@lednabwm Well by definition, Atheism is a belief.. Agnostism (not sure spelled correctly) on the other hand is the lack of a belief and that is the most scientific and rational.
I've already explained all this, albeit probably along one of the threads. Because atheism is as old as theism, it's called a belief. This is because, back then, everything misunderstood called upon others to believe. Atheism now simply implies a lack of evidence. Agnosticism, on the other hand, is a refuge for intellectual cowards. The analysis does not account for the lack of evidence correctly or weight it properly against the notion of the obvious fact that humans invented god(s).
@lednabwm The way you describe Atheism is the way i know Agnosticism to be.
As far as i know, Atheism means to be sure there is no god, and Agnosticism means we have no evidence there is or isnt a god.
And btw its not a fact that humans invented gods, we cant prove it, and nonetheless the definitions of the terms Atheism and Agnosticism should be objective and not skewed by opinions of the people that are holding those notions.
i remind you that scientific thinking works by eliminating possibilities by disproving them scientifically, and so far we cant disprove (nor prove) the existence of what we call a god (or aliens for example) does it mean that (based on scientific approach) we should believe in god (or aliens) ? no, but it is still different to saying that there is for sure no god.
And Agnosticism is exactly the approach that describes that, and btw used not only in religion related topics. Agnosticism is basically scientific.
@avi917@lednabwm
Absolutely agree. "Atheists get SO upset when I tell them "Atheism is a religion." They are absolutely positive their belief is true with no evidence to support it. They take it on faith that what they believe is true, and they prosthetize trying to convince others their belief is true. That's the very definition of a religion.
"Agnostics" don't proselytize. They admit they don't know whether there's a God or not.
@MugsysRapSheet@avi917@lednabwm that's because you're gaslighting them. Telling atheists their 'lack of faith is a religion' is almost as dumb as worshipping an imaginary being itself
@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm
LACK of faith? You clearly ignored what I wrote. Atheist are DEFINED by their "faith"... a 100% certainty that their BELIEF is true... even if that "belief" is that there is no God.
Proving my point about how upset Atheists get when you challenge their Religion.
@MugsysRapSheet@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm
'Atheist are DEFINED by their "faith"' Like saying that totally bald people are defined by their hair color. Give your god(s) the boot. They're just a waste of time and money, unless you're making money off of them.
@MugsysRapSheet@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm
"Bald people don't insist they have hair."
Non sequitur. It would appear that you have untidy thought processes, likely a root cause of your delusion that supernatural gods exist. I believe in your god(s) as much as you believe in:
Do I believe the earth is 6000 years old?
Do I believe Noah lived for 900+ years?
Would someone lie about what "God said" for money & power?
Is Occam's Razor blasphemy that will doom me to eternal hellfire?
Do I really believe that chick was a virgin?
@paninid@MugsysRapSheet@steviesyerda@Threadbane@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm We can prove pi. It wasn't just made up one day. Archimedes figured it out a few thousand years ago. It was one of those fun things we did in calculus class. If you want a modern belief with no proof chance of proof, the idea that the laws of physics are universal through time and space is one. Science is a religion!
Imagine you're seeing an empty field. Theism is to argue there's an invisible fence. Agnosticism is to say there could be an invisible fence. Atheism is to act as if there was no fence, because none can be seen.
Atheism is nothing more than saying that in the absence of evidence, it's most...
@Threadbane@MugsysRapSheet@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm In fact, if this really was about an invisible fence, the people arguing it's there or the people hedging their bets would be the one we'd advice to seek help, because they're clearly not acting rationally.
Agnosticism isn't wrong as a theoretical exercise. It's correct that we don't know. But we also don't take detours around a fence we don't see. That would be irrational.
@jens@Threadbane@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm
Incorrect. The moment you start trying to convince others that there is no offense, then you are proselytizing. And that's where religions do.
@MugsysRapSheet@Threadbane@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm What offense? You mean the fence? Unless someone starts to argue it's there, there's no reason to even consider its existence. You're mixing up cause and effect.
@MugsysRapSheet@nosmaharba@avi917@lednabwm
I'm starting to think you don't know many atheists, since you throw around a lot of absolutes about what you think other people think.
I agree that certainty about something unprovable is a belief, but I don't know many who claim that level of certainty. Atheist is just "doesn't believe in god." Most of us are living our lives and trying to treat other people decently, and going about it without god.
@nosmaharba@Mcdyer@MugsysRapSheet@avi917@lednabwm If by "people who act as if they don't believe in God" then maybe so. If a priest molests a child, he clearly is not following the tenets of religion. That doesn't actually make him an atheist, just very very warped.
@nosmaharba@johnshirley2024@Mcdyer@MugsysRapSheet@avi917@lednabwm church is less about the divine and more about community. If you want to meet god(esses), go to the woods. You may not succeed, but you may meet yourself or at least some chimpmunks and cool fungi.
