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I think that was actually Christopher Hitchens that had the awakening to anti-theism because of his teacher talking about the colors being green.

My own education was stultified because of that nonsense. I read several quackish books on evolution trying to resolve the disparity between nature and my religion, when I could have been learning something useful or at least been exposed to some valid texts on the subject. With the wide availability of the internet it is probably less a problem, but I still resent the fact that no useful counter-arguments were made in science class to rebut the garbage spewed from the pulpit.

I never actually mentioned what "my construction of God" was

I didn't mention what my construction of Santa Claus was. Do you still believe in that?

You missed my point. Why?

My guess is, too busy being pissed that someone would have the gall to "defend" an institution you personally have chosen to "be against."

For clarification, I have no problem with people choosing to follow atheism or theism - what I take issue with is the claims of absolute certainty that a lot of people, atheist and theist alike, seem to have in regards to topics in which there can be no absolute certainty, such as the existence of an "overbeing," so to speak.

When someone like TechyImmigrant here says, "there is no God," they are making the exact same bullshit, unprovable point as the people they're trying to argue against - arguing a certainty when there can be none. It's wholly non-scientific, either way.

All theist communities are like that. Actually, that's what theism is about in the first place! The sooner we get rid of this crap, the better for everyone.

But it gives plus one happiness and two gold and culture for every religious building.

The muslim word is full of stupid jerks who use religion and the beliefs of other people to serve their own agenda

All theist communities are like that. Actually, that's what theism is about in the first place! The sooner we get rid of this crap, the better for everyone.

You make the classic fallacy of shifting (or nullifying) the burden of proof. It isn't the job of the defendant to prove innocence, it's the job of the prosecutor to prove guilt. They are NOT on equal footing...please link to peer reviewed study on God (tm), or for that matter, any sound evidence period. You conflate atheism with anti-theism, and the inability to provide an explanation grants ZIP to your claim to a god.

Not all Christians believe Genesis as fact.

Sure, the morons pushing their creationist agenda *happen* to be Christians, but they also probably *happen* to be white. That doesn't say anything about Christians any more than it says something about whites.

If you want to argue that this creation nonsense is pushing "theism" on people then feel free, but back the fuck off of Jesus. He had as much to say about evolution as he did about homosexuality: Exactly nothing.

I have heard this creationist rubbish for years and I am still waiting for just one (1) piece of evidence to be produced. There is more evidence to show Earth was formed in the accretion disk of the sun and life as we know it developed through the process of evolution than that the Earth was terraformed and populated. The idea of theism is nice but you really should stick to the truth. - we don't know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Actually, I simply think there is no reason to engage in this particular debate because it is of no value

But it is of value. Look back a few decades; remember how repressed and "in the closet" atheism was? Most kids were inculcated with religion by default because that's all that really made it into the public square.

Now, through the auspices of high profile objectors like these, and the rising tide of audibility on the networks, tons of kids know that theism is a subject of great controversy, not one that is settled, as the religionists would very much like them to believe.

The huge holes in theistic reasoning are now on the table, and subject to dissection by some of the finest minds out there. Baseless-assumptions-as-axioms are revealed for what they are; the cries of "but you don't know how X happened" are revealed as minefields constructed by the god of the gaps ideas; the idea that it is ok to have questions with no obvious answer is beginning to percolate about the population without inspiring fear. No longer do all citizens feel that they have to profess a theistic viewpoint in order to be socially adequate. Even the false middle ground of agnosticism is eroding, and all of this is not just good, it's great.

No, a debate like this probably won't move a single member of its local audience to the opposite view; but it serves to strengthen the atheist standing and presence in the community and that makes it very valuable indeed. Here, on Reddit, etc., this debate is very much an important topic right now, in the sense that lots and lots of attention is focused that way. All good, my friend, all good.

It's been my experience that most anyone who brings up their atheism is very vocal in their gnosticism; usually to the point of being an intolerant dickhead about it.

Well, when you grow up surrounded by theists, who are very vocal about their theism, usually to the point of being an intolerant dickhead about it, some atheists just get so annoyed by it all that they end up becoming dickheads themselves. Not that that justifies their dickheadedness towards people who do not deserve it, but it does provide an understanding with which to break the dickhead cycle.

Not only that, it has no predictive or explanatory power. It in no way explains which theism defines the correct creation myth. It merely asserts the existence of a Creator.

People on this planet, by and large, are NOT talking about a billowy, abstract creator-deity. They are talking about the dude who made Moses make the box from Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Theism is a much more defensible view because it's mild and doesn't make predictions that contradict observation. It also doesn't make any predictions that can be confirmed by observation, and is therefore outside the realm of what's knowable.

(a) Everybody believes there is no teapot, and therefore to use the teapot as analogous to a deity is to invoke a strawman.

(b) The teapot works by placing an everyday object in an absurd context. As does the unicorn (itself a derivative of a horse). Thus, the teapot looks like a good analogy to an atheist (like Russell), because atheists believe that humanity has created God in their own image, and thus conceptualise God as a kind of man set in an absurd context (old man in the sky and the like). Theists don't believe that humanity created God in their own image, and don't conceptualise the deity as being like, or derived from, a man or woman. Thus, it is a form of petitio principii - assuming the conclusion as a premise.

Note that there are other issues with this line of argument as well - not that this applies to you, since you didn't explicitly draw the analogy in question. Neither did Russell, at least not entirely, he was arguing against the notion that Atheists need to provide proof or it can be assumed that a deity exists (whether or not anybody made that argument is besides the point). Which in a limited way is true - Atheism, like Theism, is a belief and neither is proved empirically, and neither proves the other by lack of proof, that would be fallacy.

