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theism: belief in a god or gods. a-theism: without belief in a god or gods. theism is religion. atheism is not. atheism encompasses no dogma. No "holy" books; no lists of thou shall/shall nots; no historical tales; no morals; no ethics... all it is, is the lack of belief in a god or gods. Anything else you get from a person who has declared themselves atheist is added on from some other philosophical corner of their outlook, because atheism literally brings nothing to the table.

Atheism is a lack of belief, not a belief of lack. In that regards it is not a faith at all.

I think it would be more accurate to say that Agnostic's lack belief--or perhaps that they believe that there is not convincing evidence one way or another. Atheists believe in the absence of deity. Hence the term-- "A"-"theist"

Agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief. Atheists have no belief in a deity. It's a-theism, not a-theos-ism.

I replied to the "sister comment" on why the "common culture" view is untenable. Please reply there if you wish to talk about that topic more.

I know fundamentalism is not the only view of Christianity, but I've yet to encounter another theistic version of Christianity that makes sense. It is clear that the bible is full of falsehoods. It is fairly clear from Church history that God is incompetent or non-existant. It is fairly clear from infinite sharding of Christianity into smaller groups with different beliefs(that has caused much great bloodshed over the years) that there is no good way of discovering the "correct" doctrines.

I've read Marcus Borg and Spong on post-theism Christianity, but it doesn't really have much to recommend it.

So, where do I go to find the "correct" view of Christianity? Because from the hundreds of books I've read, nobody can agree how to do that.

>And ONCE AGAIN, those were NOT enforced by some kind of Tithe- or Widow- police. And REGARDLESS we do NOT have a theocracy these days, nor does it make sense to do so since our national identity is NOT as a chosen people of God.

If anything that makes it MORE imperative. These were orders given by your god, which makes perfect economic sense then and now. Demanding that your government structures society to see these as rights is no less sensible than demanding your government give you holy days as hollydays or restrict access to material you find objectionable - both actions the religious right frequently entertains. That they came before the institution of a civil government makes them MORE important today, not less. You keep saying that these rules of moral economic behavior and loving your neighbour doesn't apply because we have governments now - I say they apply just as much and that government or no government god's laws must remain the same. Did your own Jesus not tell you to give the king his due ? Does Paul not say that as long as the government doesn't prevent you from serving god you must obey it in every way ?
There are many good, secular, arguments in favor of small government. There are NO good religious arguments in favor of doing this at the EXPENSE of charitable care of the poor. You want to cut spending and shrink the government ? Ditch the military and the FBI and the CIA. Cutting social security CANNOT be called an action justifiable under Christian morality.

>But it does NOT mean mandating a tithe for nonbelievers; if it wasnt enforced in the theocracy, by what basis do you assume it should be enforced in today's secular societies?

And once more I call you on inconsistency. If you cannot mandate a tithe for non-believers then you cannot mandate ANYTHING for non-believers at all. So the religious right will stop citing religion in all political matters from now on ? Great, glad that's settled.

>That quite depends on what you mean by "God influencing politics"; I have no doubt that an athiest's a-theism influences the way he votes, so why shouldnt a theist's ethical views influence HIS vote? That seems rather hypocritical, not to mention non-sensical-- to expect someone to exempt what they think "right" and "wrong" and "the point of life" are from their political choices.

But you're contradicting your own statements. I think it's fine to let your opinions (including those related to faith) indfluence your vote. In fact I think it would be impossible not to, but it is NOT fine to let your faith be a reason to vote for morality to become legislature. Morality should always and EXCLUSIVELY be personal. I probably believe in small government more than you because I don't think teh government should have the right to enforce ANYBODIES moral views as laws. It's actions should stop at protecting people's rights, including the right to eat. Give me social security, do NOT give me laws about personal choices and sexuality as these things have NOTHING to do with the government.
You are welcome to believe certain things about that, I don't think you have the right to actively campaign to prevent me (who holds different believes) from living according to those different believes by law, or have me denied certain basic rights on the basis of things you don't agree with but which are demonstrably not harmful to you.
That's the problem with the religious right- they campaign for laws which enforce their moral views on the PERSONAL lives of others,then campaign at the same time against things that protect the lives of people less fortunate than them. That is by NO means in line with Christian teaching and it's why I generally get along very well with individual people who happen to be Christian, but can't get along at all with Christians plural.

>Life isnt that simple, see above. You are taking a childish, simplistic view of things. One thing can be bad, but its "remedy" can be worse.

