning of the human mind.

You replaced belief in God with belief in science. Unless you actually erase everything about God, including the very concept of God from your mind so that you are completely free of all such knowledge, you're merely setting aside one belief and erecting another in its place of prominence in your mind. That's the nature of belief. It's "confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof." When the subject of God comes up, you automatically assess the comparative degree of confidence between God and Science and make an unconscious determination that the degree of confidence in the existence of God as a proposition is small, or even nonexistent as compared to your degree of confidence in Science. You simply cannot avoid doing so, even if you don't know you're doing it at the time.

But the information remains in your mind and in order to keep it suppressed and keep the other belief in its place of prominence, whenever the issue of God comes to mind you inexorably and unconsciously evaluate the issue and weigh the evidence and make a decision as to which belief is stronger. You can't avoid doing so.

I never pitted science against God.

I rather doubt that.

Against miracles, resurrection, a floaty soul that animates the body, etc. Sure. But never against God itself. My rejection of God is not based in an acceptance of science.

I didn't say that. I said that you replaced one belief with another. It's not cart before the horse. What I'm saying is that you cannot simply stop believing entirely. You have to believe in something (unless you're a psychotic nihilist) and it's natural for our beliefs to shift and change places in the hierarchy of importance in our minds, with false or weak beliefs being set aside in favor of strong or true beliefs. But belief is about comparing pluses and minuses of competing beliefs. It cannot be otherwise except if one is completely ignorant of any other competing hypothesis.

It's like you competely ignored the part where I told you I believed in both together at one point, and pointed out that many others do.

There's nothing dichotomous about doing so, as you point out. Science is not incompatible with the existence of God, it's just that if God exists, science is not yet able to detect, observe and quantify God, just as Copernicus could not detect, observe or quantify quantum mechanics. When you believed both together you formed a balance in areas where they might compete and you partitioned what did not conflict. One can say you gave an approximately equal amount of weight of credibility to both compartments at one time, and then the balance shifted, lessening the weight of credibility of theism and increasing the weight of credibility of science, until eventually theism became of zero weight of credibility and science became of infinite weight of credibility. But the two compartments still exist in your mind, and each time you ponder the notion of God you set that compartment back on the scales and weigh it against science and find it lacking in credibility.

I don't even see certain versions of God as incompatible with science. You also haven't even listened to the part where I told you I have no alternative to God. You don't care to listen to what I'm actually saying. Only about trying to win some sort of argument that I'm not even having with you.

I'm paying very close attention to what you are saying. What I'm doing is analyzing what you are saying and I'm stating my opinion on the strength and probity of your arguments, and I'm suggesting that perhaps you misunderstand the workings of your mind and I'm offering an alternative hypothesis which I believe applies to everyone, not just you. No insult is intended.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Like Muslims, Marxists are allowed (indeed encouraged) to lie about being Marxists if it forwards the Marxist agenda.

What? All billion of them?

You wouldn't let an atheist away with making such a blanket statement about Christians. I'm not letting you get away without making one about Muslims

You're letting your Christianity slip, by the way. I mean its the only explanation as to why you come down hard on atheists while giving Chrsitians a free-pass while hypocritically making disparaging remarks about Muslims. I guess it's not only Muslims and Marxists who lie to forward their agenda.

He's right. It's called Taqiya in Shia islam and idtirar in sunni. Look it up.

All billion of them?

All billion of them are given that "right" by their holy book and their prophet (who gave a bloody good example when he promised not to attack the people of Mecca and then did exactly that!) Whether all one billion of them are liars is debatable but I'm with House on that one...

[Seth]

But my point is that insofar as the motives and intentions of those who truly believe that hell awaits their children, they are not abusing them, they are attempting to protect them against a great evil and harm that might befall them if they are not warned off of the behaviors that result in such punishment. Philosophically it's no different from telling a child that if he murders someone he'll be put to death or locked up for life by the state.

If they were simply saying, "Don't do this because of that" I wouldn't have much of a problem. Sure I was told that crap myself. It is the lenghts these people go through to torment their children and wind them up and have them crying and frightened like whipped dogs I have a problem with.

My dad caught me sticking paper clips in the wall socket when I was about four. He went and bought an old crank telephone and put wires on the terminals. He made me hold the wires while he cranked. I got zapped. He made me do it three times. Then he told me that what was in the box was "little electricity" and what was in the wall socket was "big electricity." I was crying and frightened but I never, ever stuck a paperclip in a wall socket again.

If he did that today, they would put him in jail. But he thought, quite correctly, that the smaller hurt of the minor shock might very well save my life, which it did. It's a lesson I never, ever forgot, and I've never had anything but gratitude and admiration for his ingenuity in teaching me that lesson.

