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[cue "Charging Sequence and Arming Protocol" sound effects from Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers]

How dare an educated and enlightened individual quote from a document associated with an institution responsible for centuries of suppressing science and sexual freedom! The next thing that will happen is that people will start changing their behavior because an unpleasant eternal future awaits them. It awaits them by default unless they surrender their wills to "some kike who thinks he will rule the world when he comes back".

People would rather believe that they will come back even if something lesser than human in the Samsara Spin Cycle(TM) than to face "some kike sitting on a great white throne" and be tossed into the Lake Of Fire(R). This is the appeal of Eastern Panth-theism over the boring life Abrahamic One-Shot(R).

It's cool to call the Nazarene a kike, right? It show how educated and enlightened I am, right? After all, the kikes are responsible for bring a moral law to humanity, right? That moral law interferes with sexual freedom as wrote Aldous Huxley, right? Therefore, humanity in its Psalm Two style rebellion against all things transcendently moral and upright seeks to implement a Final Solution for the problem of morality, right?

Jehovah, the kike god, the spoiler of our fun, right?

And because Slashdot knows there is no better clickbait than theism-vs-atheism.

Therefore, not just one of thousands of privacy cases, but one with that religion twist to it.

Proof of this is analysis of language. When someone says "I don't believe you filled up my [cup/fueltank/bathwater] sufficiently" they mean "I believe that you did not fill up my [whatever] sufficiently" but is worded in a passive manner.

In your example, if I ask directly "Was your cup filled", you can easily answer "No, I know my cup was not filled", which is what you meant to say. This an easily discernible situation. Words have multiple meanings and I'm not arguing the appropriateness of specific words, but what you actually mean you say them.

If I ask "Does a supernatural god exist?" and you say "No, I know such an entity does not exist", you have no means to determine the truth of your statement. You do not know this in the same way you know your cup was underfilled. Yet, you are willing to stake out the same position. I don't care what words you use, but that you apparently believe these two examples are similar. That you have the same quality knowledge/belief/whatever about these two situations. Yet that is not true.

a-theism means without-God. Anyone who doesn't affirmatively believe that there is a god is an atheist. Believe that knowing the answer is impossible? Doesn't matter. You either believe, or you don't. Most agnostics are atheists. As my father put it, he's "agnostic" because it's more polite. He actively disbelieved in God (or believed in the No-God, if you prefer), ,but self-identified as agnostic so that people wouldn't take his beliefs as contrary.

I don't care either way about your definition of atheism. Again, the words you choose to use don't matter a lot and don't change my argument one bit. If you take the position that there is no god or supernatural being of any sort, you have staked out the same territory as the religious who believe there are.

There is a huge difference. In your first quoted sentence, you are taking the affirmative position that pink unicorns do not exist. In the second, you are unsure if pink unicorns exist.

So "I don't believe in the Tooth Faerie" is completely different from "I believe there is no Tooth Faerie."

I think that most people would not see a substantial difference between the two. I don't think the first shows that much uncertainty. Both show a lack of belief in the Tooth Faerie.

It's a minor semantical issue to passivise the idea. If you don't beleive in the Tooth Faerie, then what do you believe in? I believe that there is no Tooth Faerie, but that the functions of said creature are carried out by parental units. I don't have "faith" that any particular parents will act in any particular fairy-amenable manner, but that having no-belief in something is the same as the belif in the no-something.

Proof of this is analysis of language. When someone says "I don't believe you filled up my [cup/fueltank/bathwater] sufficiently" they mean "I believe that you did not fill up my [whatever] sufficiently" but is worded in a passive manner. Agnosticism doesn't exist. It is a tiny grey area created by the Church to convince the large numbers of non-believers that they have different groups that deserve some in-fighting.

a-theism means without-God. Anyone who doesn't affirmatively believe that there is a god is an atheist. Believe that knowing the answer is impossible? Doesn't matter. You either believe, or you don't. Most agnostics are atheists. As my father put it, he's "agnostic" because it's more polite. He actively disbelieved in God (or believed in the No-God, if you prefer), ,but self-identified as agnostic so that people wouldn't take his beliefs as contrary.

