Is Atheism faith?

[Independent Canterbury]

YES IT IS

[Len Hyet]

It is just that most atheists are behalving like talibans and are so annoying that they want that normal people share their view because they think it is true. In other words atheism is a religion without theism.

Ireligious people dont.molest other people.

Yeah you know I don't recall strapping bombs to children and committing acts of terrorism, mind backing that up?

Ah, sorry. That one's on me.

MY BAD GUYS!

[Len Hyet]

YES IT IS

No, it really isn't. It is a lack of faith. In the same way that a void is not matter, it is a lack of matter. Or that darkness is not light, it is an absence of light.

[Seshephe]

It blows my mind how these threads can keep going for so long...

If you're old enough to remember record players (or, you know...been around record players...it's not like the things vanish in the presence of younger people...) it's not that remarkable. The record gets a nick in it, the needle skips and then just plays the same bit of the record over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

My granpa used to have one. Then we digitalised his collection...

[Xirtam]

YES IT IS

NO IT'S NOT!!!1!!!!1!11!1!1!!!!!!1!1!1!1111!1!

[Len Hyet]

YES IT IS

NO IT'S NOT!!!1!!!!1!11!1!1!!!!!!1!1!1!1111!1!

Come on Xir, you know the rules about arguing with idiots. Never do it. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

[Lost heros]

YES IT IS

Is cold a type of heat?
Is off a TV channel?
Is abstinence a sex position?
Is darkness a form of light?
Is silence a sound?

[Risottia]

YES IT IS

SURE, JUST AS CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL.

[Len Hyet]

YES IT IS

Is cold a type of heat?
Is off a TV channel?
Is abstinence a sex position?
Is darkness a form of light?
Is silence a sound?

YES IT IS

SURE, JUST AS CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL.

Come on guys, I just went over this.

[Risottia]

Ireligious people dont.molest other people.

Eh?

[Len Hyet]

Ireligious people dont.molest other people.

Eh?

Catholic Priest Joke

[Breadknife]

(I take a break for three or four hours, and I now still have another 16 pages to read. Still, my ego is really enlarged, as it appears nobody wanted to argue with any of the points I previously made. It's nice to be right. )

Yes, Atheism is a "Religion" of sorts. It requires faith to believe that there is certainly no god, which is why most people who identify as atheists are usually just agnostics who consider the existence of a god to be unlikely.

This is very "No true scotsman"-like. You're saying that Atheism (by your definition) is the faith-requiring type. Except that most people who say that they are atheists are the kind for whom faith isn't required, so you're classing them as something else for your own convenience.

Noting that I identify as atheist¹, agnostic² and apatheist³. All at the same time. (And other things, but those are the more relevent aspects.)


¹ Have no belief or faith in dieties of any kind. Definitely lack the same. Do not believe in His or Their absence, in any way, merely do not consider their (singular or plural) presence as probable.

² There is no way to know the situation, either way. Much apart from being unable to prove the negative, if tomorrow I look up into the sky and see the clouds part and a giant hand point at me and declare that I am to be the prophet of the next religion... well, that could be aliens, a really complicated Candid Camera-type stunt or my brain having suffered internal trauma causing me to hallucinate. With a Sufficiently Advanced Technology behind them, enough of a production budget or a particularly bad mental episode the subsequent scenario could be continued (by whatever cause it actually was) for the rest of my life, and yet there's no way I could prove it was God (or gods) playing with me like a mortal chew-toy. Although I wouldn't put it past me going along with it if it's that convincing. (After all, you don't want to mess with Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, TV Production Companies or one's own mental state without some thought behind it.)

³ I just don't care whether there's a God or not. It ought not to have any bearing on anything, and that's how I'm living my life, barring the odd forum discussion like this. I quite imagine that, regardless of the Truth of the matter (there being a deity or not), not doing bad things to your fellow man is as good a moral basis as any, and if there's a supreme being with various miscelaneous commandments He wants to be obeyed I'm sure that I'm already covering that ground. To this end, I do not feel that there's any reason to specifically go, weekly, to any building built in His honour and also recite some words that (frankly) I could recite even if I were not a good person. Let my earthly legacy be my earthly (and secular) actions. Should there ever be a judgement in afterlife then I'm going by the axiom that being generally good will give me enough positive points for the favourable judgement over and above the negative points. I mean should I have eaten fish on Fridays, as I'm sure I have done? Some deities might have an opinion, others not. Should I have said some specific words (often while facing some specific direction, if at all possible) so many times a day, once a week or every other leap year? And if so which specific words. Assuming one ought to, it appears there's an awful lot of people who would turn out to be wrong. Better for me not to bother at all with that detail. And if the deity doesn't like that then the chances are that pretty much no-one reaches His high standards at all, in a very much Nugganistic manner, and I wasn't in with a chance anyway. So there's no point. But that's just my opinion. Please don't let me spoil your own ideas on the subject. Maybe you'll get credit for effort that I don't, even though you also came up with the wrong answer.

