I know what a specious argument is, thanks. You claiming it doesn't make it so, nor does it alter your mistake. I am not the only one to have pointed out your error. If one truly believes in the actual existence of the deity of Pastafarianism then they are theist. It is not an atheist position. It is believed in as a concept. It exists as a concept. Even you must accept it as a concept as you are discussing it. Without it being a concept one can not hope to start discussion. It remains a valid analogy despite your logically fallacious appeals to (un)popularity. Irrelevant. But thanks for playing. No thanks, we have a valid example. It's called the FSM. Yes you can. What you mean is that you can't. Or simply don't want to. I know what you're doing. And, like much of your responses, it is irrelevant to the discussion. And just an attempt at side-tracking and evading. I didn't ask that. I asked why you disbelieve in the other deities. Please stop trying to evade.
Which has already been addressed. You just chose to ignore it in order to further develop a red-herring and evade. No I didn't. You made a comment with which you intended to clarify. And it didn't. As already explained. And you still haven't explained how you think your comment implies meaning 2 over meaning 1. Further you still haven't explained how taking meaning 2 over meaning 1 negates my original comments on the matter. So please no further attempts at evasion. I am trying to get you back on track. You are the one continuing to evade. To set up straw-men. To argue fallaciously. No I didn't. As explained previously. You first made the assumption that I was intending meaning 1 of the 2 you subsequently posted. There was no evidence at the time of your original comment to suggest that I was. You then claim I have purposefully misrepresented you yet anyone who bothers to read through the exchange will realise it a baseless accusation and spot you for the fraud and charlatan you have shown yourself to be. If you wish to level this accusation formally, please do. And please submit all the relevant information without misrepresentation. It is you who has been intellectually dishonest through evasion and knowingly using fallacious arguments. Yet you cry foul without substance, seemingly only as yet another means to evade. See it how you like, LG. Your continued baseless accusations merely show you to be pathetic. Your inability to argue honestly is also quite a surprise from someone who is so eager to appear wise and devout.
Again, he fails to proffer any explanation at all of what "atheist ideology" consists of. Claims on top of claims on top of claims. None of them substantiated. :shrug: Not to mention a startling inability to understand why parody has nothing to do with the point being made.
Its impossible to find THE answer in this, but first of all I would say that religion always blocks a certain kind of rational thinking. If that is a small part or a large part depends on the type of the religion itself. Besides that, I don't think there is a real relation between intelligence and not believing, it matters much more where you come from, who youre friends are and in what mood you are. Example: you are very 'intelligent' and you had a lot of bad luck; some family members died, you crashed your car, ... . At that very moment your mental barrier, and with it your 'creative health', is weak and you want to hold on to anything else that gives 'creative solutions', and that can be believing in something or becoming radical in some ideas because you see a solution in it. Now to what I mean with this 'creativity', is that people always have some willpower, and some people have less. People who do have a lot of willpower are those who are creative and always see solutions/find ideas for everything. Those who don't have this, tend to look for people who do and learn or stay with those who have. My conclusion in this is that I don't think there is a relation between atheism and (IQ)intelligence, but there could be one between atheism and emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligent people always see solutions and are creative so they are in much less need of religions/... to fill in gaps that can be made by experiencing something bad. Of course, this is just a theory Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Every conversation between theist and athiest Athiest belief/ Theist belief our universe was started by energy/ God is energy man evolved from monkeys/ god gives evolution the chances to occur You don't have any evidence/ you don't either Jesus was a person/ Aren't we all children of God? I don't know how things work.../ oh so your agnostic History is formed from science/ Most original scientists were theists We are more intelligent/ then disprove God man that's tough/ Really? I haven't noticed