@KatLS@nosmaharba@Mcdyer@MugsysRapSheet@avi917@lednabwm Yes effectively and at its best church is about community. It sometimes does good for others. Church based charities are sometimes genuine (there are many that are just covers for raking in money), and those do some good. But there would be a small fraction of wars going on, as compared to now, if we had no organized religion at all.
@nosmaharba@Mcdyer@MugsysRapSheet@avi917@lednabwm quite a few. But behaving un-Christian doesn't mean they don't believe it. They're just hypocrites. Lots of them are terrified they're going to Hell. It's absurd, of course. Tormenting themselves with unreality.,
@nosmaharba@Mcdyer@MugsysRapSheet@avi917@lednabwm I will say that televangelists, mega church entrepreneurs generally believe in nothing but their bank account. Their followers believe, or want to. But the televangelists are just grifters.
Churches need to be taxed and regulated. Would need a constitutional fix.
@VeroniqueB99@nosmaharba@Mcdyer@MugsysRapSheet@avi917@lednabwm Women DO sometimes show off new clothes and hats in church but why assume that's the reason they went? They go for social reasons, they go for tacit community reasons, they may be serious believers to the greater or lesser degree. Do they have some vanity? Who doesn't? Churchgoers are human beings. Personally if I see ladies fancily dressed coming out of church, I stop to admire it. I am not going to convert to Xtian over it.
The reason I 'assume' is they told me. I don't assume I know. Church is a 'club', I'd personally rather call it a Bridge club, it's more fun. And a WHOLE LOT less hypocritical. Isn't church all about being humble and isn't pride a cardinal sin? Sorry but going for social reasons isn't about faith or belief. It's about going against the very dogma you're supposed to be a part of. You don't see the irony?
@lednabwm I've had people claim to me that "science is a cult", too, or it is "worse than a religion"...Some of those making that claim were religious types, some were anti-vax. I am entirely supportive of this meme, or cartoon--and yet I'm not an atheist. I'm not "religious" either. I don't believe in "God" as people understand it. I think aspects of the universe itself contain active intelligence--but there's no creator God. Still, there's something. But I'll always support atheists anyway.
@johnshirley2024 Great post... Your position is your own, and that's respectable even if it's kind of like sticking a giant rope through the eye of a needle. Cheers 🍻
@lednabwm My position, re the cosmos itself, is based on evidence not generally available. What I believe in is something entirely materialistic; it will be someday shown to be just another aspect of physics. But with regard to atheists--let me put it this way, while there is some social value in some religious practices and sayings, on the whole humanity would be better off without religion. If atheism were the norm, we would be better off. I support atheism.
@johnshirley2024@lednabwm I’m not a believer in ‘God’. Yet I got sober almost 20 years ago when a Higher Power reached out to me one morning when I asked. I’ll never understand it, but it saved my life.
There are some great attempts at discussions here, folks. Thanks for keeping it civil. Also, remember, the historicity associated with theism or a lack thereof stem back to times when everything in people's lives was belief based because they had no idea what was happening. To them, and even now, people say the sun rises or falls, but factually, the earth turns. You have to compensate your present-day understanding of things with perspective.
@lednabwm
Well, that's not entirely wrong. It is a belief system.
We believe that resorting to magic as an explanation for almost everything is silly.
We believe that there is a rational explanation for everything and that simple reasoning will get you there. And so far, it's been pretty darn successful.
@lednabwm@MennoWolff No. A lack of belief is not, cannot, and could never be, considered a form of belief. That's like saying you're a vegan who eats steak.
But I'm not sure I can answer either of those unless I hear a definition of "believe" and a definition of "god" that I can make sense of. This hasn't yet happened.
@TimWardCam@lednabwm@MennoWolff Atheism is the lack of belief in "God" as an idea of any kind, regardless of which "Religion/s" or "Belief" structure/s it comes from.
Atheism is only a response to the proposition of a deity's existence.
Being unconvinced of a deity doesn't require other beliefs. I know atheists who believe in crystals, chi energy, spirits, etc.
In our culture, the answers for questions like why are there so many animals, or how did the universe begin are often answered by scientific fields w\o religious explanations, but that doesn't mean an atheist must accept those explanations, as my crystal friends show.
Atheists are not agnostics. They are not merely unconvinced. They're sure there's no deity. Atheists -- every one I've met--have a scientific way of thinking, which would leave out the belief in chi energy, spirits, crystals etc. Unless chi energy etc are shown to have a scientific basis. They haven't been shown to have, and it's improbable they would have. If they say they're atheists but they believe in that sort of thing, they're unclear on atheism.