No, I'm just expecting your basic thinking patterns to be non-hypocr

I don't mind you directly obviously lying about the quality of discussion in this case or others, because you have no worthwhile response, but I do worry about my grammar being criticized. :p

It's in quotes because a fallacious argument likely should not be considered an actual "argument", much "not-X", where "X" is anything, is nothing specific at all.

Like "a-theism". See the "Reification Fallacy".

Okay, admitted. I like my double-quotes.

I bet you'd find more child molesters among hackers than among priests. Just sayin'.

I doubt that, but even if it were true, you forget that priests have laid claim to the moral high ground and hackers have not. In fact, "hacker" and "pedophile" doesn't necessarily collide. One is disgusting, and it diminishes your worth as a human being, but not necessarily your capabilities or claims as a hacker. For a priest, preaching about the love of god, and teaching people how to behave and claiming that you know what is right and wrong and then raping a child does very much collide.

Or, in semantic terms, one set of attributes is within the same realm, the other is not.

Also, it takes a great deal of faith to be atheist. After all, there is no evidence that god doesn't exist. Agnostics FTW.

There is no faith in being an atheist. I do not "believe" in the non-existence of god in any sense that compares to religious faith. A-theism defines itself through the absence of a belief, not through having exchanged one god for another, or a concept.
Depending on how strictly you define agnosticism, I may be an agnostic, because my view is "there is no god, that is something I am as certain about as I can reasonably be" which means there is, as with all things, a tiny, tiny, inconsequential off-chance that I'm wrong. Of roughly the same probability that gravity doesn't really exist or I'm a brain in a jar somewhere and all the world is fed into my nerves by a simulation program.

They serve a PUBLIC who are superstitious!

There are near zero theism-free Americans. There are hundreds of millions of bible thumping white trash horny for blood.

Superior (and yes, all things being equal the theism-free human IS superior) people should seek separate education so they can rise in power above the mob. Americans wonder why their betters exploit them.

I finally realized the answer:
Our public hate to think, so they _deserve_ to be exploited, used, and ripped off. The intelligent are left to self-rescue from the Hellmouth of society. Fine, do that, and to do nothing for the little people who made things that way.

No. You're bewildered. Theism: belief in a god or gods. The root "a": without. A-theism: without belief in a god or gods. That's it. That and no more than that. Your definition is some kind of crazed religious nonsense.

The Soviets being theism-free was a plus that didn't negate their badly planned economy and other problems that go with a system run by a string of people (such as Stalin) without education appropriate to running a modern state. Their scientists were subordinate to ideology, hence Lysenkoism and other nonsense.

A god is just as likely as unlikely

Ah... no. God is about as likely as a talking teapot, or any other example you care to think of...

• for which there is absolutely no evidence consisting of objective facts
• which flies in the face of known science
• for which the only available metric is some quantity of unsubstantiated, non-consensual belief

It is a straightforward cognitive failure to assume that something unknown has equal odds of being so, or not. Do flying pink elephants have equal odds of existing, or not? Does a troop of dancing fairies in an opposite solar orbit have equal odds of existing or not? Of course not. And the same is true for other superstitions and mythological propositions, such as parting of the red sea, or turning someone to salt, or "creating" the heavens and the earth, or even turning water into wine. They're not equally unlikely as likely, they are *extremely* unlikely and not likely at all. Or in other words, WAY over at the "what a silly idea" end of the scale.

Also, agnosticism (lacking knowledge) is not a valid middle ground between atheism and theism; theism is belief in a god or gods; a-theism is the lack of such a belief. Neither position is based upon knowledge. A person either believes in a god or gods, or they don't; and that makes them either a theist, or an atheist, regardless of any protestations to the contrary.

Funny, as far as social effects go I would call it much worse than nothing. Not, I hasten to add, the things they claim, and continue claiming to do, as in the specific cases that you mention. (Though I've heard that many Indian folk consider that St. Theresa had an overall negative effect on the society due to her anti-contraception propaganda.)

In fact, the one result of christianity that I consider mainly positive is the foundation that it gave to the original scientific method. And pretty much ANY monotheism, or even duo-theism, could have had that effect. (It has to be reasonable to try to "read the mid of God by studying his works" , so a polytheism or pantheism wouldn't work...though atheism or agnosticism works just fine. As Thales, Plato, Aristotle, etc. proved.)

One could almost get an impression that you have a habit of omitting part of important conclusions of what you yourself write about...

