He didnt answer so i will take a crack at it. I dont think that true atheism is possible since no living person has experienced death then how can they say what comes after?
Theism and the oxymoron of "life after death" are merely (major) elements of the philosophy of supernaturalism: the belief that an invisible, illogical supernatural universe exists, in which powerful creatures live, who whimsically and often angrily interfere with the behavior of the natural universe.
The fundamental premise of science is that the natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its present and past behavior. Science is recursive and this premise has been subjected to the scientific method, and tested aggressively for half a millennium. It has never come close to being falsified.
To embrace supernaturalism is to deny science, by accepting as proven a set of hypotheses for which there is no supporting evidence, a flagrant violation of the scientific method.
While it is true that no living person has experienced death, the assertions of the supernaturalists include many instances of dead people communicating with the living. No respectable evidence for these assertions has ever been presented. The typical "evidence" is a splotch on a tortilla (of the billions that are manufactured every year) said to be the image of a Biblical figure. Since there are no portraits of those people against which to compare the tortilla, the claim is absurd. Another widely used type of evidence involves a "medium" who claims to be able to hear the dead and passes the communication on to their survivors, who of course cannot hear them directly. This is nothing more than a carnival trick. People have even claimed to hear their religion's god speaking to them, and the fact that no one else ever hears these conversations is explained away as God's supernatural ability to speak so that only one person hears him. It isn't even necessary to accuse the object of this communication of lying, since people experience hallucinations every day.
In aggregate, the supernaturalists insist that they have evidence for their assertions, including the assertion of life after death, yet this evidence never stands up to the most elementary testing.
This is why it would be just as
unreasonable to accept the premise of an afterlife as any other supernatural premise: 1) There is no evidence for the existence of a supernatural universe, and 2) Since we first developed the scientific method, all evidence that has been tested has consistently supported the premise that the natural universe is not subject to supernatural forces.
This is the evidence you require, and it supports the assertion that there is no supernatural universe, which includes gods, miracles and life after death.
That said, if they assumed the position of 'atheist' for whatever reason, would it be fundamentalist atheism, coerced atheism or volunteer atheism?
I don't know, and I'm not sure I even understand your labels. I was an atheist as a child because religion was never mentioned or explained by my family, who were all atheists. I never heard of gods and supernatural forces. When I first heard about them I thought it was a big joke, and that's basically how I feel about it today. I'm an atheist because not to be an atheist would be irrational or simply stupid.
I myself am Agnostic, how would you get me to become full blown atheist?
Why should I try? Why should I care? Atheism is not a religion. Atheists are not evangelists. Well most of us anyway.
The majority of the people on this planet are supernaturalists, yet they manage to be decent people and do a good job of keeping things running. Obviously belief in a supernatural universe is not a major impediment to taking care of their business, so I'm not going to go around trying to convince them to be atheists.
At the societal level of course I do see much harm caused by supernaturalism, especially the Abrahamic religions. They reinforce our atavistic tribal instinct and motivate us to kill each other for not believing in exactly the same supernatural universe. But going around and trying to convert one supernaturalist at a time to atheism doesn't seem like it would be very helpful.
If we're gonna enforce grammar, spelling and punctuation, then let it rain on all.
I don't "enforce" writing standards. I just explain them and, when necessary, explain the reasons behind them. As the Linguistics Moderator it's part of my job. Whether you follow the standards is up to you.
There has been considerable research into the way the brain works while reading, and we know that misspelling and other errors in orthography interrupt the pace of reading. It's an apt comparison to point out that reading something in your native language that is full of typographical flaws is somewhat like reading something in an unfamiliar alphabet.
A busty young lady was walking down the sidewalk toward me wearing a bright t-shirt with "Jerusalem" written in Hebrew. I know the Hebrew alphabet and even though I don't know the language I know the name "Jerusalem" when I see it. It took me quite a while to puzzle that out. The lady was about to frown at me for staring at her chest until I looked up and she could tell what I had been doing from the expression on my face, so she smiled good-naturedly.
Reading an English sentence with spelling errors, or even simply bad punctuation, is a similar experience, although obviously considerably less difficult. You have to slow down and read every letter one at a time.
Most university graduates can read at least 100 words per minute, which allows us to do quite a bit of reading both on the job and in our free time. We cannot read John's writing at anywhere near that speed. So it robs us of time we could be using to read something else. Sure it's only a few seconds per post, but if everyone wrote that way it would really add up.