There are (at least) three positions a person can hold regarding God's existence:

1. "I believe that God exists" (aka religion) 2. "I believe that God does not exist" (aka atheism)

This is extremely restrictive in that it frames things in terms of a single god and only in belief. The more common atheist position is:

2b. I lack belief in the existence of gods.

While your 1. hides the existence of the asymmetry between theism and atheism, every theist I have ever come across believes in a single god or particular pantheon of gods and either lacks belief in the existence of other gods, actively disbelieves in them or thinks they are a misattribution of the god(s) that he worships.

3. "I hold no beliefs concerning either the existence or the non-existence of God" (aka agnosticism)

Is a misunderstanding of what agnosticism is. Theism and a-theism (not the privative alpha) are about belief, gnosticism and a-gnosticism are about knowledge. It is perfectly possible to lack belief in god(s), i.e. be an atheist while at the same time not being certain that god(s) do not exist, i.e. agnostic.

Fair enough.

It might be useful for me to clarify my stance on a few things in reference to your comments here, now that this has become an actual discussion beyond my 3-word quip we started with.

There are a lot of different viewpoints under the general term "ID" (which I take to mean as scoping to exactly what it says, no more, no less--design by an intelligence, how and "who" being independent questions that are largely philosophical rather than scientific, at least at this point).

I do not question that a great deal of explanatory power is offered by reference to standard mechanisms of natural selection. I do not dispute that the Earth is billions, not thousands, of years old.

And, indeed, my knowledge of genetics is limited--I am a software developer by profession. What troubles me here at Slashdot, though, is a kind of automatic dismissal of even inquiring into the possibility of design as a causal factor in our genetic makeup. I do believe that it is often the case, now that the topic has become very politically polarized, that the naturalistic evolution position overstates its case, on particular issues, as "fact" when in reality it remains a theory undergoing constant refinement (we can refer to the continual modification of "the" structure of the "tree of life" for a direct example). I have no expectation that the broad structure of evolutionary theory will be discarded at any point, my interest lies more on the "edge cases" where ambiguity, and therefore worthwhile analysis, exists. And I do think that often confirmation bias comes into play on the part of the "established" evolutionary models.

Which, to me, is counterproductive and really contrary to the nature of science. If in fact, there do exist any Irreducibly Complex biological structures, this does not preclude viability on either side of what generally ends up being a theism-atheism split on the issue. One could happily be an atheist even in the case of a clear IC structure being identified, with the conjecture that, say, an extraterrestrial race genetically engineered the modification--much as a theist can consider even in the absence of an IC structure that evolution is essentially a "biology factory" which was in itself designed by God.

So, from the standpoint of one's worldview, it isn't crucial either way. But from the standpoint of advancing science, it could be very interesting, and it would be a great loss to miss such a case due to the whole category of suggestions that a particular mutation might have been designed (intentionally caused for a particular advantageous outcome) being dismissed a priori for "political" reasons.

Now on your software analogy, I think there may be an element to the connection to the overall topic you may be missing. Let's note here that reusing those "features" and their implementation are squarely a case of design, by an intelligence, that intelligence being "us". If this kind of "code reuse" exists extensively in biology, that would weigh more strongly to the notion biology also had directly-designed elements, than the notion similar features came into place independently due to a random-mutation/natural-selection process, though, it is not impossible for that to have occurred. As you say, there is much we don't know about genetics. So long as it is indeterminate for a given case, though, I'd prefer to keep the question open and viewed with unbiased eyes.

Toward that question, it would probably be worth noting a pertinent difference between "current ID thinking" (e.g. Behe) and "mainstream" evolutionary theory. As I'm sure you are well aware, within the mainstream viewpoint, the majority of complex structures arise through successive series of mutations that are selected for due to some advantageous attribute--and indeed, no argument from me that many, many changes to biological structures do indeed happen this way. The particular distinction with this viewpoint that ID postulates (and ID tends to get "suppressed" so vociferously that most aren't ev

DUDE! Remember to check AC when you post crappy trolls like this! For those that don't know, this can only work if you count every non-theism based death as somehow "being done in the name of atheism" and that's just silly.