Of course they have plenty enough to do with each other (with how important part of whole culture religious practices were and still are in many places...heck, they themselves claim it is like this), of course it mattered what people on the streets thought - you said it yourself: while one cultural group led itself to believe in single, higher order (an approach which undoubtedly helped them advance, as you also said), some other groups didn't have that (also!) because of their beliefs (Chinese probably to a large degree, for example; one of the reasons why they didn't have the same kind of Enlightenment is possibly because they've seen gods / world as a bit more finicky, etc.)

And it still matters. Sure, it might not be so visible on personal timeframe - but influences the dynamics of societies (as...it always did; and no, it's not some simplistic "if you want the place to be better, work to make it more secular" of course, too many factors interweave, in all directions...though it sems to be a general pattern if such trend is organic). Even on a pretty basic level - for example, my place experiences yet another exodus of intelligentsia lately... (which isn't naturally some direct response to slightly over the top levels of religious practices, among many other things of course - rather, all those effects feed on each other, most importantly on long-term results of previous waves)

While mentioning a "desire for policy decisions to be made based on science", you should also say much more directly what way too often influences policies now. Which also immediatelly invalidades your claim that what practitioners believe doesn't matter - at the least they can influence policy (plus, for example, prevent large portion of future citizens from even considering certain pursuits). That science is not a philosophy of life doesn't matter much if the second way of conduit we're dealing with most certainly is.

I nearly have an impression that what you're saying is, essentially, almost a much milder form of one usual talk of religious PR - "when something good is around, that's of course largely thanks to us; when something bad happens...uhm, don't look here, no reason to"

PS. "Truth" that atheism is a religion? Excuse me? That's the only approach which has shown it's disconnected from the whims of societies which are what's shaping religions ("post-theism" is a more precise term in light of that)
Almost, a bit (though in a different form of course), like...some other thing which describes reality that we talk about in this thread.
You might get such impression if you mistakenly think that it's suddenly about very short-term dynamics of some specific results or policies...but it's about much longer timeframes than that.
(and please, don't embarass yourself by selling me BS about, say, "national atheism" of so called "communist" countries - I live in place which had such official policy - and, surely by some miracle, virtually all children of ex Party members are baptised; and if anything, the Parties tried to create their new faith / miracles / Lenin still hasn't decomposed...which worked in very few places (one?) where "old" faiths actually gave in.
But you might look, if you haven't, at Czech Republic, Estonia, large part of Germany, France, Spain or Nordic countries...)

PPS. What was the purpose of bringing morality into this? Policy decisions cannot be made on science and hence must depend on...morality? OK, probably also. But that's another, third topic altogether. One in which religions demostrably don't have much authority... (look at countries best in positive societal factors, low crime rate, etc. and look at their average secularisation; do the same for places with the worst state of society; that is the level which tells anything when it comes to big, very long-term policies; some details about promoting further spread of HIV or gods often displaying quite horrible, very human traits in all mythologies, being largely irrelevant)

You really think there's no difference or only pretend?... O_o

Religions are of the position that they represent the absolute truth (each of them separately, which btw tells something about it...). You can of course easily find atheists who are like that (though to many it's really more about post-theism). But not only that doesn't follow to "absolute moral guidance" in this case, those people...generally...just want to be left alone. Really, everything else (secularisation, etc.) will just follow from that, no need to do anything...

Religions OTOH generally exhibit the trait of securing their realm however it's feasible (those which don't do that - vanish). That includes permeating every aspect of life, if that's possible. Getting in your way, if that's possible.

BTW, preaching means there many such tirades exactly. No, it isn't limited to private spaces or to a way not relying on public funds; if it did...heck, I don't care much what you do in private.
Prayer before a meal stops being polite if it is intruding into the public space.

By the way, for those who associate "atheism" only with a positive belief that there is no God (and might therefore be confused about the term "weak atheism" as used in my example), I suggest thinking about similar words that use the prefix "a-", which usually means "not," rather than "against." Something that is "amoral" is ambivalent in moral terms -- neither positive nor negative -- rather than "immoral," which actually goes against morality. Similarly, "asexual" is not against sexuality, it merely states the lack of sex or sexuality.

Similarly, "atheism" is the lack of "theism" or belief in God, though given the ubiquitous nature of belief in Gods in many cultures throughout history, it has also gained the connotation that someone who is "atheist" must be actually against theists, rather than simply not subscribing to their belief.