If you believe that the wages of sin are eternal torment, then it's pretty easy to rationally justify "winding up" a child and frightening him into compliance. I'm not saying that's the best or only way to go about it, merely that the intentions of the parent are important when judging the actions, as are the actual physical consequences of both doing something and not doing something.

At least your father showed you somethng demonstable. Now imagine fucking up a child's whole life for something you can't even show. For making a gay kid suffer and send him to a "gay camp" because of something you think might happen.

It's abuse and nothing else and you're not going to change my mind on this. I don't care what pathetic excuse they have for doing it.

This assumes that they believe, as you appear to, that being "gay" is a normal and natural variation of human behavior. If they believe that engaging in homosexual activity will doom their child to eternal torment, are they fucking up the child's life or are they attempting to protect the child against a greater penalty in the future?

Your opinion on this matter is of course colored by your beliefs about homosexuality and it's appropriate moral propriety, and you have a right to that opinion. However, to make a rational analysis you must acknowledge and take into account that not everybody believes as you do. This does not necessarily justify absolutely anything, it merely demonstrates that whereas you may see evil intentions in anti-homosexual indoctrination, they may not have evil intentions at all. The differences in perspective are an important factor in assessing such situations, if one is to be truly rational and logical about it.

[piscator]

I can't help but read Seth in a Walter Sobchak voice. Is there something wrong with me?

[Brian Peacock]

For someone like me who started a Catholic, then rejected a god who cared about what you believe to the extent that he'd send you to an eternal hell if you didn't tow the line and moved to a more inclusive God of which all religion leads to imperfectly, religions being an artifact of men, to learning science and rejecting miracles and moving to a more deistic God who doesn't do shit, then from there moving to Buddhism and being influenced by certain forms of Christian mysticism in which 'God' is a name given to some incomprehensible, pervasive energy, to learning more science and understanding that there doesn't seem to be any unaccounted energy and asking more questions about whether anything extra needs to be added to naturalistic explanations, to say my atheism is a belief is fucking absurd in the highest.

Atheism is what you are left with when belief has been rubbed down to a nub, and eroded to dust. It's not something you turn to because you've been convinced of it by charismatic people, or wise-sounding words, or wishful thinking and fantastical tales - and I know what that feels like to feel that pang of conviction having been convinced of many things - it is the position of the totally unconvinced. It is the last resort when every avenue of belief has been explored to their inevitable dead ends. When every spiritual quest has ended in failure and disillusion because everywhere you've went all you've ever seen are people too willing to believe and too unwilling to question anything they're being told.

Giving up on belief was not something I took lightly, despite how easily each belief fell off when confronted with a better explanation as I don't have a mind particularily geared toward holding on to an explanation because I like it. It was something I just had to let go of like a deceased loved one. It is almost an insult to me to be told that this is in itself a belief. Kind of like being told that the acceptance of soemone's passing is itself a kind of holding on and refusal to accept reality.

QFT.

[Brian Peacock]

I can't help but read Seth in a Walter Sobchak voice. Is there something wrong with me?

Nope. You are just being you.

[hackenslash]

I note that Seth is using the proper noun formulation. He's correct that I certainly have an opinion on the existence of that preposterous entity, though I wouldn't call it a belief, largely because I have no use for the term 'belief', it being almost as nebulous as 'god'. I'd call it a fact that that entity doesn't exist, based on the ridiculous attributes given him by his fuckwit fan club.

My atheism itself certainly isn't a belief, though. It's a privative, denoting the absence of something. I simply don't accept a specific class of truth claim with regard to a specific class of entity. For most conceptions, I'd describe the situation as non-cognitivist, as it's a rare conception that has been even remotely defined, lat alone sufficiently to draw any conclusions.

Finally, if you're going to be silly enough to commit an argumentum ad lexicum, a particularly special combination of logical fallacies, you should work out what all the words in your cited definition actually mean, to whit:

This is where you are wrong. Disbelief is confidence in the truth of the proposition that deities do not exist, which existence is not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.

Disbelief: "the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true" (ibid)

Unbelief: "the state or quality of not believing; incredulity or skepticism, especially in matters of doctrine or religious faith" (ibid)

I understand this may be too subtle a distinction for you to comprehend, but still...

Note what your cited definition actually says about disbelief, which directly contradicts you. The prefix' dis' is, like 'a', a privative prefix, which means that it denotes absence.

As for your alleged subtle distinction, what seems entirely lost on you is that the only distinction between those is the words used. Semantically they are exactly equivalent. The both denote not believing.

Still talking through your arse.

[jamest]

Perhaps someone should change the title of this thread to 'Seth is never right'. I'm not really motivated to post here.

[hackenslash]

I'm keeping out of it for a bit now. I like kicking him, but the novelty's wearing off now. I simply don't like bullies, so I fuck with them where I can. All the chew's gone out of Seth now, though, and I can't be bothered. Plus, there's hardly anybody left here for him to bully.

