Atheism is a belief.
- Thread starter Tht1Gy!
- Start date
Because all agnostic means is someone who doesn't think the existence of God is something that's knowable. That doesn't tell you anything about that person's belief in God's existence. What you need to know is that if that agnostic, after accepting that they can't know God's existence for a fact, chooses to believe in God or not. That's what makes him/her a theist or an atheist.
Japanese live by the samurai code,they rather die then surender,Im sure those who decided to use A bomb knew this very well.
me thinks atheist is pretty acurate description of someone who disbelieve!
atheist = without theism
without belief in gods
agnostic= isnt sure about gods.
I may be agnostic about SOME kind of god,
that still DONT make me believer as Im sure thats where you are headed with this post.
and when it comes to DEFINED gods such as xian one Im 100% sure he dont exist.
snake river rufus
Registered Senior Member
Does the word atheist bother you? You may refer to your religious beliefs by whatever word that you wish. And I'll do the same. Atheist is the best word to date. If you don't like that I could use the term 'Bright':jawdrop:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
No one claims to have observed that gods don't exist. All we say is that no one has observed any empirical evidence that they exist. Those are two quite different things. The most cogent rationale for the existence of gods is that since we are still baffled by some of the workings of the universe, it must therefore be under the control of supernatural beings. That is not evidence at all, merely an extraordinary assertion with far less than extraordinary substantiation. Therefore, according to the scientific method, it has been adequately peer reviewed and found lacking and we are under no obligation to take it seriously as a hypothesis.
Scientists are free to believe whatever they want so long as it does not contradict "truths" that have been established beyond a reasonable doubt. Many scientists believe in gods and many don't. Those who do, do not claim that their belief is a valid scientific theory, it is merely in the class of a hunch or a hope. Those who do not, cannot claim it as a scientific theory either, because science only deals with nature: the observable world. The supernatural by definition is external to this, if it exists at all.
They increasingly are. Homo sapiens continues to use his uniquely massive forebrain to override his pack-social instinct to advance civilization (as well as other primitive instincts such as the archetypes that are the basis of religion). His code of conduct advances right along with it, being derived steadily more from reason and learning and steadily less from instinct.
Hindsight can always be used to second-guess decisions, especially those made under the pressure of war. However, what I have read about the reasoning behind the nuclear attack says that at the time absolutely no one agreed with your hypothesis. The U.S. would have had to send the largest invading force ever assembled to conquer the Japanese homeland, and our armed forces alone could easily have taken 150,000 casualties. Japanese civilian casualties were estimated in the tens of millions. The least conservative but still reasonable prediction I've come across was that three-fourths of the population would have died, counting second-order effects like starvation and untreated wounds. It's quite likely that defeating Japan by conventional warfare would have doubled WWII's sixty million body count.
Don't forget their code of honor. I have often made the morbid joke that the Japanese would have fought until the last six-year-old girl was gunned down while charging a batallion of U.S. Marines with the samurai sword she plucked from her dead father's hands. No one who fought on the Pacific front in WWII regards that as a joke.
The point of obliterating the unsuspecting civilian populations of two cities of minor strategic value was to impress upon the Japanese that they were fighting a new kind of enemy with no sense of honor, one that was guided by reason alone. As I have stated before, this was almost a textbook example of terrorism. We terrorized Japan's civilians into supporting our cause--winning the war by Japan surrendering rather than by Japan ceasing to exist as a nation--because we had no other way to enlist their support.
It was one of the very, very few times that a campaign of terrorism was ever successful. And it illustrates the fact that history is written by the winner, because history does not call the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki "terrorism."
Was it Meher Baba?
Although tangent, since it has come up repeatedly:
The conclusion must be that the bombs, especially the second, also dropped on a densely populated city without warning, had some other purpose than bringing about Japan's surrender - which had already been offered in attempt, btw, in terms open for negotiation.
The timline involved denies taht interpretation - the civilians in Japan neither knew about nor had time to react to the A bombs. Not even the military command had time to react after the first one, the second coming within days. Any terror was confined to the few who had some grasp of the situation before the surrender.fraggle said:
The conclusion must be that the bombs, especially the second, also dropped on a densely populated city without warning, had some other purpose than bringing about Japan's surrender - which had already been offered in attempt, btw, in terms open for negotiation.