@johnshirley2024@MennoWolff@lednabwm
You rely solely upon the atheists you've met to draw your conclusions. In terms of logic, that's a hasty generalization. In terms of science, it's an unrepresentative sample. but, when it comes to the question of a deity, they were clear.
If you want to play the xtian apologist game of pretending to know their mind better than they do, go ahead and be that ignorantly arrogant person. Don't be surprised when people avoid you.
@Jeramee@MennoWolff@lednabwm Not sure who you're talking to here, Jeramee. There are three people in the mix. Me, I grew up in Christianity, have studied it objectively via academia, know many Christians now...and am not a Christian. As for atheists, all I'm saying is that not everyone who blithely says "I'm an atheist" is one.
I'm not an atheist either. Something along the lines of Spinoza.
I'm with @johnshirley2024
Here.
Believing in other supernatural things, but not a specific imaginary friend is still a kind of theism in my opinion.
I know people who say that God is not the dude with a beard in the he sky. But they somehow believe that God exists and influences things here on earth. They say God is energy of some kind and that the bible can't be taken literally. Are they atheists? I don't think so. @Jeramee@lednabwm
@MennoWolff@Jeramee@lednabwm I don't believe in anything supernatural at all. If there are higher beings, to use an unsatisfying blurry term, they are a part of the natural cosmos. And there is no unnatural or supernatural or magical cosmos. (Except in the poetic sense.)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke
I started "believing in" crystals when I started studying for my first ham radio license in the early 1960s. Today, crystal clocks are in every piece of digital anything. Did crystals stop being magical, or did we figure out how the magic works?
@andytiedye@MennoWolff@Jeramee@lednabwm Crystals are "magic" and so is fire and so is electricity. But some of what is claimed for crystals--healing properties etc--is just...plain...well it's the placebo effect, if anything.
@kaffiene@andytiedye@johnshirley2024@MennoWolff@Jeramee depends on your context for magic. If you mean supernatural, then definitely they are not. If you mean exquisite, remarkable, useful, and unique, then they are indeed magic.
@lednabwm@kaffiene@andytiedye@johnshirley2024@Jeramee
Yup. Every once in a while, I see a magic show. I'll see a performer do a trick and I'll think how the f*** did he do that? I simply cannot wrap my head around the physics and/or misdirection that may have happened on stage.
Am I amazed? Yes.
Do I think the guy has made a pact with the devil, or attended Hogwarts? Absolutely not.
Loads of things may amaze us, also in science. If we cannot explain it, it's because we don't yet know how.
Perhaps the term 'supernormal' would be preferable to 'supernatural'?
I suspect that 'higher beings' (to use your blurry term) are smarter than us & more advanced than us.
It seems to me that any being that was sufficiently far advanced to boggle the minds of our distant ancestors would be seen as a 'god'.
We think we know a lot, but there is so much more for us to discover & understand. We occupy just a small corner of our universe, & of Reality.
I use the word "supernatural" because a lot of people are stuck within its shadow. My late wife used to hear sounds at night and think ghosts were walking around. She wasn't exactly thrilled when I broke the spell by explaining to her she was hearing nails popping. Later, I showed her when i was painting a room where nails had popped.
@lednabwm@SurrealSeal@MennoWolff@Jeramee Nails pop? I don't doubt you but I didn't know that. Like, the wood contracts or expands from temperature change, and it forces some nails out?
Mostly the drywall... when my house was built, they used nails to attach the drywall. You can see the nail heads sticking out of the paint after they pop. Now, because of cordless electric drills, they use drywall screws. They can't pop.
@lednabwm@SurrealSeal@MennoWolff@Jeramee Houses anyway make all kinds of sounds, from contracting and expanding and vibrations of trucks and trains (we have the occasional train in a gully not far and you can feel it a little when there's a heavy load) and wind pushing and on and on. And the ghosts of all the Jehovah's Witnesses who wouldn't go away. I warned them. I warned them I tell you. How they moan in the night.
@johnshirley2024@SurrealSeal@MennoWolff@Jeramee true... my late wife was a non-practicing catholic. Everything that didn't have an immediate understanding must have had supernatural agency to her.
But still there are some things we can’t explain, no matter how we try. I think ‘ghost’ is a handy term that gets attached to some of those things. (I would probably settle for ‘weird’)
I went through the basic philosophical discussion of this along one thread spun of an atheist meme I posted. Everything can be classified into the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. The unknown can be brought to the realm of the known. The unknown is the realm of imagination. It's encompassed by mythology if you're an atheist and metaphor if you're not an atheist.
@SurrealSeal@Jeramee@MennoWolff@lednabwm Just being alive is a great mystery in many ways. Pieces of the universe organize into bodies that look and feel and use tools. Evolution, certainly. And yet it's strange to be here. I sometimes think that we are just not suspicious enough of existence.