[Trotskylvania]

Again, you haven't shown us proof. I don't believe in a God, but I don't think you know what proof means. Proof means you know exactly what happened. We can't be sure that a God didn't create the universe. You've given valid evidence that he/she didn't create the universe, but not proof.

In certain definitions, proof is synonymous with evidence.
Proof: The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true.

When you're dealing with philosophical questions, you should probably use vocabulary in the same way that it is used in the field of philosophy. And proof has nothing to do with evidence, it's a metaphysical concept. You don't prove or disprove an empirical question, evidence might verify or falsify the question, but it does not prove it. Proof is used in the sense of a mathematical or logical proof; it's an artifact of pure reason not of experience, so it's entirely a priori.

The difference can be demonstrated easily. In 1932, the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment (itself a modified version of the Michelson-Morley experiment that falsified aether theory, and paved the way for relativity) gave the first experimental confirmation of special relativity. It, along with many other experiments, established that within a certain resolution, the theory of special relativity explained and predicted natural phenomena. But the theory of special relativity has been shown by later experiments to be incomplete and like general relativity it will likely be superseded by a theory of quantum gravity. Relativity is more correct than the Newtonian physics it superseded, but it still is not a complete picture of reality.

By contrast, when Fermat's Last Theorem, formulated in 1637, which states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two, was finally given a successful proof in 1995 (150 pages and seven years of research time on the part of Wiles), the theorem was proven true and nothing will ever change that. Though mathematicians had long suspected that it was true in all instances as no counterexample had ever been identified, when the proof was made the question of its truth was settled for all time. Because the logic of the proof was sound, and it was a question of pure reason, its truth value will never change.

[Breadknife]

I was busy eating a giant strawberry.
*nods*

So it is a strawberry! I've been meaning to ask you about that. (/offtopic, possibly more TG-fodder than this.)

[Xirtam]

NO IT'S NOT!!!1!!!!1!11!1!1!!!!!!1!1!1!1111!1!

Come on Xir, you know the rules about arguing with idiots. Never do it. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

I'm not really arguing with him, I'm belittling him.

[Risottia]

YES IT IS

Is cold a type of heat?
Is off a TV channel?
Is abstinence a sex position?
Is darkness a form of light?
Is silence a sound?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4

Dang.

[Seriong]

YES IT IS

So, care to enlighten us as to how?

[Risottia]

...

It is just that most atheists are behalving like talibans

Oooh! Oooh! I'm an atheist, to I get to behalf people in two with IEDs?

Although maybe using IUDs instead would be more in line with my style...

[Seriong]

NO IT'S NOT!!!1!!!!1!11!1!1!!!!!!1!1!1!1111!1!

Come on Xir, you know the rules about arguing with idiots. Never do it. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

So? Drugs are bad for you as well, but many people here support the legalization of it, because sometimes that momentary high of arguing with people such as this is worth the inevitable crash.

[Breadknife]

How come Revelations(which had to be made at latest 476 AD ,because of fall of Rome.) Predicted the coming back of Israel ,which happened in the 1900's,and all those other prophecies. YOU think it's all a coincidence?!?!?! Baloney.

How about all those other holy books that said that <insert society here> would dominate some sphere of influence in the future... only for <said society> and all their holy books to have long since slid into obscurity?

Stopped clocks are right twice a day. Predictions that haven't yet come true might yet do while predictions that have long been forgotten aren't anybody's concern, and some of the others may well have become at least partially true, just through the laws of averages... It doesn't mean anything else about the prediction source is special, it just muddled through the odds...

[Alvaria and Cagwenyn]

In the case of the Dawkins asslick brigade, yes, it most certainly is.

[Dyakovo]

No, it wasn't. It was simply making the baseless assertion that that is the case.

Because it was an example....

An example that demonstrated nothing more than your ability to construct an example where you arbitrarily declare that what you're trying to demonstrate is true.
In other words, a baseless assertion which demonstrates nothing.

[Menassa]

Because it was an example....

An example that demonstrated nothing more than your ability to construct an example where you arbitrarily declare that what you're trying to demonstrate is true.
In other words, a baseless assertion which demonstrates nothing.

Then if it's not to much trouble, show how my example didn't explain my assertion.

[Dyakovo]

There is no proof that there is no God

Of course there is.

No, there really isn't. There is evidence that there is no god, but no proof.

[Xirtam]

Come on Xir, you know the rules about arguing with idiots. Never do it. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

So? Drugs are bad for you as well, but many people here support the legalization of it, because sometimes that momentary high of arguing with people such as this is worth the inevitable crash.

Cannabis isn't really that bad anyway.
Here's to drugs, maaaan.