One important distinction: there is an acute difference between blind faith, and faith per se.
While you theists behave according to blind faith, the atheist position is one of faith. This faith however, is probabilistically supported by not only a methodology that has paid serious dividends, but also by a logic that cannot be reasonably refuted.
As always, life is in the details...
I don't think so.
I think both theists and atheists are acting on faith, but their faith has different bases:
Atheist faith is based on (a particular approach to and interpretation of) evidence.
Theist faith is based on (a particular kind of) morality.
Except that theists themselves often describe it as being based on evidence, which is a mistake, but it seems they don't see it.
I think theists would have a sound point if only they would keep to their dogma and not try to explain it and justify it. It is their attempts to rationalize and scientificalize their faith, to explain and justify what is actually dogma, that makes a mess of their arguments and hurts the mind of anyone dealing with those arguments.
Without those attempts, theism would be just another dogmatic moral system; perhaps morally offensive to some, but cognitively harmelss.
lol, that was the best picturethere is always reason, there is always a belief.
a rock has a purpose, just like you and I.
I agree partly that a rock has meaning. The rock you showed us surely has meaning for me.
Perhaps everything has some kind of meaning, but the meaning of a rock in the middle of the woods surrounded by thousands of similiar rocks, might not scream it's meaning to me.
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Perhaps generally, but I've been talking about it here for a long time.
Yeah but dictionaries get stuff wrong, or could be considered "colloquial" or whatever, and just be "what people call it" rather than something rational or logically consistent.
It depends on how you see it. If you look at it as argument from popularity, or argument from authority, then what? If I can demonstrate to you that what every dictionary says doesn't really make sense in its "philisophical context", would you recognize the reason and logic of it? If you would read the pertinent sticky in this forum, or maybe it's the religion forum... anyway, there's a big long discussion about the definitions of athiesm, agnosticism and theism, etc... and why "soft athiesm" or however you term it, is a logical consquence of its relationship to theism.. and how agnosticism isn't related exactly to them. I would say that athiesm is a logical consequence of agnosticism...
All the labels of course depend very closely to the related definitions.
For instance, if you say athiesm is a 'lack of belief', agnosticism 'not knowing' and theism 'belief', you'll note that two involve belief and one 'knowing', as in.. knowing in general, not specifically related to deities, etc.
Anyway though if you redefine stuff, the relationship between the terms shifts in reflection of it, even though it may not seem like much of a change.
I think we all learn these things slightly differently and are here unwittingly arguing semantics. Meh.
They (the dictionaries) do not refer to it as simply a 'Lack Of Belief' in god, that's called agnosticism.
try wiki maybe? i think it goes over all the variants or something. it depends on the context in which you're speaking.
check libraries for actual philosphy proffesor types who discuss the issue... or just accept that different people use the shit in different contexts and try to help accomodate actual communication rather the bickering for bickering's sake.
Unless that's what you're into.
lol. fotc nerds.
so anyway yeah. perspective and stuff. got it.
No, it's grounded on the assumed lack of logic. The assumed lack of evidence (or the real lack of objective evidence).
Whenever you make a object of something you hold it by faith. That you believe in the non-existance of santa. As such you can make arguments in the non-existance of santa, which you couldn't if you didn't have the belief.
This would hardly be relevant if you haven't made such a deal about it or if theists haven't made such a deal about it.
I wonder why you refuse it so much (?), is it only because you refuse to accept that reality might look a bit different than you thought?
Or refuse to accept that the non-existance of God is not knowledge?
snake river rufus
Registered Senior Member
No, a creator god implies the supernatural. Believing in the supernatural,whethere is a natural explaination, is a text book example of illogic.
Supernatural is just a word. Hysteria.
I don't bother to disbelieve in Santa, I'm unaware of any evidence for his existence. The only faith involved is the faith I have that my senses are allowing me to perceive a world that exists outside of me.
I cannot disprove the existence of Santa. But I'm greatly skeptical that anyone can provide evidence of his existence.
Theists have been around from the beginning of what?
