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I hate getting into definitions - Agnostic, Athiest, Theist, and all the middle crap is annoying. That said: I'm very annoyed by true Athiests and here's why. In my mind, the true Athiests are the ones who don't believe in god and mock and attack anyone who says otherwise. These people are on the exact same level as the theists who believe in god and attack and mock anyone who says otherwise. This is why I equate Atheism with Theism. The truth is, it's not religion or lack thereof that's the problem. It's the people who feel the need to jam their opinion on the subject down other peoples throats. This is the true reason that Athiests believe religion is the source of all evil, and it's the real reason Theists roll their eyes at athiest arguments on the matter: they're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

That said, the regular old Athiests - just like the regular old Theists and regular old Agnostics - are in no way a problem. These are the people who have their own opinion and allow others to have a separate opinion.

Communism, as a philosophy, and what has actually been implemented in the real world, are very different things.

That is often claimed, but I'm not sure if that is really true. I do not think it is just a matter of bad luck that all real world attempts to implement communism ended in a horrible mess. Stuff like "Dictatorship of the proletariat" or "Class warfare" is right from Marx.

Communism does not ban the worship of God, god(s) or goddess(es), and the only place of proof is the communist manifesto, and I would have to cite the entire book to show it's not in there.

Communism as a philosophy contains far more than just the communist manifesto. All the other works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Trotsky, ....
You do not need to agree with them, but these works are still part of the philosophy of communism. There is not a single true version of Communism, but many different versions with different teachings and some of them are religions. What you are trying to do here, is the Communist version of the "True Christian" defense tactic. A Christian is still a Christian even if he does evil things, that are completely against your interpretation of what are a true Christian should do. And a Communist is still a Communist even if he, in your opinion, completely misunderstood Marx. Notice that I explicitly mention Marxism-Leninism and also Maoism in my last post. Sure, there is also a version of Communism that is just a economic system and nothing else. But Marxism-Leninism, Maoism and Stalinism are also versions of Communism and they are not just an economic system.

Atheist & Theism = religious systems

Atheism and Theism are not religious systems, but properties that can be part of religions and also non-religious world views.

Actually, (a)gnosticism is entirely separate from (a)theism. A gnostic atheist believes he knows there is no god. A gnostic theist believes he knows there is a god. An agnostic atheist believes there is no god but that it isn't possible to know for sure. An agnostic theist believes there is a god but that it isn't possible to know for sure.

Communism, as a philosophy, and what has actually been implemented in the real world, are very different things. The communist structures you mention were/are lead by dictators. Dictatorship is not a requirement in communism. If you read Marx's Communist Manifesto you'll see that the power structure in communism could be just about anything - even a democratic republic. Communism is an economic system. Not a political system, and not a religion.

The reason the dictatorship communists have a 'full-fledged philosophical world view' is due to the dictator demanding it on their people. Their demands are not derived from the communist manifesto or the communist system in general. Their demands are derived from their political system. Communism does not ban the worship of God, god(s) or goddess(es), and the only place of proof is the communist manifesto, and I would have to cite the entire book to show it's not in there.

As far as singing songs, I think you are mislead by pop culture. You make it sound as if Communism forces people to sing songs about The Party. People in communist countries sing songs about The Party because they want to, not because they have to. American culture for the last century has been devoted to demonizing communism to the point that most Americans think that citizens in communist countries are prisoners being forced to do things they don't want to do.

You should also look at the American system, which uses capitalism, and does a lot of the same things: children are told to say the pledge of allegiance as early as elementary school - a practice paralleled by countries like North Korea, the national anthem is sung at sporting events -which is about the government, just as much as songs about 'The Party' are, and people buy and cherish flags that represent the country. My point: these are not practices that are driven by an over-bearing, oppressive regime. These are things that are done willingly by the people. It's also important to note, that during all of this, religion hasn't come into the picture once. Why? Because capitalists, just like communists, are allowed to be Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Taoist, or any other religion they decide to follow.