Atheism is not belief. It is lack of belief, or unbelief. To restate it as "belief that there is no god" is merely syntactic sleight of hand and won't get you through the first ten seconds of a formal debate. It's more commonly said that theism and atheism are both faith. Theism is faith that supernatural creatures and forces exist, atheism is faith that they do not. The difference is that theism is an irrational faith, based on hope, Bronze Age legends passed down by our elders, and archetypes (instinctive motifs programmed into the our synapses by DNA); whereas atheism is a rational faith, based on the scientific method, which has withstood challenges for half a millennium--specifically its principle that it is not necessary to prove a negative; the default status of an assertion presented without evidence is FALSE. Our universe was started by a temporally and/or spatially local reversal of entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics allows for this and places no limit on its magnitude. The pluses and minuses (e.g., matter and antimatter) in the universe exactly balance out. Nothing was created except order, which is slowly attenuating in accordance with the Second Law. This is widely heralded as the Century of Biology, as the 20th was the Century of Physics and the 19th was the Century of Chemistry. Come back in 100 years and review what is known about evolution at that time, rather than taking the standard religionist cop-out: We don't know how this happened so God must have done it. Basic failure to comprehend science. It is never necessary to prove a negative. If it were, the Academy's annual budget would be exhausted in one day, patiently disproving all the pseudoscience, religious bullshit, and other claptrap brought to its door without respectable evidence. The Romans were compulsive recordkeepers. If Jesus were a real historical figure, wouldn't it be likely that one of their scribes would have mentioned him? (The writings attributed to Josephus are now widely suspected as forgeries inserted later.) Jesus is far more likely to be a wonderful, useful myth like King Arthur, Robin Hood and Kermit the Frog. We can learn a lot from metaphors, as long as we don't get stuck in a mental trap demanding that everything be either true or false. That's a sophomoric bait-and-switch tactic on two meanings of "agnostic." In any case, the scientist is diligently trying to figure out how things work, and with every decade he has more of the answers. The theist is still stuck with an explanation that was invented in the Stone Age when everybody was ignorant. The human capacity for cognitive dissonance appears to have no limit. Besides, religious leaders the world over are backing away from their hard-core belief in the six-day creation and such. Even the Pope admits that most of the Bible is metaphor. Once again, for the scientifically challenged: It is never required to prove a negative. It's your job to provide just one tiny bit of respectable evidence for the existence of God, before we are under any obligation to even pay attention to you. What the hell is this supposed to mean? We all know that fairytales are comforting. In the past life was often dismal--the infant mortality rate of 80% right up to the end of the 19th century made life a nearly endless stream of grief for many people. They needed comforting. Life today, at least in the developed nations, is considerably more comfortable and fulfilling. Most of us are at Step 4 on Maslow's Hierarchy, working our way up to Step 5, and wondering what Step 6 will look like when we finally get a glimpse of it. We don't need the promise of Heaven. Life is terrific right here!
Or an understanding of the logical fallacy of appeal to (un)popularity. He continues to confuse the reasoning behind (un)popularity with the (un)popularity itself. I am not sure at present whether he deliberately does this through dishonesty. Or whether he simply does not understand. The more he is involved with discussions the more I can not help conclude the former.
I'm just saying this type of sequence sounds like every debate I've ever heard. I can apply this form of debate to almost any subject where people seek either an ultimate truth or denial of a simple idea. I agree with you which is why I don't understand why someone ruins a perfectly good lifestyle with debates over what happens after you die hidden behind how they perceive life is today. It's pretty straightforward: The ideas you spread into society grow or diminish, and your body decays until the elements in it are reanimated into smaller creatures. Now does this mean you become a smaller creature? No. Just simply that the smaller creature picks up your information and passes it to the next animal. Just like when you tell a good joke it spreads pretty quickly and before you know someone is telling you the same joke you made up. I don't have a general idea of what to believe or not to believe. This doesn't make me agnostic or Buddhist, just tired of thousands of years of recreated sentiments on the most extreme values. I believe people who argue these types of points are afraid of their own death. Religion seeks "something after" and atheism is a sad realization of physical truth. Theism demands more of what we don't know in mania. Atheism demands more of what we do know in depression. And we wonder why people are considered manic-depressive??!!!?? We have messed with their heads for thousands of years of BS and denial from both opposing sides. To such a point where no one really notices how good life is away from a life of argument. But somewhere in the middle of those there is truth of what we all can seek to attain in life. The reenactment of life instead of the arguments against it. Neither of which beliefs has anything to do with intelligence. Whichever one they choose to believe does not negate the their own ability to comprehend the opposition. Facts are facts, beliefs are psychological tools meant to provide humanity with security. So if I had the choice of being led into a false sense of security or a depressing pointless outlook on life, I would choose facts- Existentialism I loose arguments all the time. Mainly because I have no idea what they consist of or even look like to begin with.