[jamest]

Bully? In what sense is he bullying anyone? I don't grasp that opinion at all.

[jamest]

He's giving a confident exposition of his views, I'll grant you that, which is not to say that I agree with them. And though I haven't read all of his posts nor necessarily the totality of those which I have, I have yet to see any sense in which the term 'bullying' could be applicable to him. Unfortunately, for those of us less sensitive than myself, the notion of bullying is exactly the one I'd apply to your sort of posting behaviour. So, pot & kettle time.

[Seth]

I note that Seth is using the proper noun formulation. He's correct that I certainly have an opinion on the existence of that preposterous entity, though I wouldn't call it a belief, largely because I have no use for the term 'belief', it being almost as nebulous as 'god'. I'd call it a fact that that entity doesn't exist, based on the ridiculous attributes given him by his fuckwit fan club.

An absolutely perfect iteration of the Atheist's Fallacy. Thank you Hack for giving me such a perfectly and clearly formed target to demolish. The Atheist's Fallacy, wherein the existence and/or nature of (a) god (or) gods is denied (or indeed affirmed) is based only or primarily on the descriptions and/or attributes ascribed to said deity(s) by believers. This is of course an informal logical fallacy because the existence of and/or nature of any deity(s) does not depend upon and is not affected or created by the perceptions, descriptions or beliefs of those who believe said deity(s) exist. Quite simply, you state a fallacy because those in the "fuckwit fan club" may in fact be interpreting what they see, hear, taste or feel incorrectly and thus, while the deity does in fact exist, their claim of attributes may be partially or completely mistaken.

I refer you to the fable of the blind men and the elephant for an analogy.

My atheism itself certainly isn't a belief, though. It's a privative, denoting the absence of something.

Nonsense.

I simply don't accept a specific class of truth claim with regard to a specific class of entity.

Right. You "don't accept" such truth claims because you have evaluated them and concluded that they are lacking in the degree of proofs that you find necessary to convince you of the truth of the proposition. That's a belief. It's "confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof." In your case you are expressing confidence in the proposition that truth claims about the existence of God are false. And since you have no way of subjecting that conclusion to immediate rigorous proof, it constitutes a belief that God does not exist. It is simply not true that you hold "no belief" or that your position on the existence of God is "absent." It's not. It's perfectly obvious from the paragraph immediately preceding the subject sentence that you hold a very firm and certain active and positive belief that God does not exist, and you said it yourself when you wrote, "I'd call it a fact that that entity doesn't exist, based on the ridiculous attributes given him by his fuckwit fan club."

Just because you are uncomfortable with the concept of belief doesn't mean that you don't hold beliefs or that you can evade the obvious fact that you hold textbook definition beliefs about the existence of God.

For most conceptions, I'd describe the situation as non-cognitivist, as it's a rare conception that has been even remotely defined, lat alone sufficiently to draw any conclusions.

Except that you cognate on the issue rather frequently and with great vigor, and you issue undeniable expressions of your beliefs on a regular basis, as you did again above.

Finally, if you're going to be silly enough to commit an argumentum ad lexicum, a particularly special combination of logical fallacies, you should work out what all the words in your cited definition actually mean, to whit:

Um, Mr. Dictionary Man, it's not "to whit", it's "to wit" as in "to say or to witness (speak)." Pot, kettle, black.

This is where you are wrong. Disbelief is confidence in the truth of the proposition that deities do not exist, which existence is not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.

Disbelief: "the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true" (ibid)

Unbelief: "the state or quality of not believing; incredulity or skepticism, especially in matters of doctrine or religious faith" (ibid)

I understand this may be too subtle a distinction for you to comprehend, but still...

Note what your cited definition actually says about disbelief, which directly contradicts you. The prefix' dis' is, like 'a', a privative prefix, which means that it denotes absence.

That's not what Merriam-Webster says. The quote is directly from the source and connotes an active decision (refusal) or a functional problem (inability), whereas "unbelief" is the privitave form of "belief."

Privitave

[priv-uh-tiv]

Word Origin

adjective
1.
causing, or tending to cause, deprivation.
2.
consisting in or characterized by the taking away, loss, or lack of something.
3.
Grammar. indicating negation or absence.
noun
4.
Grammar. a privative element, as a- in asymmetric.
5.
something that is deprived.

As for your alleged subtle distinction, what seems entirely lost on you is that the only distinction between those is the words used. Semantically they are exactly equivalent. The both denote not believing.

Wrong. They are two different words with two different meanings and are not semantically exactly equivalent. That much is proven by the fact that the two words are separately defined and have differing attributes, according to the authors of the dictionary.

Still talking through your arse.

Still trying to pettifog your way out of the inevitable fact that your position on the existence of God is a belief, and that you're a person of the Atheist religion, I see.

Fail.