I am agnostic. Atheism is a belief if not a religion in it's own way.

It's all very well recycling the old comparisons to baldness, or not collecting stamps, but if I may take a moment to apply a little less snark to this...

Atheism and Agnosticism are two different dimensions to a position on religion, you can be one or both or neither without ever causing a contradiction. People often seem to imagine a single line, running from "Atheist" at one end (implying that you're certain there's no god), through to "Theist" at the other, with Agnostic in the middle as some kind of "I don't know" option, but imagine instead two lines perpendicular to each other.

One one line, Theism-Atheism, as before, this line concerns what you believe, and how sure you feel about it privately. The other line runs from Gnosticism to Agnosticism, which is about what you claim to know, or to paraphase, what you think we can be certain of. "Gnostic" is used to describe certain groups of Christians in a different sense of the word, I'm just aiming for it's root word which means 'knowledge'.

So we have a 2-dimensional system for talking about what people believe, to point out the 4 corners, we have...

• Gnostic Theists believe in god and believe we can know that to be the case - the types who see the Bible as divinely inspired and inerrant, or think you can prove the matter logically or through evidence (the 'design' crowd come to mind here too).
• Agnostic Theists believe there to be a god, but don't think they can claim to know it. Perhaps thinking that the truth of the matter is beyond human proof, appealing to pure faith instead, or possibly saying that we can't know until after death.
• Agnostic Atheists don't believe in god but don't claim certainty or proof - like the previous group they don't think we can know for sure, they just come down on the other side. This is where ideas about invisible pink unicorns and the like come in, to point out just how many things we can't technically know either way about, and how few we decide we have to take on faith anyway.
• Gnostic Atheists don't believe and think we can know there to be no god. Proving a negative is difficult, but you might come to the conclusion that the gods described by the religious are logically inconsistent ideas that can't possibly exist, or might reason from the problem of evil (if there were a god he would prevent it, but we still see horrendous unnecessary suffering, therefore...).

Hope this helps someone. It'll probably be lost amid more bad analogies, but I can hope.

Personally I think the religious idea of god is either an impossible fantasy or too loosely defined to be disproved (and hence scarcely worth believing in). It seems like the refuge of faith for the "sophisticated theologian" types is in the space where we can't possibly know anything, because you can't see any evidence for or against a god that has no measurable effect on anything anywhere. Those who are less slippery about the whole thing and describe a god who actually does things we would expect to see... well they fail the test of the evidence.

No no, they don't inevitably require it. They inevitably imply it. Important distinction. I won't embark on any lengthy explanation as to why, but I will say that there is a an infinite set of spectulative ideas not inspired by relality, most of which are contradictory, so right away you know the odds of any one of these ideas being correct is extremely low. You can argue that theistic belief (either one specific religion or a nebulous definition that tries to tie together a bunch of disparate religions) has special qualities that make it stand well above these other speculative ideas, but I have never seen such an argument that wasn't ridiculously contrived. (Note I said theistic belief, not deistic belief. Theists trying to ally themselves with deists is even more absurd than Christians trying to ally themselves with Buddhists. I'm not an a-deist, but the concept is so empty as to be irrelevant.)

So yes, it's entirely possible for a freethinker to make an unreasonable exception when it comes to religion, making them a theistic (or at least theism-tolerant) freethinker. It's also possible for someone to literally believe the entire word is the completely literal word of God except for a few key 'obviously allegorical' phrases. Both are inconsistencies, the severity of which depends on how socially and politically contentious the phrases / religions in question are.

I don't really object to "militant"; I just find it an important indicator of how the lines have remained skewed. I do view "atheist" as fairly derogatory (when used as the sole descriptor of one's worldview/arguments) for a variety of reasons, but I recognize that this is still a minority view.

There are different levels of a-theism, the discussion of which is not one that should really be held in this forum since you can easily look them up elsewhere. Whilst almost agreeing with you, my point on your remark would be that it is far safer not to say "I believe that there isn't a god", but to say "I don't believe that there is a god". The difference being that the latter is careful not to shift burden of proof onto the premise that "there isn't a god". It's only words, but I think the specific words chosen here are important. It's up to the theist to define what he believes, not the a-theist.

