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No. A theism means without a belief in a god. That doesn't exclude other myths an atheist might believe in.

Even where the intent is to believe no falsehoods, cultural myths are everywhere and often taught as fast. They're insidious. Some are harmless. Others actually helpful if only to provide cohesiveness to the culture. Some are actually harmful, intended to preserve power structures unworthy of preservation.

an apatheist is someone who considers the question of the existence of gods as neither meaningful nor relevant to their life.

Although this neologism is suspect on etymological grounds, one could only hope that this word will become more popular and overtake the various misuses or imprecise uses of "agnosticism" for example.

As a Greek and Christian i agree with you (with many reservations, but still you are much more correct). An "a-patheist" is translated from Greek as someone without ("a-") "pathos" (a word with the meanings of "strong emotion/feeling/passion", but also of -positive or negative- "experience" and even "suffering", because of "strong emotion/feeling/passion" or sin - the "-theist" neologistic part is just one more convenient but suspect on etymological grounds in this neologism case). So, logicaly (and based on Christian beliefs also), someone without "pathos" will "consider the question of the existence of gods as neither meaningful nor relevant to their life" - and as a Christian is important for my belief (Greek Orthodox) to overcome the sinful "pathos" (that make me need Christ) and join God's "pathos" (i.e., join God).

For the record, "agnostic" (literally "lacking knowledge") in the traditional sense doesn't mean "I don't know" nor "I don't care," but rather is a positive philosophical belief that it is impossible to know for certain whether god(s) exist, e.g., because of the impossibility of collecting appropriate evidence or the nature of knowledge/deities/the universe/whatever.

Very problematic term this "agnostic" because it is translated from Greek as just someone without knowledge. And it is also problematic because agnostics very often mistakenly are categorized as people that don't believe in God but an agnostic may believe in God (there is belief -in God- either with or without knowledge), and most if not all Christians are agnostics to an extend (based on their "pathos", as in "experience" - of God) because God does not reveal to us fully, and does it in different ways and degree to each one.

"I believe" = theism

"I don't believe" = (strong) atheism

"I don't care" = apatheism

"I don't know" = weak atheism (aka "negative" or "soft" atheism)

"I can't know" or "No one knows" = agnosticism

"I don't know, and I don't care" = apatheistic atheism

"I don't give a crap, and nobody could ever know anyway" = strong agnostic apatheism

Hmmm... being both Greek and Christian i consider ALL terms very problematic!

As a Christian i don't consider anyone as "a-theist" because "Theos" exist with/in everyone - but even as just a Greek, and even accepting the neologism "the-ist", "a-theist" still has a problematic meaning of, not just "not believing" but "without God" (that's what happens when "-religious- atheist" define themselves... they need God even for that!).

Since i already mentioned the other problematic terms ("apatheist", "agnostic"), i hope more people will at least think more about those terms, like you did (regardless of your beliefs, which i don't even know, i congratulate you... for your Greek!). And if those opposing God ever need some help from us Greeks and/or Christians to define themselves, we will give it to them!

an apatheist is someone who considers the question of the existence of gods as neither meaningful nor relevant to their life.

Although this neologism is suspect on etymological grounds, one could only hope that this word will become more popular and overtake the various misuses or imprecise uses of "agnosticism" for example.

For the record, "agnostic" (literally "lacking knowledge") in the traditional sense doesn't mean "I don't know" nor "I don't care," but rather is a positive philosophical belief that it is impossible to know for certain whether god(s) exist, e.g., because of the impossibility of collecting appropriate evidence or the nature of knowledge/deities/the universe/whatever.

Or, in terms of familiar statements:

"I believe" = theism
"I don't believe" = (strong) atheism
"I don't care" = apatheism
"I don't know" = weak atheism (aka "negative" or "soft" atheism)
"I can't know" or "No one knows" = agnosticism
"I don't know, and I don't care" = apatheistic atheism
"I don't give a crap, and nobody could ever know anyway" = strong agnostic apatheism

etc.

What would you update them to? Secular philosophy has zero consensus on the most basic ethical questions after trying for 2500 years.