In summary:

Dictatorship & Democratic republic = political systems
Communism & Capitalism = economic systems
Atheist & Theism = religious systems

The reason any particular dictatorship is theistic or atheistic is determined by the dictator. Same goes with communism and capitalism, and every other system that makes up the society being ruled.

It is simply easier for a person to just believe the same things as most of his neighbors, family and friends. No arguing needed, no or only little amounts of justification for own world view are needed. If a person, however, has a world view that does not match the world view of most people around him, this person will always have to justify this world view to them. This needs more intelligence than just going with the mainstream. Low IQ people will therefor always go with the mainstream as this is the only thing that is possible for them.

As all these studies that compare individuals intelligence vs. atheism have been done in states such as the US where the mainstream is theism, they show no low IQ people who are atheists. These studies should be repeated in states where the mainstream is atheistic and anti-religious, e.g.: China or eastern Germany. They might show exactly the opposite trend: No low IQ people are religious.

The problem here is the fundamental misunderstanding or misuse of the words (a)theist and (a)gnostic.

Theism and atheism merely describe your position on the existence of a God or Gods.

Gnosticism describes the nature of the position--do you know, or do you not know?
Someone that is gnostic "knows" that their position is correct. Someone that is "agnostic" doesn't really know either way.

A theist can be gnostic ("I KNOW God exists") or agnostic ("I believe God exists, but I have no way to prove it; the position may be unknowable").
Obviously, the same positions exist for an atheist.

I understand what the vernacular is, but the vernacular isn't very clear. I'm an atheist. I do not believe in any deity in any religion. I can't prove that such a being doesn't exist--such a proof is fundamentally impossible for me to construct; I believe the burden of proof is on theists. In this way, I'm agnostic.

If you asked even such a person as Richard Dawkins if he were gnostic or agnostic, I'm sure he'd say he was agnostic. He's just rather loud about it.

Please produce material evidence or testable predictions that justice exists.

It doesn't. Justice is an emotional concept and is thus not at all in the realm of hard science. Which is why you don't see any justologists and justicians fiddling with pipettes or working out mathematical just-quations.

Or more simply put, I can prove the statement "all men are created equal" is both true and false at the same time.

Another emotional concept directly related to your previous. But it is built on the observation that if you don't consider all people fundamentally equal you tend to create a great deal of strife and suffering.

You see, fundamentalist atheists believe that all conclusions that can be drawn must be within the boundaries of what they call "hard science."

No they don't. They believe all scientific conclusions must be drawn by scientific methods (that's why we call it science).

"Justice" and "All men are created equal" fall under the "wouldn't it be cool if" scenario. Because yeah, it would be great if both of those things were true. They are also observations on human behaviour so we have chosen to strive to make them as true as we can muster. Well, some of us at least. Nobody would label them as scientific assertions (perhaps extremely ignorant people).

Claiming that they had some universal truth or some defined existence (this is what theism falls under) would place them under the hard science umbrella. Where they would be immediately discounted because any testable prediction they make fails pretty much immediately.

A rational person views ... "if it waddles and quacks, it's a duck."

No they do not. A rational person thinks and uses reason. You seem not to understand that and you do not paint yourself as overly rational with your absurd examples. You seem to have confused United States' constitutional law with scientific law. Although sharing a small word I assure you they are very different and are treated very different.

We let dogs die as quickly and painlessly as possible because they have no soul. A person, especially a good Christian must receive all the medical care possible to maximize your suffering, because it's clearly god's will that you are suffering and just letting you die would be a sin. You do know that if you take your own life you'll burn in hell forever, don't you? Anyway, if god doesn't want you to suffer, he would have seen to it that you don't -- so you must have done something to deserve it if you are dying a slow, agonizing death. Perhaps he's preparing you for eternal damnation or maybe you need to suffer to let Jesus in on your death bed. Anyway, it's all in god's perfect little plan.

Isn't religion grand? Mono-theism has brought so much enlightenment and prosperity to our world.

They were not the first two humans.

Contrary to what your local pastor may have told you, the bible says no such thing. Cain's wife was one such member of the pre-existing human society that existed outside of the Garden. The creation of Eve is stated clearly to be performed on an entirely different allegorical "day" than human females per se.