Being theism-free is "being theism-free". Understanding that superstition is not supported by evidence is not strictly necessary to being free of theism, as one may merely be indifferent to teachings of witch-doctors.

Prove your god exists or fuck off. Do it now. Here. Immediately, with no Faith as a requirement for belief. If your Sky Fairie is real, prove it and end the discussion for all time.

Excellent points, but the points you've just made are not the ones you think they are.

If I understand correctly, you believe that being concerned with deity is invalid. Hence, you have a specific belief about how ideas of deity ought to be treated. Thanks for the clarification.

Furthermore, I would note that the concept of "faith" and "proof" are yet at-debate amongst mathematicians, who have yet to determine what about geometric proof or logic--in any of their various forms (current/past) make them provable at all. According to "Godel, Escher, Bach," by Douglass Hofstadter (with works cited therein), this very problem of circular proof requirements (called "Strange Loops")--such as, geometric proofs are valid because we can prove them with geometric proofs (or with logic, which, itself requires proof, and on and on)--has been a topic of major debate and study since before the 20th century, and remains so to this day. Principia Mathematica was written to deal with this problem (through the creation of non-self-referencing sets, and complex rules that govern them), until an enterprising individual by the name of Kurt Godel proved that the system of Principia Mathematica can only function insomuch as it can prove that it is, itself, valid--which violates many of the essential, core doctrines that make it valid at all, since in PM, no system or statement is allowed to refer to itself; thus:

"Principia Mathematica is valid becaue of X Y Z..."

...violates heirarchical system theory, and therefore INVALIDATES Principia Mathematica. Of course, further systems have been developed, but as Dr. Hofstadter so well indicates in his Pulitzer-winning discourse, none have adequately exorcised the problem of Strange Loops, and as such, no form of mathematical logic (including that used in a formal debate) has yet been determined to be indisputably valid, itself.

So, with relation to proving that there is or is not a God (or multiple):

Religion cannot prove the existance of God, even if he manefested himself in-person and said "hi," because the idea of a deity is an inherently religious belief, and could be seen with roughly equal validity as a manefestation of technology, biology, or physics; thus, no miracle at all can ever possibly be considered a miracle, unless one first subscribes to the religious idea of miracles--and thereby violates any probihition against circular logic by requiring self-evident proof.

Likewise, religion cannot be DIS-proven, since in order to do so, one must accumulate the sum total of all possible knowledge and understanding, and then use that understanding to say, in essence, "there's nothing else out there"--which, itself is a circular statement that's predicated on the truthfulness of the presumption that all knowledge has, in fact, been acquired and understood, already.

Therefore, the best that either side can ever prove, in isolation from faith of any kind (A.K.A. assumptions)--whether it be faith in the completeness of the set of knowledge being used, or faith that an un-provable religious belief is correct, despite a lack of deductive evidence--is that neither position is, in fact, able to be proven at this time.

Therefore, to state that a conversation or theory about religion or deity is, in the first place, invalid commits the "begging the question" logical fallacy by requiring the conclusion that deity cannot exist to be true, before one can deduce that conversation about deity is false--which, as deduced above, cannot be done with logic or mathematics as we currently u

"which are, of course beliefs about God, if only by denial and uncertainty) "

Being theism-free is "being theism-free". Understanding that superstition is not supported by evidence is not strictly necessary to being free of theism, as one may merely be indifferent to teachings of witch-doctors.

Prove your god exists or fuck off. Do it now. Here. Immediately, with no Faith as a requirement for belief. If your Sky Fairie is real, prove it and end the discussion for all time.

There still are not. That's why I support school vouchers and school choice, because while it will let many of the Christian Taliban segregate, that takes some of them out of public schools.

More importantly, it helps theism-free people send their kids to better schools, including out-of-state boarding schools.

Fine with me if the Poor White Trash want to stay ignorant, but better people should have a way to escape their clutches and get a quality secular education. Boarding schools are a way to escape the toxic average in this country.