And yes, we are applying ours current to the times. You know this. You just lie and claim we don't, and only you are advocating "1.0" for the schizophrenic purposes of attacking them. Which, is odd, since 100% of the norms you have you got from theism by cultural assimilation, which you then deny the source of, and you have no defensible objective source of your own. Atheism never has come up with anything of it's own, never will, and frankly, that's exactly what you want. You'd no more follow a non-Christian set of ethics than you would a Christian one. You want your moral code to be synonymous with whatever your whims are at the moment. I'll believe otherwise as soon as a concerted attempt is made to come up with... anything, as an alternative.

Religion, also, assimilated from other sources, and humans have, over the aeons, developed their ability, whether that individual belonged to a religion or not.

The religious often like to say that their reason led them religion, so you see, our ability to see the value in some moral teaching, is linked to our capacity to reason. And our capacity to reason has slowly developed, and it has developed over a much longer timespan, it actually predates the major religions. That's where our morality "comes from". It all arose together, and so I don't think you can just separate one area (religion) from the rest of society and claim that it was only religion which drove things.

Consider, I can't actually feel the pain another person feels, especially if they are living on the other side of the world and I have never met them. But I can perform a cognitive trick, and I can ask myself rationally, "If I was them, would I be suffering?"

That's the Golden Rule, and it is very old rule. The key is that it relies on our ability to rationally ask a question which then leads to an imaginary leap of empathy.

I can't feel what it is like to be that person, in their shoes, but I can rationally pose the question, and then consciously bring it up in my imagination, to try to see a story, about what I might be feeling if I was that other person. Cognition is key.

And cognition is hard. Over time we gradually learnt to apply that rule to more people. We didn't used to apply it to slaves, you know, the slaves who had very religious owners. Did religion stop slavery? Doesn't look like it. No, we gradually applied the golden rule, rationally, to more and more situations. Today we use it even when imaging the biosphere.

So atheists, insofar as they have a brain, can very well think about morality and ethics and come up with answers, and our answers today are better than the typical answer you got 2000 years ago. Which isn't to say that a Buddha or a Jesus or a Lao Tzu couldn't still best us today, but they were ahead of their time.

Of course, thinking rationally about ethical problems, is hard. It is hard to try to act in the interests of the whole world. And so people can and do disagree. But that doesn't mean it is hopelessly relative and self-indulgent. Humanity is gradually pulling itself up to become better. Now, this doesn't preclude an afterlife and so on, but we have almost NO evidence for such, and all the major religions disagree on this anyway, some say you have original sin, some say you have your previous karma, some say you can be saved, some say you can only save yourself, and so on, so until we get some real evidence, we are simply having to make do with not knowing.

And that's ok, because maybe, if you wonder that there is more to life, maybe us not knowing is part of the situation, and you'll be tested at the end, and maybe they'll ask, so what did you think of the golden rule, did you use it much?

What would you update them to? Secular philosophy has zero consensus on the most basic ethical questions after trying for 2500 years.

And yes, we are applying ours current to the times. You know this. You just lie and claim we don't, and only you are advocating "1.0" for the schizophrenic purposes of attacking them. Which, is odd, since 100% of the norms you have you got from theism by cultural assimilation, which you then deny the source of, and you have no defensible objective source of your own. Atheism never has come up with anything of it's own, never will, and frankly, that's exactly what you want. You'd no more follow a non-Christian set of ethics than you would a Christian one. You want your moral code to be synonymous with whatever your whims are at the moment. I'll believe otherwise as soon as a concerted attempt is made to come up with... anything, as an alternative.

I think you are confusing two different issues here. Atheism vs Theism is about Belief, Gnosticism vs Agnosticism is about Knowledge. My wife and I are both agnostic atheists. Neither one of use Know whether or not there is a god, but neither of us belive that one exists based on the available evidence and rational marshaled as justification for his/her/its existence. It is possible to be a Gnostic Atheist (Knowing and Believing in the absence of a deity), as well as an Agnostic Theist (believing in god without actually knowing). From my perspective, the truly scary to me are the Gnostic Theists who claim to know for certain that god exists, not because of any empirical evidence, but simply because... Their counterparts, the Gnostic Atheists at least have a view that is consistent with observable phenomenon and are generally willing to be convinced of their error with sufficient evidence. I've had Gnostic Theists on the other hand tell me flat out that there is no evidence they would accept of god's nonexistence to even open up the possibility that they might be wrong. That kind of absolutism is truly dangerous.

Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion and therefore a "true believer" in atheism is an oxymoron. It's like if you ask someone what there favorite cola is. The majority will say Coke, a close second will be Pepsi, some percentage will name far less popular colas, and some will say they don't like cola at all. That last group is the functional equivalent of an atheist. To say that their favorite cola is "None" is not really correct because it presumes that they like cola at all, which is not the case.

That being said, there are assholes in any group, and one should not confuse the views and actions of the asshole as representative or indicative of the group. And in defense of some atheists I've seen accused of being militant (my wife being one), what believers often perceive as being militant is actually being unapologetic. My wife's family has on several occasions attempted to engage my wife in religious discussions only to get frustrated when she turns there attempts at conversion (which no matter what they claim, was the true purpose of these conversations) into a dialog where she explains her beliefs and tries to make them understand her view. They view her attempts to turn the tables as being disrespectful and rude because they start from the assumption that god exists and any discussion of the possibility that he might not be real is inherently wrong and disrespectful to god. As the previous poster pointed out, there are lots of things people believing for which there is no credible evidence. Just because someone believes in something does NOT mean I have to show respect for that belief. However, lack of respect for the belief does not grant me permission to show disrespect to the believer. The religious in this world enjoy a privileged status in most society and many view that privilege as their right, instead of as an artifact of previous intolerance of different religions or the non-religious. Therefore they have a hard time not seeing my lack of respect for their belief as a lack of respect for them as a person.

I'm very sympathetic to your point (I'm actually agnostic, so I tend to look at these issue through several lenses at the same time.) My take on the certainty of theism is that there's often better support for it than some will admit, but most of us don't see a slam-dunk case for it.

I do think you're missing one of my main points here, though. I agree that a certain form of harm is done to gay persons who are unable to get equivalent business accommodation for their weddings as do straight couples.

But my point was that Christians, and perhaps some other religious persons, also suffer a kind of harm: having to choose between committing acts that may be prohibited by their faith, and not being able to make their living.

I'm not arguing about a particular manner in which those two notions of harm should be balanced in public policy. I'm simply raising the point that it's not a simply matter of "harm A" vs. "no harm". To Christians, it's a matter of "harm A" vs. "harm B". Atheists, on the other hand, see it as "harm A" vs. "no harm". Or at last I think they do.

BTW, thanks for the civil discussion. You're raising good points in a friendly manner, which doesn't always happen. I really appreciate it.

Recognizing that a terrorist group doesn't represent the entirety of a major worldwide religion must be something hard for you to comprehend then.

Technically, it doesn't represent "the majority" as in the people involved, but if by "religion", you mean the mindset, then I'd say it definitely represents theism pretty well.

And your philosophical underpinning for what is, or is not, "excusable" is... what exactly?

In other words, why specifically is it not "excusable"? Note that any general pragmatic rationale you provide will be countered just as effectively with a followup "why" to that assertion, as well.

Of course, I have no objection to your conclusion, just your failure to ground it in anything. And, well, theism would be a valid objective ground, and nothing else is, so if that's an unstated required presupposition, that will suffice.

I confess the possibility of misunderstanding. However, when I've had multiple Atheists assert that belief in God is {foolhardy, evil, insert_negative_emotion}, that does seem to be a parsimonious explanation.

I do not think that Dawkins' formulation of the existence of God as a scientific proposition makes much sense, and it's an example of over-scientification of matters of philosophy - he fails to account for the idea of undecidable propositions (the existence of God being among them). Dawkins is actually a good example of someone who makes a bunch of attacks on Theism (cf the title of his book), when if it is merely a matter of him personally not having a belief, why would he care so much? Further, the spectrum displays a profound ignorance of religious people - doubt is a normal part of the religious experience, and he denies that sincerely religious people experience doubt (that is, the expressions of typical religious people would have a lot more degrees between his "1" and his "2"). .

Atheism requires just as much faith as theism, since atheists still must "believe" in the unprovable.

Atheism is an absence of belief, not a belief in absence. Few people who self-identify as "atheist" have an affirmative belief/faith in the non-existence of a deities. Atheism is just the default position of an absence of belief through faith. It doesn't require "proof" of anything.