Pre-Adamics are what is consistent with science, and correct reading of what Genesis actually says.

There is much more to be said here, and much more potential insight to be gained, but since I doubt you are interested in more than the immediate question specifically insofar as it helps you reject theism and no farther, I'll leave that for another day.

Thank you for sharing this, I enjoyed watching it. I will say that Hitchens debated much better than others who have debated Craig. However, I wouldn't say that he "trounced him" or demonstrated that he was "willfully twisting the truth". I would call it a tie as far as debating goes. Hitchens could have tried to offer evidence affirming naturalism. Craig should have understood what Hitchens means by atheism. But what this debate shows is that there are in fact people who build a case for theism not on faith alone or logical fallacies. So the phrase "religion's inherent necessity for irrational belief in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary" isn't perfectly accurate.

Dr. Ross is demonstrates this a lot better (and he doesn't come off as a jerk like Craig does). Dr. Ross is an astrophysicists who runs an organization called "Reasons to Believe". In one of the podcasts that his organization produces, they look at various "empirical evidence" seriously. For example, you don't often hear about Christians discussing things like whether or not humans interbred with Denisovans like you would with RTB. Most Christians would discuss why they haven't interbred. Hitchens in this debate called people like Ross and Craig, "evidentialists".

Basically, I'm saying in a roundabout way that rational thinking and religion are not mutually exclusive. This doesn't prove or disprove a God, but demonstrates that blanket statements about the irrationality of religious people is untenable.

You notion of a lack of internal consideration within theism of the case for "justified war" is ludicrous, as is your hyperbole regarding "torching a few heretics". We have billions of Christians right now. State your statistically-meaningful evidence that burning people is representatively commonplace.

And, in fact, atheists can and do have no problem with making people fear things that could actually exist, like large groups of people considered "opposing" for any manufactured reason. Stalin killed 50 million such people, theist and atheist alike, by pointing to people who unquestionably existed and ordering them killed, because, because fuck them.

And a Darwinian worldview has not the slightest objection it can raise to this.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Think of Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses getting door after door slammed in their face, or getting laughed at, or challenged. Is that really likely to make them leave their tight knit social circle related to their professed faith? Look what happens to them when they do, by analogy with this Christian missionary who lost his job and family after being deconverted by the tribe he went to "help":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Don.27t_Sleep.2C_There_Are_Snakes:_Life_and_Language_in_the_Amazonian_Jungle
"Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, his belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982, and had lost all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late 90s;[9] when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.[10]"

90% of jobs are probably either useless of harmful these days. There are not enough for everyone as long as people need jobs to get income to survive, absent deeper changes:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

I kind of cringed reading that back and forth on the blog with the recruiters the same way I do when watching a "Yes Men" action. Such narrow challenges rarely address the fundamental deep issues, like I tried to do here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."

Or here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all."

There were some easy answers th

The humanities course were full of people that were extremely confident that their morals were correct and universal

And if they got through that course without having their viewpoint challenged at least once, then they didn't get good value for their tuition.

For instance, in a course where theism is relevant, a worthwhile exercise is to ask students to make arguments for both the theist and atheist positions, so they can understand how someone could legitimately arrive at a position that disagrees with their deeply held beliefs. For example, a good teacher might make an atheist understand Rene DesCartes' argument in favor of the existence of some sort of god, while making a theist understand Bertrand Russell's argument against it.

It depends. Theism in general is not incompatible, but plenty of particulars from this religion or the other are not compatible with scientific knowledge and/or logic. So they are not complete opposites, but they are not orthogonal either. Hence much of the confusion.

I've asked several Buddhists over the years whether they believe a god or gods. Not a single one has given me a straight response which I could interpret as yes or no.

A Buddhist here. What happens is that Buddhism doesn't care. If gods don't exist, that's fine. If they do, they don't matter. So, why bother? Consequently, you'll find Buddhists who do believe in gods and somehow insert them into their practice because "why not?"; others who do but don't because "they're not important"; others who don't and don't because "meh"; and still others who don't and do, because "why not?" (more or less my case, as I think the concept of gods useful in an abstract, poetic kind of way). In any case it doesn't make the person to be more or less of a Buddhist.

