Thread: Question for Atheists.

Religion is also defined as "a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects" . Seems like atheism could fall under that. Just from personal experience, and from this thread no doubt, when a religious person and/or zealot begins talking about their said religion, atheists do seem to band together and oppose him/her. I've also seemed to notice that atheists seem to talk about their "beliefs" more or just as often as religious people do, usually much more aggressively - but maybe that's just because I hang around with a lot of atheists

Sect - a subdivision of a larger religious group
>assuming once again that atheism is a religion before you've proved it.

Belief - any cognitive content held as true
>also assuming that all atheists hold the nonexistence of god to be true

Practice - habitual or customary performance; operation
>Implying atheists do things like go to church or hold atheist conventions once a week.

All this shit about atheists banding together
>implying a few superficial similarities make the two similar in other ways. By your reasoning, I could claim that dogs breathe and eat and take a shit every now and then, and therefore, they must be humans. And perhaps the atheists you know would stop talking so much if the religious shut their gobs for once and stopped waging war against basic human rights, like gay marriage.

And by your logic, I could argue that the Shriners are a religious group. They have a commonly defined "belief" in helping children with orthopedic problems. They practice these beliefs by gathering and donating charity, and also by carrying out the occasional ritual of riding small motorcycles in parades. They advertise their organization in these parades. And yet, there is no such fucking thing as Shrinerism. And they don't become a religion of Ashrinerists for not believing in shrinerism. Jesus tapdancing Christ.

I'm understanding that correctly yes? So what your saying is neither can prove anything?

That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying that since <insert claim here> cannot be proven and there is no credible evidence to suggest it is true, there's no reason to believe it.

Atheism is not the specific claim that the Christian god of the New Testament who created the Earth in seven days and sent his son Jesus to Earth to save humanity is false. There was not some archeologist who dug up an artifact that conclusively showed that specific story to be untrue.

Rather, atheism is what happens when someone tells you a crazy story they say is absolutely true and when they fail to provide any convincing reason as to why or how it could be true, you tell them they're full of crap. In every other topic but religion any half-sane person with even the slightest whisper of intelligence would side with the "atheist" in such a case.

When you say things like "neither side can prove it" you're sort of setting up an unfair contest. How do you prove there is no invisible magic man who purposefully avoids detection because he wants you to "have faith"? How would you disprove my crime syndicate example? You could investigate every person on the planet and I could simply tell you that you did not find them, since it's impossible for either of us to know exactly how many people are on the planet. Or I could say your investigation was not thorough enough. Or I could say they are magic and are purposefully avoiding detection. There are a million cop-outs I could invent to evade the fact that it is my responsibility to prove the claim I'm asserting is true.

Which raises another question. Why should evasive catch phrases like "I can't prove it and neither can you" be necessary in the defense of a claim that is true? Shouldn't it be a simple matter of explaining to other people how you know it to be true?

There seems to be two kinds of gods. There are the fairly well defined trickster gods which avoid detection. You'd have to wonder how anyone could even be aware of their existence given their amazing capacity and desire for not leaving any trace of it anywhere. Then you have the vague gods who are so poorly defined, they're impossible to disprove because no one even seems to have the slightest idea what they are. (But oh, they are certainly there. Somewhere. Doing... something...)

Originally Posted by acatalephobic

Two systems of thought, two methods of arriving.

Aren't they two halves of the same coin?

Originally Posted by Cosmix

Religion is also defined as "a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects" . Seems like atheism could fall under that.

Atheism is by no measure a set or system of beliefs and certainly has nothing to do with any kind of practices. Atheism represents the rejection of certain claims and nothing beyond that.

But that's all beside the point, really. This is yet another defensive semantic tactic meant to reflect criticism of religion in the absence of having anything meaningful to say.