TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Hmm, idd. Can't find the post anymore that I was actually quoting.Hey, TM. I think you meant to quote somebody else and somehow my name got in there.
Maybe it was God??
Something went wrong there. Nevermind ;-)
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Why are you an Atheist?
- Thread starter Syed hannan
- Start date
Something went wrong there. Nevermind ;-)
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
No, they aren't.
I'm an agnostic atheist.
I don't know if a god does or doesn't exist (= agnostic) and i don't accept as true / believe the claim that there is a god (= atheist).
That's not a "choice", nore is it a "philosophical" position.
It's just a fact, as far as I can see, that I have no way to know if an unfalsifiable / undetectable entity does or doesn't exist.
Not sure how you think that I (or anyone else) am able to simply "choose" what is or isn't knowable......
Not having any compelling reasons to accept a certain claim as true or likely true, is again not a matter of "choice".
As far as I can see, it is a fact that I have never been presented with valid reasons to consider this claim as true or likely true, nore have I discoved such myself.
This is again not a choice. People make claims and are unable to support them. That means I have no reason to believe them.
Sounds simple enough to me. Not sure why people like to overcomplicate this so much.
Choice has nothing to do with any of this. Both my agnosticism as well as my atheism are pretty much compulsary.
I can't "choose" to (dis)believe in god any more then I can "choose" to (dis)believe in flying spaghetti monsters or undetectable interdimensional unicorns or leprechauns or gravity...
I did: I have no valid reasons to accept the claims of theism. That's it.
"desire"?
No real idea what that is supposed to mean, but I'll classify it in the same category as it being a "choice".
Why don't I believe in go? Well, because I have no reason to.
What's so hard to comprehend about that?
PureX
Veteran Member
No one has ever said otherwise. Again, this is about TRANSCENDING physicality, not denying it. I think you may be caught up in the idea of "supernaturalism", rather than metaphysical transcedence.
It means that the sum of the parts exceed the limits of the part's individual possibilities. What is "metaphysical", here, is the creation and recognition of possibilities not otherwise physically extant.
PureX
Veteran Member
What you believe or do not believe has no bearing on the philosophical positions that the terms refer to. Each term refers to a different position in relation to the idea of the existence of "God/gods". These ideological positions are mutually exclusive of each other, by necessity, even though we humans may adopt more than one position at a time based on differing relative criteria.
Are you suggesting that someone or something else is choosing for you?
Of course it is. You are choosing the criteria by which you are assessing what is and is not a "compelling reason". Unless you are suggesting that someone or something else is choosing that for you.
You might be able to see 'further' if you were willing to seriously question and reassess your criteria for "valid reasoning". That "choice" I spoke of comes from the willingness to accept that you are perhaps currently being blinded by your own bias, and that there may actually be better, more effective ways of assessing what "validity" is, and means to you. And how relative our "reasoning" is to our personal needs, and desire.
It will be your choice when you find the courage to take it on as such.
This really isn't about what other people claim or can support.
...is this a joke? Am I being pranked?
Literally you, Pure:
Me: Unfortunately, our physical senses are the only tools at our disposal to obtain information about the world outside our heads.
You: "Fortunately, this is completely untrue."
I'm fine with the notion that we create things by recombining existing physical objects in ways that don't occur without our intervention. None of that demonstrates that we can obtain information about the world outside our heads apart from our senses. Which apparently, you don't disagree with?
Which means, logically, that if we can't physically detect something with our senses, we have no rational basis for thinking it exists, even if it turns out it does.
PureX
Veteran Member
I am not here to struggle against the limitations of yours or anyone else's bias. (We all have them.) All I can or will do is offer you a different way of understanding, as best I can, and it's up to you whether or not you grasp it, or if you even want to. I sense that you want to "fight about this", and I have no interest in doing that because I have no desire to change anyone's mind. I learn about myself by trying to articulate my perspective to others. Beyond that, it's out of my hands.
ecco
Veteran Member
Some of us do. Some of us realize that the very concept of gods springs from the imaginings of man.
Faieries don't exist.
Bigfoots don't exist.