There also was a Star Trek Voyager episode where the evolved intelligent dinosaurs left thd Earth for the Gamma quadrant before the asteroid hit and settled there. It was the dna they shared with humans that had to remind them of their ancestry. The only problem was if they were smart enough to travel to another quadrant of the galaxy, how could they not be smart enough to avoid an asteroid impact... 😂🤣😂🤣
@lednabwm@todwest@crow@SurrealSeal@Jeramee@MennoWolff I seem to remember, not sure if I've got it right, that there's some Star Trek canon that an ancient race of aliens went around spurring higher biological evolution in lower creatures (shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey) ...? Is that right? I should know this.
@lednabwm@todwest@crow@johnshirley2024@SurrealSeal@Jeramee@MennoWolff perhaps there were two groups of Dinosaurs, ones who believed the Asteroid was coming and something should be done and then those who wanted to pretend it away.
Imagine a Species being that dumb, imagine....
@johnshirley2024@lednabwm@SurrealSeal@Jeramee
Funny thing is, I was looking for something showing an invisible ghost unscrewing a screw, but found this.
Interestingly, this could be a perfect example of the above discussion. I believe it's a bolt loosening due to vibration.
Someone who doesn't understand this phenomenon might think it's a ghost who comes by at night to wreak havoc, but in reality, it's just physics.
@MennoWolff@lednabwm@SurrealSeal@Jeramee yes no doubt some will post it as an example of ghostly action. It's in a machine that is making it vibrate, so to test how vulnerable bolts and nuts are to ambient shaking
@lednabwm@SpaceLifeForm What? No. I'm an agnostic atheist. That means I've drawn the conclusion I think best fits the evidence, but I don't have the hubris to claim I have any oracular relationship with the truth. All I have is evidence, which stacks on the scale to lean it one way or the other. But no matter how much weight is on one side of the scale, it's always possible to add more to the other side. In other words, I'm capable of changing my mind if there's new evidence that comes to light. That's the core of agnosticism. If you think you can be absolutely certain about things, to the point that you can ignore additional evidence, then IMO you have more in common with those with fervent religious faith than with me, despite our common conclusion in answer to this particular question.
Right... so you either don't understand the evidence or have weighted it improperly. I pull a rabbit out of my hat. Well, the possibility exists that I can conjure rabbits, even though you know that conjuring rabbits from nothing doesn't work. Therefore, you're agnostic because maybe someone, somewhere, someday, sonetime will be able to actually conjure rabbits. Sounds reasonable to me... NOT!
@hosford42@lednabwm@SpaceLifeForm I'm not sure what is meant by the accusation of cowardice, either: it takes a lot more courage to acknowledge you don't know and accept that something is unknowable, than it does to believe the thing is known
It's not cowardice; it's "intellectual" cowardice, mentsl fence-sitting. Also, the unknowable is not a refuge for the supernatural, except in mythology. Agnostics say they don't know, not that it's not knowable. You're misrepresenting the difference. The "unknowable" is myth to atheists and "metaphor" for theists. Either way, it's the storytelling and art humans tell themselves and each other about their place in nature.
@lednabwm@hosford42@SpaceLifeForm I don't think I'm misrepresenting the difference: I didn't split that particular hair, that's true.
I disagree that agnosticism is fence-sitting: it's the correct description of both the empirical and rational state of the argument - which is that we cannot conclude that a higher power (such as "God") is real or is not real. Atheism claims the problem is solved when it isn't: which I do think is cowardly, both intellectually and otherwise.
@lednabwm@hosford42@SpaceLifeForm That's a smear tactic: not an argument. I'm taking a principled stance for a clear representation of the facts, even if the conclusions are uncomfortable (inconclusive). You can call that fence-sitting if you want, I just don't think you should be surprised that most people wouldn't recognize that definition.
@lednabwm@hosford42@SpaceLifeForm In fact there's plenty of room from both a rational and an empirical standpoint to correctly claim that "God might be real" (as opposed to absolutely is or is not)
“Atheism claims the problem is solved when it isn't: which I do think is cowardly, both intellectually and otherwise.” - Atheism for the vast majority of atheists just means that there is no proof that a god exists. Therefore, as long as that lack of proof continues atheists like me don’t believe in the existence of a god. What is “cowardly” about that?
@SpaceLifeForm one of the criticisms of mastodon is that when someone posts a link to a website, every mastodon instance that receives the post runs out and grabs its own copy to render a preview tile. Yahoo is one of the sites that bases the language of the preview tile solely based on geo IP. Infosec.exchange is hosted in Germany, so yahoo gives a German version to us. Techhub is most likely hosted in the US or some other English speaking country, and so when it grabs the preview, yahoo gives them an English version.
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