I didn't have to go to school with Bubba and LaQueefa, and heartily encourage anyone who can rescue their kid from the public school and the PUBLIC in general to do so. Forcing people to associate with those of lesser intelligence and/or inferior belief systems is toxic, so do not do that and don't pretend we should be forced DOWN to the same level.

The ancients did not have a base-10 system of math

This makes no difference, and if anything makes my argument stronger due to less formalized precision. It is not unclear, significant digits or not, that "5 million votes" does not specifically exclude "5,000,001" or "5,000,120". Further, being from a divine source who would be aware of future time periods, we can expect prophecies to be translatable into current conventions and still hold true.

(a) - the passage is gender neutral and is referring to mankind, not the masculine.

That is your grammatical interpretation, not the sole demonstrated one, which is again required for your own claim. If the verse read, "My spirit will not contend with man forever, due to all the bloodshed he participates in..." would you still be as confident it is definitely not the case that males were specifically being referenced, regardless of using the same pronouns? The original Hebrew here uses "adam", the same as used for the specific male human, and Hebrew is actually the form of reference for evaluating potential subtleties of meaning.

You are still trying to apply logic to a discussion of the supernatural

Really, take that Philo 101 course. You simply apparently don't know what "logical" means. "Only material objects exist, therefore Obama will get re-elected" is illogical. "God exists, therefore he can act in the world" is logical. It makes absolutely no difference whether someone believes in anything supernatural at all for the first to be, factually illogical, and the second, factually logical. Logic addresses -only the inferences between premises-, and has -nothing to say about which premises are correct-. To argue for the correctness of premises, you need to go to some -other- methodology or source, such as empiricism.

Point (d) is addressed in the Wikipedia article - her age is not in question.

Neat. Watch this. I'm questioning it. It is, therefore, by definition "in question". You've yet to provide any rationale why you do not feel it possible that whatever (unspecified, handwaving at links is not an argument) reasons you have to make your conclusion, could not reasonably have a 1-in-a-billion error rate. Birth certificates certainly would have far more than that.

So the only remaining point is (c), for which you have not provided anything to back up you assertion.

It's "backed up" by the direct words of the verse. God is making this limitation for the direct purpose of limiting the damage caused by man's lifetime. In the case of someone who is -not- causing such damage, or clearly is causing more good than bad, or for myriad other reasons (including the amount of pro-theism posting her life has indirectly caused at this very moment), there is no reason he could not make an exception.

What biblical scholar are you getting this from so I can read up on the reasoning?

You have me here, and I am sufficient. Address what's in front of you. We're still at zero refuted, all 4 needed, for your "disproven".

Do you believe in Zeus? Thor? Horus? And why not? Onus of proof is always on the side that claims to posses the knowledge of existence of something. Atheism means simply that: not-theism, because there is no evidence that any kind of god exists, let alone a personal one that interferes in lives of people, cares what you eat and on what days, who you sleep with and in what position, and who stops the sun in its motion around the earth :D so that certain people in the bible can finish their work etc.

In fact, we have plenty of evidence that religion and personal gods are man made. The mere fact there are competing religions (so different they are all damning each other to hell) all claiming to posses the truth and the word of one divine creator of the universe is exactly what you would expect to see if religions were man made (and they are not just man made, they are man, as in with penis, made).

Actually, theism is the belief in a god or gods; a-theism is the lack of a belief in a god or gods, and agnosticism attempts to circumvent the belief question by moving the goalposts to "knowledge" -- but that doesn't actually answer the question that the theist/atheist concept poses: Do you hold a belief in a god or gods, or do you not?

In the end, for every agnostic, they either hold a belief, however small, that there is a god or gods -- or they don't -- and therefore they are either theist or atheist.

Answering "Agnosticism" when queried on theism is like answering floating point coprocessors when queried on the smell of a rose, except it is either sneaky or stupid rather than an obvious non sequitur. Declared agnosticism WRT theism/atheism represents either intellectual cowardice, or cognitive failure.

here is of course a tiny little difference here. islam claims the whole world as it's territory

So does Christianity.

As for your idea of non-deistic ideologies ... they've not exactly provided us with peace either.