-(Negative) Geez Fraggle, you're really bothering me repeating that, here and elsewhere. Then again I may be wrong and I'm in to learn something, let's see. My problem with your statement is two fold; A positive can be phrased as a double negative. "An assertion" is subjective to the default state one is native to. From the first point you can see that there are no "negatives", it's all relative. Example: "God DOES NOT exist", and "belief in god IS false" mean the same thing, but the former is negative yet the latter is positive. "There are no black swans" can be phrased as "swans are of all colors but black". From the second point you can see that there are "common sense things" which need not be "asserted", and "new" unproven things which amount to "assertions". Needless to say, in most regions in the world, "god does not exist" is an assertion. In many scientific or atheistic places, "god exists" is an assertion. Sciforums has a mix of both people, telling them to keep themselves in the mindset of experimental lab scientists and mind their "assertions" may be a bit confusing, even if it's possibly truer to science.
I didn't say it was real belief. I said it was "real healing" doesn't matter if the results were the same or different. If you want to deal with something as it appears on face value in order to deem it real, the healing offered by the fake reiki teacher is real (to run with your usage of the word) not really false equivalence probably sums up over 95% of what atheists succumb to when they make the mistake of going on about their ideas about religion Being able to find at least a single advocate of the argument is kind of like a prerequisite for any discussion that has the ambition to take a form other than the specious (especially when, by default, one is only left with a multitude of facetiously minded advocates)
neither does your claiming that it is not which is? as far as I am aware, an argument that fails to find a single advocate beyond the facetious is certainly specious. You, much like all these apparent "others", haven't even begun to explain how it could be otherwise ( a specious argument that is ) , much less established how I am mistaken to suggest it And in the absence of any such persons, one can easily say none are present (and in the abundance of atheists playing charades with the FSM, one can actually say its an atheist idea) Since it relies exclusively on atheist ideology (in order to successfully communicate what the "real" point of the FSM is) , being infact an idea established by an atheist and supported by atheists, I can't understand how you can say that in any meaningful manner. (IOW I can not understand why you have immense reluctance to discuss this as a sub branch of atheism, since they are exclusively the type fo people who advocate it) By who? as a concept of it being an effective parody (ITHO of atheists of course) of religion, nothing else. Sure. its your disassociation of it with its root cause - atheism - that is unacceptable Its more your reluctance to discuss it as a concept intimately and exclusively tied to atheism that is an issue. If it only (ie : exclusively) finds popularity amongst atheists, then clearly it can't be an analogy ... unless there is some suave argument you are yet to present about atheists and theists being non-different Perhaps that would hold weight if we were discussing social conventions that arise from world views ... as opposed to actual world views.. :shrug: On the contrary it requires a helluva lot more to support something as valid than simply typing the words "valid" next to your ideas and "irrelevant" next to mine. :shrug: No I mean YOU can't. You are yet to explain how the FSM can be discussed in any MEANINGFUL way divorced from issues of atheism. IOW its not a fake belief (ie a fake world view) It is a fake social convention (since you have people from one ideological stance pretending to adopt the standard of another). IOW its not a standard (or a world view - IOW no one develops an actual way of life arising from the FSM) Rather it is the adoption of a social convention (in this case, a fake one) to support an already existing standard (or world view) So if someone is an atheist, they are in the right category to potentially become a FSM worshiper. Their reason to become a FSM worshiper is to strengthen (or broadcast or reinforce or otherwise clarify) their already pre-existing world view (namely, atheism). IOW at no time does the FSM leave the vicinity of atheism, what to speak of acting in the capacity of theism. already explained precisely what the FSM is lacking in order to be rendered as an analogy (and even gave you an example of a successful analogy ... just so you can be crystal clear on what is missing from your ideas on the subject). lol wtf You are the one who suddenly decided to talk in atheist cliches that have no bearing on the topics under discussion! If you think belief in god requires the disbelief of other gods, you are already side tracking and evading at the onset. Its called a loaded question. Kind of like me asking if you are still beating your wife.
and are these things they are re-evaluating peripheral aspects of religion or integral? I mean its not like geologists or physicists bring anything new to understandings of text critical issues that surround the bible.
