Attitudes Toward Atheists & Beliefs About Atheists
- Thread starter StrangerInAStrangeLand
- Start date
The definitions of atheist, agnostic, & believer seem very clear. Yet there are those who claim otherwise.
In this & various other Threads, I think that a Poster should mention his beliefs up front.
I am a Quaker (aka Society of Friends). They are very behavior oriented & accept me as a member in spite of knowing that I an atheist. They have no clergy. Their meetings for worship consist of sitting in silence for an hour. Anyone who feels they have something worthwhile to say, stand up & says it.
BTW: A Quaker joke.
At a Quaker funeral there was silence for circa 35 minutes, when a person stood up & said
Five minutes later, a member stood up & said
I believe that one should accept a person’s stated view of his/her beliefs.
To me it seems arrogant as well as silly to claim that a person's belief is different from what that person claims.
I once Posted in another forum that an agnostic is a cowardly atheist. While I consider there to be some truth in the remark, it is contrary to the definition of agnostic & I accept any person’s claim to be agnostic.
Baldee Post 17
Ted Grant Post 2
In this & various other Threads, I think that a Poster should mention his beliefs up front.
I am an atheist with no silly qualifications. I do not believe in the existence of any god.
I am a Quaker (aka Society of Friends). They are very behavior oriented & accept me as a member in spite of knowing that I an atheist. They have no clergy. Their meetings for worship consist of sitting in silence for an hour. Anyone who feels they have something worthwhile to say, stand up & says it.
BTW: A Quaker joke.
At a Quaker funeral there was silence for circa 35 minutes, when a person stood up & said
Five minutes later, a member stood up & said
I believe that one should accept a person’s stated view of his/her beliefs.
To me it seems arrogant as well as silly to claim that a person's belief is different from what that person claims.
I once Posted in another forum that an agnostic is a cowardly atheist. While I consider there to be some truth in the remark, it is contrary to the definition of agnostic & I accept any person’s claim to be agnostic.
Baldee Post 17
Iceaura Post 20
Ted Grant Post 2
The above 3 Posts seem arrogant as well as silly. Each claims to know that some Poster’s beliefs are different from what they claim.
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1 problem is it is too difficult to believe theists actually believe what they claim to believe. It is too absurd, arrogant, stupid, silly, ignorant, cruel & contradictory. I have a problem with people trying to turn their backs on reality. Specially when they try to force or coerce that on others. People who cannot face reality criticize those who can. Tho I do not approve of drug abuse, trying to escape or find some relief that way makes more sense to me than believing or pretending to believe in cruel insecure narcissistic bully gods who will not even show up.
It is mainly theists tho who will not accept others' views.
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on the contrary.
First, you seem beholden to the notion that agnosticism is on the same measure as theism and atheism, somewhere in the middle.
As such you think someone being considered agnostic is to claim they aren't what they profess to be with regard their theism and atheism.
This is not necessarily true.
Agnosticism is a matter of what one knows, an epistemological position.
Theism and atheism are ontological positions.
By noting that one is an agnostic or not does not alter whether or not they believe in God.
Nor is it arrogant, nor silly, to simply note that in my experience most theists are actually agnostic.
You have not had my experiences.
You have not lived my life.
And so I repeat: in my experience many theists are actually agnostic.
If you wish to revisit the many theists I have discussed with, feel free.
But the only arrogant and silly claim I see is you claiming that those exampled quotes are silly and arrogant.
I'd suggest you first learn what agnosticism is, and how it stands on a different axis to theism and atheism, before you set yourself up for a further fall.
kx000
Valued Senior Member
Because theists are not allowed to preach in some forums & their claims are not accepted without proof & their arrogant assumptions about atheists are refuted & there are more atheists than theists, theists feel they are not treated right.
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Honestly, do you want to get cheated on? Or do you just want to lie? And your just a bit of a narcacist.
You don't believe
You don't believe in life
Your damned?
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My post makes no such claim.
I accept completely the beliefs exactly as described, and simply note that the label applied to them varies according to context - that the beliefs of the typical self-labeled agnostic, exactly as described and without alteration, would be labeled atheistic if they were not being challenged by a theist within a theist-dominated culture.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
Typical Christian bullshit. I don't need to search the universe to be reasonably certain there are no magical unicorns. Am I certain? No, there is always a degree of uncertainty. Then I hear an argument from complexity, argument from incredulity. What miracle has ever been recorded? Please spare us this simple analysis, I think we are beyond it.
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I would not be surprised at unicorns existing in a galaxy far away but god is claimed to be everywhere & to actually do things here.
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Stranger: What was I doing before birth?
Stranger: Why was I born?
Why are you living?
Why will you die.
Why do you believe in atheism?
I did not exist.
Stranger: Why was I born?
You need to take a course in biology.
Again you need to take a course in biology: My mother supplied an ovum with half the nucleus required for me to exist & my father supplied sperm with the other half.
Why will you die.
Because humans as well as all other mammals are mortal.
What will happen to you after death?
Oblivion: It would be nice to be pleasantly surprised, but I do not expect it.
Why do you believe in atheism?
I consider the Christian god & all other gods to be mythical creatures. I kind of liked the Greek pantheon, but they are mythical also.
But this only reiterates one's detachment from others. The history of this question, "why", is pretty well established; the need to reframe it into another context in order to pretend an answer makes its own point.
Anti-identification at this point is sloth, much like recontextualizing for self-denigration by retort.
Learn to think for yourself. Don't wait for others to say something in order to decide what you don't believe in.
Take the ritual out of animal slaughter and you just make the meat industry more efficient and pave the way for factory farms.
And now "sacrifice" - a religious term, largely theistic religions - is set aside, and "slaughter" substituted.