Do you not understand the difference between Theism and Gnosis ??

Atheism (without belief) < ----- > Theism (with belief)

A-Gnostic (without knowledge)
^
|
|
|
V
Gnostic (with knowledge)

"but it's ludicrous to call state-authorized murder on religious grounds as in the "same ballpark" as some allusions to theism in some textbooks"

    No it isn't ludicrous because the latter(allusions) always leads to the former(murder) eventually.

I'm as secular as the next atheist, but it's ludicrous to call state-authorized murder on religious grounds as in the "same ballpark" as some allusions to theism in some textbooks. They're both bad things, but to pretend that they're the same degree of bad is delusional to the point where it would make one certifiable.

Um. Ok... so why are you bringing this nonsense here? Seriously? Do you have anything to contribute to the article without having to go out of your way to turn this into a discussion about theism vs atheism derp?
 
There's a time and place for that and much to the dismay of many here it's not in most of the science articles presented on Slashdot. The only reason you're not modded down for making this kind of bad noise is because many here would take it as a sign that someone is a theist and disagrees with you. The fact of the matter is that your post brought nothing but more pointless static to an already undermined scientific community on Slashdot.
 
Wanna bash religion? Fine, do it in a religious forum where you'll actually hit your target audience. Want to discuss science? Fantastic! Can you do it without having to push your agenda every post? That would be really great.
 
You haven't said anything here that we haven't heard tens of thousands of times before. We know there will be young earth creationists for the rest of our lifetimes. What of it? We can't do anything about it and your post isn't doing anything about it either. Go to where they are and have a blast.
 
Now, if you have nothing to say about the science presented here please just shut up and move along. It's gotten really old, FFS.
 
And no, don't take this as a defense of theism. I'm just sick and tired of the sound byte sized arguments and memes that have been beaten to death. Save that kind of thing for Facebook. Most of the people I see like you have no clue how to discuss science for real. You go around with your Science Channel education and act like you're part of the legitimate scientific community but you don't know a micron from a parsec. Maybe that's not really you but you sure do come off that way.

He could be asking for rocky road ice cream on Fridays. It still has nothing to do with theism or atheism.

Didnt some famous dude murder several million people for their religion about 70 years ago? Doesnt one of the biggest countries in the world right now specifically persecute religious people (requiring an oath of atheism to even be permitted into the state party)?

But pinning anti-religion actions on all of atheism is no different than pinning the acts of Islam on all of theism. You don't see many atheists blaming, say, Catholicism for the actions of the Taliban

As I recall, Dawkins in the very first page of God Delusion pins all of the worlds evils on "religion" at large. Im not seeing a terribly big difference between that and what you describe.

and the official state religion is atheism.

Just being pedantic but a state religion cannot be atheism because atheism is by definition the absence of belief that deities exist. You can accurately say that there is no state religion or that theist religions are officially discouraged/suppressed. But atheism is not and cannot be a religion in any sort of conventional meaning of the term.

Your definition is wrong. A religion is any belief based on faith. Atheism is a belief that no god exists, something that cannot be proven empirically, and thus Atheism is a religion. It's not an "absence of belief", that would be agnosticism.

No, that's not agnosticism. Agnosticism is the position that we cannot know any answer to the question of 'Is there a God?'. Gnosticism, the opposite, asserts that yes, we can answer that question meaningfully.

Atheism is the lack of belief in a theistic deity, full stop. It's an absence, a nullification, not an affirmative preposition.

I've yet to meet the strawman gnostic atheist you present here. Even Hitchens would preface his attacks on theism with the statement that he cannot know there is no God.

Besides, Atheism clearly meets the "Seven Dimensions of Religion", defined by Ninian Smart (a framework accepted by anthropologists and historians): narrative, experiential, social, ethical, doctrinal, ritual and material.

Of those seven, atheism fails to define a narrative, only involves experience in noting the very lack of it in terms of the divine, has no doctrine, and has no ritual. It is defined by the very absence of those things.

A religion is any belief based on faith.

A religion is an organized collection of beliefs related to sacred things which may or may not include a belief in a god. Faith is a typical (almost ubiquitous in fact) but not required component of a religion. Something can be sacred without requiring faith though in practice this is unusual.

Atheism is a belief that no god exists, something that cannot be proven empirically, and thus Atheism is a religion.

The fact one believes in something that cannot be proven empirically does not make that something a religion. A religion isn't defined merely by the belief (or lack thereof) in a deity. A religion can (and some do) incorporate atheism but holding views of atheism does not make a those views a religion. You can be religious without belief in a god and belief in a god does not make one automatically religious. While it is common for theists to be religious and atheists to be irreligious the reverse is also true in some cases. The concepts of (ir)religion and (a)theism are orthogonal to each other. Much like debates between science and faith, people keep getting the concepts confused and arguing about the wrong things.

It's not an "absence of belief", that would be agnosticism.

It is not an absence of belief but rather a withholding of judgement. You can believe in the non-existence of a god while not denying the possibility one exists which makes you both atheistic and agnostic at the same time. Conversely you can believe in the existence of a god while being unsure of the actual existence of one which makes you both theistic and agnostic at the same time. There are other forms of agnosticism as well. Your definition is overly simplistic.

Atheism clearly meets the "Seven Dimensions of Religion", defined by Ninian Smart (a framework accepted by anthropologists and historians):

Looking them over I see no fit whatsoever with that framework and atheism because religion and theism as I've said before are orthogonal concepts.