What is "atheist ideology?" What is the "real point" of the FSM, and how is that point inherently atheistic? :shrug: How do you know? :shrug: Actually, it's more your reluctance to explain how you know it's a concept intimately and exclusively tied to atheism that is an issue. It's a perfectly fine analogy. The point was to illustrate that when playing by the "anything goes" rules of your religion, any claim is valid, and the FSM is a great example of that. In other words, if you won't allow logic and reason (not to mention evidence and a lack of evidence) to stand against the truth claims of your religion, then they can't stand against any religion, be it FSM, Raelianism, Mormonism, or Scientology. You have no evidence against the validity of FSM that couldn't be used against Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism, yet you refuse to recognize it when it's used in that context, and you refuse to recognize your own naked hypocrisy in citing them. I mean, you kicked this whole thing off by claiming that any argument relying on an absence of evidence is weak at best, political at worst, and now you're running around claiming that you "know" FSM is a parody because there's no evidence of it being "real." Not only is that not true, but it's exactly the kind of argument you said didn't work. :shrug: Can't say what atheist ideology is. Can't say what means you arrived at your understanding of FSM as a parody without contradicting yourself. Can't support any of the claims you've made in this thread. :shrug:
anything that attempts to contextualize (in a diminishing sense) the subject of religion outside of religion (nb - of course you can talk about atheism being an absence of belief about god (aka the atheism of tables and chairs .... which are also bereft of world views and hence ideology) , but that is certainly not an accurate description of the type of atheism that gives rise to the FSM .... IOW when atheism starts attempting to get "pro-active", it gets ideological) that god is false of course I'm pretty sure even you are capable of that one :shrug: On the authority of abundance of atheists who are the only ones who exclusively support it :shrug: if the concept never finds expression outside of atheists being facetious by their own standards, it should be pretty obvious If we were talking about (fake) social conventions, sure, it would be fine. Unfortunately we are talking about (fake) world views, so this is where it runs in to problems. Since the FSM never actually makes it to a world view (outside of the ** world view afforded by atheists of course ) it is not logically possible for it to represent diametrically opposed world views (unless there is some suave argument for atheism and theism being non-different to take the subject outside of the precinct of diametrically opposed discourse) :shrug: ** world view : ie a view that establishes a fundamental comprehension of reality/the environment and hence concomitant behaviors/attitudes
Indeed - I never said it did. But since you made the claim (of it being specious) you need to support it. You haven't, other than through "because I said so". And that would be your error. A specious argument (any dictionary can tell you) is one that superficially appears correct but is actually wrong. Since you can not disprove the FSM you can not show it is actually wrong. Therefore it can not be specious. And you are still arguing from (un)popularity - a logical fallacy as has been pointed out time and time again yet something you fail to address. Through claiming it false (through calling it specious) you need to show that it is. Otherwise it remains an unsubstantiated claim. That can actually neither be proven or unproven. But that does not make it false/specious. Irrelevant red herring. Being an idea of atheists does not make it necessarily untrue. Again your error. LG, you understand its "real" point, whether you accept it or not. As such you yourself are evidence and proof that it does not need an atheist ideology to understand or to be discussed in any meaningful way. As a concept. Not of religion - that is the concept of Pastafarianism that you are still confusing the FSM with. And the purpose of the concept is secondary to the concept itself. You are thus just relying on red-herrings. Unacceptable to who? To theists who don't want to accept the nature of an unprovable existence? It is acceptable to many theists who are comfortable with such. And to have issue with its association with atheism is, unsurprisingly, a fallacy of association... Refusing to address the issue itself but instead those associations. Rather it is your flawed insistence that it only be discussed with such association that is the issue. Your position on this is thus fallacious. You need to ignore the association and review the issue on its merit, however difficult you may find that to be. Yawn... Appeal to popularity. Your arguments stem from logical fallacies, as explained at length by others and myself previously. If you can't see that, despite them being pointed out to you time and time again, then you are just like your analogous high-school drop out who