Loch Ness Monsters don't exist.
Gods don't exist.
Psychic snowflakes don't exist.
ecco
Veteran Member
For me, it is not a philosophical position. For me, it is a position based on a knowledge of history. It is based on the knowledge that gods are the creation of man's imaginings. Period.
ecco
Veteran Member
Hold a god over your head and drop him/her/it.
Hold a brick over your head and drop it.
That should tell you much about reality.
@PureX @TagliatelliMonster
FYI looks like we may be having some glitch where we are quoting the wrong person accidentally? Just a heads up to check before you post.
FYI looks like we may be having some glitch where we are quoting the wrong person accidentally? Just a heads up to check before you post.
ecco
Veteran Member
By your logic viruses did not exist two hundred years ago because they weren't observed even in theory.
Hmmm.
ETA By your logic the dinosaurs roamed a flat earth!
gnomon
Well-Known Member
I don't believe in any of the cosmological concepts in regards to a God in regard to all of the various mythologies human history has provided.
But note: That statement has nothing to do with religion.
Milton Platt
Well-Known Member
I do not feel that the evidence offered for any of the gods claimed to exist so far are sufficient to support the claims.
lukethethird
unknown member
Why are you an Atheist?
Because all the religions were taken.
Because all the religions were taken.
It's not a bias of mine that's at issue here, Pure. You took issue with something I said that should have been completely uncontroversial, and I walked you through the logic of it. If you have no desire to argue, then don't.
Understood. Because of what God is proposed to be, I don't think there's a way to definitively say it doesn't exist in the way it's possible, for example, to say there's no pen on my desk right now. I don't have access to the necessary information to exhaustively assess the claim. That's why I'm in the agnostic camp.
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
Like it or not, words change in meaning based on common usage and context. Atheism has been consistently used to mean a range of different things and inconsistently used to mean countless others. It doesn't matter whether we say there is a single definition, we're not going to stop people using it differently. It's up to you whether you accept that and seek to understand people or not.
Actually, I found that they weren't.
I decided that it didn't really matter what I believe, as long as I don't care what other people believe. So, I made up my own "religion", complete with creator, morality, and afterlife. It works for me.
But I know that, as a limited human being, I'm unlikely to be correct. Really, Really, unlikely. And I've nothing like evidence. So, I don't care what anybody else believes. I certainly don't expect anyone to take my authority on The Great Unknowable.
That's why I'm not religious, but not atheist either exactly. Agnostic Deist is how I usually describe myself.
Tom
I'm not technically an atheist, since I figure to be an atheist I'd have to know what real thing the word 'God' was intended to denote, and I don't. Nor does anyone appear to be able to tell me. If God / gods aren't real then they can only be imaginary.
To illustrate with my usual example, what objective test will tell me whether this keyboard I'm typing on is God or not? There isn't one. I can determine whether or not my keyboard is a cup of water, a squirrel, the tune of 'California here I come', light in the green band, a petunia, even a unicorn ─ it's none of those. But no test will tell me whether it's God or not,
And there's also no definition of 'godness', the quality a real god would have and a real superscientist would lack, even if the superscientist could create universes, raise the dead, travel through time, and so on.
So I conclude from what I presently know that the idea of a real God is incoherent and God / gods can only be imaginary.
Since supernatural beings are found in all societies, I suspect we may have evolved to believe in them; it's been suggested that they may play a part in tribal bonding, as does having in common language, customs, stories, and perhaps particularly, explanations of the world and nature. Our brains have evolved to propose answers to questions, to explain what we see or sense, immediately, a very useful survival response, and perhaps that's relevant too, to explain eg grief at death and the consolations of an alternative to death. Death as a place which also punishes can appeal to our anger or our sense of justice too.
Other evidences that God / gods are imaginary are that God never says or does ─ only humans do that. And of course 'the problem of evil', which was noted by the ancient Greeks and has never gone away ─ the existence of evil as the direct refutation of claims that god is aware, benevolent, just and all-powerful.
And finally, the observation that the world behaves exactly as if the only place gods existed was in the imagination of individuals.
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