(Atheism requires just as much faith as theism, since atheists still must "believe" in the unprovable.)

Nooooope.

For example, it takes more faith to believe that there is a psychic duck flying through space deliberately diverting meteors from hitting the Earth so that Earth will have time to develop civilization, than it does to believe that there is no such duck, even though the lack of a psychic space duck is not disprovable because he could always have just used his psychic powers to erase the memory of anybody who tries to make an observation. A being of logic would not include the possibility of the psychic duck just because it had heard of the concept -- that would be biasing its decisions toward old ideas.

Your statement is common, but it's a variation on saying that something has a 50% chance of being broken: either it is broker, or it isn't. It's a facile analysis and it's unfair to both atheists and theists.

Regardless, everybody has to agree on definitions. Wikipedia says:

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[3][4][5] Most inclusively, atheism is the absence of belief that any deities exist.[4][5][6][7] Atheism is contrasted with theism,[8][9] which, in its most general form, is the belief that at least one deity exists.[9][10]

The "most inclusive" definition is not an aberration or a vandalism, and is the one used here.

On agnosticism:

Agnosticism is the view that the truth values of certain claims – especially metaphysical and religious claims such as whether or not God, the divine or the supernatural exist – are unknown and perhaps unknowable.

People aren't born believing that they can't possibly know whether or not God exists, that's a conclusion that rational people make.

As corollary, agnosticism is not incompatible with atheism and in the strictest sense isn't even incompatible with theism or the stricter senses of atheism (in that you can acknowledge a truth value as strictly unknowable without regarding it as a 50/50 even-money option, like the psychic duck).

An atheist is one lacking theism.

See this rock? It's an atheist rock.

I'd like to know how the submitter arrived at the conclusion that AI would be "born atheist". Seems to me that if there is a "default" stance on the existence of god -- whether human or AI -- it would be one of the two neutral possibilities: agnostic or apathetic. The two non-neutral possibilities (theist and atheist) would require a deliberate "indoctrination" (programming), rather than a natural predisposition. Since AI itself is founded on logic, my conclusion is that AI is agnostic by default (i.e. stance is indeterminable), which is the only stance out of the four possibilities that can be determined purely through logic. (Atheism requires just as much faith as theism, since atheists still must "believe" in the unprovable.)

Then you go onto assert that it is an active attempt to negate a certain belief

No idea where you got this from.

I do like "No god is more likely than some god, given no evidence" as it clearly shows how atheism makes as much sense as theism.

The issue isn't "theism". The issue Einstein points to is the limits of "reason" because all reasoning is based on assumption and emotions and a choice of reasoning tools -- and none of those can be based on pure "reason". See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Granted, we can argue about whether the Judeo-Christian tradition is the best source of these (a weak point of what he said, although one can read his reference there as an example rather than prescriptive) -- or even which version of it given 100s of sects, many disagreeing about various things. But we can't avoid the issue of making assumptions or basing decisions ultimately on feelings (or, at least, feelings interacting with reason).

Firstly, that sentence doesn't parse. You can't "not believe if something exists or not", it's like saying "I don't believe if the light is on or off"

Nonsense. You can see whether the light is on or not. We don't even know if god ever existed, let alone whether he is alive or not.

I think what you mean is - "That's because I don't know if a god(s) exists or not" - In this case, it is a statement of knowledge, not belief - i.e. Agnosticism.

There's more to it than that, I don't know if a god can exist or not. That's why I'm not an atheist, but an agnostic. I don't claim to have knowledge that no one on earth possesses. Atheism is just as arrogant as theism.

Yes, and you'd be a theist. However, without contradicting oneself, can you pray to a god without believing that one exists?

That is irrelevant. The question, as asked, does not reveal whether one is not a theist, only if they are. You could just ask if I'm a theist. But I already answered that question, so you're just being redundant.

What a crap. Russell has debunked this lame justification of theism before Einstein even thought about it.

Just because someone is a famous for X doesn't mean that his opinions about Y should have more weight.

So, does that argument support theism, atheism, or neither?

It supports the wonder and joy of being human. Further affiant sayeth not,

It's hubris to think that because we don't have an answer, one does not exist.

So, does that argument support theism, atheism, or neither?