That's a false dichotomy. Theism is the cause of the violence of Christianity; non-theism is simply all the other ideologies, which have nothing in common other than not being theistic (and deism is something else entirely; look it up). Furthermore, peace without liberty is insufficient. Catholicism and socialism both managed to deliver peace at times, but at a staggering cost in liberty and human development.

Communism comes to mind as an obvious example. All sorts of dictatorial idelogies, of course. What else do we have ? Socialism has not exactly been peaceful,

Communism, fascism, and socialism are very similar to Christianity (so similar, in fact, that American conservatives keep accusing European nations run by conservative Christians as being "socialist").

So do tell, which ideology, preferably one that has actually run a state (ie. isn't totally in the realm of fantasy), would you suggest ?

The US seems to have been doing pretty well with classical liberalism, and we should stick to that. That means keeping church and state separate, minimizing government services and the welfare state, keeping taxes low, promoting free trade and free markets, protecting free speech, and letting people do what they want with their lives as long as they aren't demonstrably harming others. It means rejecting the theocratic tendencies of the Republicans and the socialist tendencies of the Democrats.

Within such a liberal state, if you want to spend your time talking to an evil, genocidal sky-god like YHWE, that's your own business, as long as you don't put your theories into practice and start harming others.

No less faith in what? A-theism means lack of theism which means lack of belief (faith) in any God or gods.

I'm guessing you lack faith in the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Does that mean you have no less faith than those who do believe.

Wrong. A-theism means without theism, which means lack of belief in any god or Gods. Therefore, agnostics who lack belief are indeed atheists. It is only the strong version of atheism which denies existence, and often that involves a denial in a specific definition of God, since "god" is a very nebulous term that can denote almost anything, such as "a higher power", "universal principle", "oceanic feeling", or even that which is beyond definition (non-cognitive).

As for empirical evidence, it depends on which definition. If we're talking about a specific god which is supposed to have a specific influence on the world, then we should be able to see whether there is evidence of such influence.

I must confess that it has been disappointing for me to have witnessed the recent surge of interest in atheism. It’s not that my own livelihood, that of a theologian, is at stake—although the authors in question would fervently wish that it were so. Nor is it that the treatment of religion in these tracts consists mostly of breezy over-generalizations that leave out almost everything that theologians would want to highlight in their own contemporary discussion of God. Rather, the new atheism is simply unchallenging theologically. Its engagement with theology lies at about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature.

Clearly the new atheists’ strategy is to suppress in effect any significant theological voices that might wish to join in conversation with them. As a result of this exclusion, the intellectual quality of their atheism is unnecessarily diminished. Their understanding of religious faith remains consistently at the same unscholarly level as the unreflective, superstitious, and literalist religiosity of those they criticize. Even though the new atheists reject the God of creationists, fundamentalists, terrorists, and “intelligent design” (ID) advocates, it is not without interest that they have decided to debate with these extremists rather than with any major theologians.

This choice of antagonists betrays their unconscious privileging of literalist and conservative versions of religious thought over the more traditionally mainstream types. The new atheists are saying in effect that if God exists at all, we should allow this God’s identity to be determined once and for all by the fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religious traditions. I believe they have chosen this strategy not only to make their job of demolition easier, but also because they have a barely disguised admiration for the simplicity of their opponents’ views of reality.

In preparing treatises on a-theism, one would expect that scholars and journalists would have done some research on theism, just to be sure they know exactly what it is they are rejecting. It is hard to be an informed and consistent atheist without knowing something about theology. And yet, aside from several barbed references, there is no sign of any real contact between the new atheists and theology at all, let alone studious investigation. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology. They just know there’s something wrong with those crazy Darwinian fantasies. So the new atheists just know there is something sick and delusional about theology. There is no need to look at it up close. Furthermore, conversation with theologians, most of whom are not biblical literalists, would add a dimension of intricacy to the new atheist literature that would detract from the breeziness that sells books. Ignorance of theology simplifies the new atheists’ attacks on their equally uninformed religious adversaries. It allows their critique to match, point for point, the fundamentalism it is trying to eliminate.

I, personally, am not religious but I do not have a problem with someone holding a different viewpoint on the matter. Unfortunately, it seems to be becoming an ever more popular trend to attack others