I guess a way to better picture it then would be by making a comparison with politics. If atheism were to be the "extreme left" of the line, and theism its "extreme right", with agnosticism as middle left, Buddhism would be a bubble in the middle spreading into both directions, covering the center-left to center-right range and touching both agnosticism on the left side and, well, whatever agnosticism's mirror image is on the right one.

That image fits well with Buddhism's self description as (and preaching of) a middle path, as whenever you posit some radical dichotomy to a Buddhist, no matter the subject, he'll usually answer with something akin to "both", "neither" or, if your question happens to include these two additional options, with "none of the above". It's just how Buddhism works. :-)

I don't think creationists think that evolution rules God out, or at least I don't think that's their primary or most common problem. I think their main problem is that it allows for a "creation story" without God in it. It is at least as compatible with atheism as it is with theism and that is their main problem.

I don't understand your example. If it was an attempt to argue by analogy you would be better served to give a clear example where atheism was a motivating factor. Please be careful no to confuse anti-theism (which I'm happy to admit can motivate people to do things) with atheism (which I claim rarely can). Note that it isn't enough for someone to claim they are doing something for a reason, they have to actually be doing it for that reason. The Reign of Terror was done in the name of justice and reason, but no one is insane enough to suggest that justice or reason caused the Reign of Terror.
I'm not deceiving myself. I'm just not confusing atheism with anti-theism. There is no gospel of atheism, and I hope that is just a poorly chosen rhetorical device. Many Christians tie Thomist notions to Christianity, but Thomism is not Christianity and if someone tried to suggest that Christianity implied Thomism I'd call bullshit on them just like I'm going to have to call bullshit on you here. Atheism is not anti-theism.
Anti-theism has indeed played the same role as religion in some historical atrocities. Many of it's adherents have been organised and used violence. But you are confusing a tertiary concern (lack of belief in deities) for the primary one (dislike of organised religion). I say this as someone who is an anti-theist so it isn't like I'd dodging criticism of my beliefs here, I'm just pointing that you are going after the wrong ideal. But you seem to think atheism either is anti-theism, or implies it. It isn't and it doesn't. If it were perspectives like my own about religion would be far more popular with non-believers than they are.

apolitical: "Having no interest in or association with politics." atheist: Having no interest in or association with theism, right?

i don't think so

atheists are usually very interested in preaching their very biased beliefs (against the existence of god) and associating with other atheists.

a similar comparison with politics might be those who are interested in and associate with proving that current political systems are flawed, but "atheist" isn't comparable to "apolitical"

From wikipedia, apolitical is defined as:

"Politically neutral; without political attitudes, content, or bias"

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

The definition of atheism on Wikipedia is a little broader, but from the lead:

"Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists."

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

In the middle somewhere it mentions "absence of belief that any deities exist", but that necessarily also requires belief that no deity exists, because atheism is by definition biased towards no deity (unlike apolitical which is defined by a lack of bias). If atheism was about absence of belief in deities but also absence of rejection of deities, then it would be less biased and closer to what I personally believe.

This is a simple logic problem, I don't know why so many people struggle with it.

Atheism literally means "without theism". An atheist is someone who does not accept, as true, claims that assert the existence of gods.

Considering the claims regarding the existence of a god, there are two possible claims:

1. 1. God exists
2. 2. God does not exist

For either claim, there are two positions one can take with regard to belief:

1. 1. belief or acceptance of the claim
2. 2. disbelief or rejection of the claim

For claim number 1 (God exists), the theist's position is one of belief, while the atheist's position is one of disbelief. For claim number 2 (God does not exist), the theist's position is one of disbelief, while atheists can hold either position.

Capisci?

No, that is not correct, you're reading it wrong. Theism is belief in god, Atheism is not believing in god. It is exactly what I said. Just because you don't believe, doesn't mean you positively assert that there is no god. It just means that you don't believe. Why is it so hard to accept that maybe there are some questions we can't answer? There is no point in wild speculation... why wouldn't it make sense for some people to simply not care?