Is this supposed to be overlooked, this tactic of the Abrahamic?
Not the ones who capitalize the word.
What is pitched in this thread is not what I would call childish because I would not so denigrate children; it is balbutive beyond infantile.
Here are a couple ideas about thinking for oneself:
• Learning the history and philosophy of what one purports to criticize.
• Setting an extraordinary low bar by finding the most simplistic dialogue possible, thereby letting some idiot one does not trust set the terms of discourse, and take part in a two-bit, identity-driven back and forth between simplistic religionism and a clueless pretense of atheism.
• Setting an extraordinary low bar by finding the most simplistic dialogue possible, thereby letting some idiot one does not trust set the terms of discourse, and take part in a two-bit, identity-driven back and forth between simplistic religionism and a clueless pretense of atheism.
The thing is this: If I just spent decades arguing that, for instance, a particular range of Christendom is wrong about the history and philosophy, i.e., theology, it asserts as identity, why under the sun would I ask anyone else who does not necessarily believe this wrong thing to answer for believing it? Under what circumstances would I let these people I have every reason according to the historical record we have to believe are wrong actually define anything under the sun?
If I want the SBC to answer for the SBC, then I might challenge the SBC. If I want Catholics to answer for Catholics, then I have no reason to challenge them according to whatever SBC says. If I want Catholics to answer for SBC, well, that would be my damn problem.
Should I have the chance, sure, I would ask Kim Davis or Roy Moore to explain themselves as such, but there would be no purpose in demanding Panchen Lama answer for Kim Davis.
The crazy preacher↗ handing out Chick tracts in Hawai'i isn't anyone else's to answer for unless someone did something particular to make him that crazy.
I can think of a couple theists around here, and nobody can answer for them but them. To the other, some of the atheists around here need them; it's an easier identity politic to respond ignorantly to disrupted ignorance than to engage a discourse that requires some manner of learning or effort beyond typing cheap retorts. It's one thing to consider atheism, and even the relationship between religion, identity, and much damage recorded in human history; if, however, the best one can manage is glib retort and anti-identification, well, their atheism starts to look, quite literally according to its presentation unto others, like a joke.
Try it this way: The reason atheists want their atheism to have nothing to do with anything else is because if we follow such simplistic rationalist objectivity absolutely, we very quickly brook nihilism. If we set aside some body of atheists we might reasonably presuppose, who just don't talk about it, it feels like a fair statement in my lifetime to suggest that the atheistic discourse I have encountered generally avoids this problem; in the end, what atheism challenges isn't an abstract higher authority, but, rather, a label.
And while it's kind of easy enough to get, because, you know, it's what the word means, the reservation entirely unto itself as such makes atheism entirely arbitrary and utterly useless. Greed might destroy the human species, someday, but at least atheists spent their efforts fighting against the historically persistent human inquiry called mysterium while refusing to have anything to do with the anthropological vacuum that silence would create.
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I think it's what one comes up with if for some reason they can't recall the obvious joke about atheists and foxholes.
Can we confirm any atheist has ever worked as an executioner?
It seems somewhere in the ¡duh! range to suggest these moments are symptomatic of parameters. Still, remember what all you're dealing with. This isn't exactly discourse.
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
I love reading your stuff and you do a great job but really do you seek to elevate either side to a level only you seek to set.
Its a game.
Clicking into high gear is wasting gas.
Alex
What do you think they serve for nibblies after the act of animal sacrifice?
Cheese and tomato sandwiches, while they let the carcasses rot?
And why does domestic livestock seem to bear the brunt of such rituals? Surely if it was about valour, one would be offering tigers and bears (with paramedics on standby)?
The connection between animal slaughter and ritualistic animal sacrifice is so strong that it appears butchery evolved from the practice (It was unthinkable in ancient greece for a civilized person to eat any meat that wasn't first offered in sacrifice ... and they are hardly world famous for being vegetarian)
In my response, I was working under the assumption that the only intelligent means to draw a comparison between the modes of animal slaughter between theist and atheists would be to look at it terms of its ritualistic sense (kali worship, halal, kosher, or meat free days if you want to travel back in time enough with christianity) and it's secular sense (your regular service on demand butcher). I was also working under the assumption that there was some view of pity for the uncooperative partners to these events, ritualized or secular .... That a view the winner would be that which resulted in the less of them thrashing around screaming with protuding metal instruments from their bodies.
Forgive me for investing too much intelligence into the response I was critiquing.
If you just want to say theists ritualistically kill more animals than atheists, since its the nature of atheism to skimp on religious ritual ( even if the purposes of both camps is to eat a hamburger), then I guess the world suddenly opens up to provide many breaking news events.
I will be on standby with bated breath, waiting for the findings on ritualistic funerals and ritualistic weddings.
In your quest for personal growth and "dealing with shit", sooner or later you will need to encounter an abrahamic person to argue with to get these chips off your shoulder. Imagining everyone who disagrees or challenges your views of God and religion to be abrahamic will probably just make you more hot headed and grumpy than what you are already.
What do you think the definitions of those three positions are?
Uh, no, it doesn't. It's common only to pastoral and agricultural people, for starters.
There is no intelligent comparison between those two hopeless muddles of category.
The word "if" has become a useful one - it tells your reader what can be skipped without loss.
You keep fitting out these dingbat digressions with stuff in quotes, as if you were replying to something somebody else had posted. As if personal growth and dealing with shit were a theme you had had presented to you, rather than an invented slur aimed at deflection from an uncomfortable point.
It's a dishonest tactic, surprisingly typical of the Abrahamic theists on science forums. Our Jan Ardena, for example, does the same thing. Its relevance here would be the light it sheds on attitudes toward atheists and atheism - targets of such attempts to manipulate via dishonesty are clearly held in some contempt.