So, "atheism" has come to encompass a lot of things. And there are lots of other terms floating around, including variants of atheism and agnosticism, things like "non-theism" or "ignosticism," etc. Unfortunately, there isn't any standardization like there is with "amoral" vs. "immoral," hence we're stuck with a debate on Slashdot every time this stuff comes up because people don't realize that there are more than a few possible positions and the boundaries between these categories are confusing.

You're going about this all wrong. The negative claim (fairies don't exist) cannot exist without the positive claim (fairies do exist) being made first. You can't say that you don't believe in god unless someone first makes the claim that god does exist. The claim and burden of proof both fall on the "god exists" camp.

Your claim that you need to argue that something exists before you can argue that it doesn't exist is manufactured hogswash to try and shift the burden of proof onto the theist camp. If you have to try and set up conditions at the start of a debate where your opponent has to do more work than you do that's a pretty good indicator that your argument itself is pretty weak.

In actual logic there's no reason at all that you have to argue for something to exist before you can argue against it.

Person A: Here's a definitino for God. [Provides a definition.]
Person B: So do you believe God exists?
Person A: Nope. I just think it's an interesting concept.
Person B: Well, I think God doesn't exist. [Provides reasoning.]

You see how it was totally unnecessary to say God exists before arguing that He doesn't? All that is necessary is a definition so you have a concept to argue about.

The claim is that god exists, not that he doesn't exist. Person A says to Person B, I believe god exists. Here's why. Person B says, your evidence is not sufficient enough to support your claim. Person B is not making a claim. He is rejecting the claim made by Person A based on lack of evidence.

You are either deliberately employing sleight of hand to try and build your case, or you simply haven't grasped the distinction between strong (positive) and weak (negative) atheism. Here are the definitions again:

Strong atheism is a term generally used to describe atheists who accept as true the proposition, "gods do not exist". Weak atheism refers to any other type of non-theism. Historically, the terms positive and negative atheism have been used for this distinction, where "positive" atheism refers to the specific belief that gods do not exist, and "negative" atheism refers merely to an absence of belief in gods.

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

So, if Person B understood logic and was honest, this is how the conversation would play out.

Person A: I believe in God. [Presents reasoning.]
Person B: I find your reasoning unconvincing, so I fail to accept your conclusion. I do not believe in God. (WEAK ATHEISM)
Person A: So you believe God doesn't exist? (STRONG ATHEISM)
Person B: Not necessarily. If I wanted to make a positive claim that God doesn't exist (STRONG ATHEISM) I'd have to build an argument to do so. I don't feel like doing that. So I'm just going to observe that your reasoning is weak, fail to accept your conclusion, and be content with disbelief regarding God (WEAK ATHEISM) rather than belief that He does not exist (STRONG ATHEISM).

You might also notice that I'm saying "fail to accept" rather than "reject". This is also basic logic. If an argument is invalid (e.g. the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises) or unsound (e.g. some of the premises are not true) than you can reject the argument. You can not, however, reject the conclusion. You can simply say that the argument didn't prove the conclusion. The conclusion may or may not be true by some other reasoning.

For example:

1. The American flag is red, white and blue.
2. All flags with the color red in them are constitutional republics.
C. America is a constitutional republic.

Premise 2 is obviously false so the argument is unsound. But if you were to conclude that because the argument is unsound the conclusion must be false you'd be making your own logical error. So if someone presents an argument from God and you observe that the argument doesn't work you can't automatically assume the conclusion is false (STRONG ATHE

stop confusing pro-theism with pro-life or as you put it "anti-choice." not everyone who is pro-life is religious in any way...

Stop calling it pro-life. You kill more life by blowing your nose than aborting an early embryo.
It's anti-choice. Or pro-theism maybe.

"Gaah, I'm really quite sick of this mantra."

Then be sick of it, but it is still accurate. One may be theism-free quite easily. One may also defend their right to not be imposed upon by the agendas of the superstitious, and as superstitions are vigorous they sometimes require vigorous opposition.

"The funny thing about atheists is that most of them will never understand the irony of their faith."

Atheism is merely the absence of theism.

Anything else a person may attribute to their non-theism or use to explain it is their problem/baggage, but it isn't atheism. Atheism is a "faith" like not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Hrm. Wikipedia or OED. That's a difficult one...(sarcasm).

Well, no. Given that the word "atheist" itself contains the meaning "non-theism", it's obvious that Wikipedia got it right. Here's the urban dictionary and the wiktionary.

As far as I can tell, only religious nuts pretend that atheism is some kind of belief system. Why they do that I don't quite understand; seems to me trying to denounce somebody else by pretending that they believe something when you yourself define yourself through your faith is borderline insane.