refuses to learn but instead puts their fingers in their ears with a "La la la la!" I can and I do. As do others, theist and non-theist alike. You seem to be unable... Or rather obstinately unwilling. No one is saying it should be divorced from issues of atheism. You are changing the goalposts (another fallacy on your part). You said that one needed to be an atheist to discuss it meaningfully. Theists are quite capable of doing so as well. And, as said previously, you understand it and can discuss it. You are not an atheist. You yourself disprove your own claims in this regard. You are again confusing the FSM with Pastafarianism. Plus you are looking at the implications of the issue rather than the core tenets of the issue. And yes, this is thus another fallacy on your part. Then you fundamentally misunderstand the issue. My mistake in that regard. If someone truly believes in the existence of FSM as a deity then they are no longer an atheist. They would be the pregnant woman of your previous analogy. You can not believe in a god AND be an atheist. It's really quite simple. No, you haven't explained anything. And also bear in mind that you now seem to think that someone can believe in the FSM as a deity and be atheist. It's not a loaded question unless you restrict answers to "yes" or "no". I.e. I could simply say "I don't have a wife" and the question is answered. But you'd simply do anything to avoid answering. So, do you have anything to offer that is not a logical fallacy? Are you able to actually stop evading issues and instead answer questions? If not, don't bother replying.
A few threads ago, Fraggle and I were arguing about the same thing. At the time I wrote: 'Atoms don't exist'. In the symbolism of formal logic, 'atoms don't exist' is: ~(atoms exist). In other words, it's the negation of the proposition 'atoms exist'. Does anyone really want to insist that it's unnecessary to produce any evidence on behalf of an assertion like that? OK... so what status should we assign to the assertion "The default status of an assertion presented without any evidence is false"? What evidence supports that? This grows into a difficult question when we address stuff like the nature and status of logical principles. Is it possible to produce a justification for logic that avoids circularity and doesn't presuppose the logical principles that we are trying to justify? It seems to me that if somebody makes an assertion that his/her listeners don't accept, the burden of proof is typically going to be on the one making the assertion. That's true whether or not the assertion was a 'negative'. My reason for saying that is that if the listeners don't already believe what they are being told, then they are going to need some more persuasion if the speaker hopes to bring them around to eventual agreement.
Internal necro-replying[?]. BTW, I LOVE LG. No homo. He's got more than the logic and language, but some unremitting stamina. What boggles the quality of religious debates on sciforums much is the imbalance of quantity of posters from each side. LG's quality posting is unfretted by that. Hats off to him. He's doing the atheists of this forum a great deal of education, theists as well. Anyway, to bring myself up to speed on this thread chronologically; I am interested in seeing how the finches change of beaks over a few generations prove the evolution of say, human beings. Extrapolate using the observed rate of evolution in the birds, by now (since the experiment took place), they should be different creatures altogether huh? Or are they at equilibrium with their environment now? Either way, worthy of a separate thread if you're up to it, how the finches unequivocally prove evolution. My main issue with evolution is that it's too personal to atheists they're biased in looking at it. I don't believe it's untrue either, I'm rather unclear on all the details and am taking the confident assurances of scientists with serious skepticism, Piltdown man is still in memory. This is where you show your lack of scientific thinking. "people don't work like that"? same as how people don't work like atheists want them to? people are illogical, is that news? or is the bit that atheists can be as illogical as the rest of humanity what's news? "Chemical imbalance in their brain"? did you just make that up? is this how you deal with things you don't understand or can't reply to? The logic is there, lay your ad populum down. I have, all of them. Good job looking for others to do your job for you. I think it's rather the inverse. Why not? Funny that atheists aren't as smart as they think they should be? not really. The fact that whatever value it has will be divided over infinite time, which is the interval on which objectivity is measured, will yield zero. Zero value. Another thing, totally different; In the case that it has personal value, then you can't force or teach people how to make their lives valuable, it's their one shot and they want to make the most-which amounts to nothing- out of it. How do they decide to do it? what do they think is worth spending your life on? Is absolutly arbitrary. Abducting women and raping babies? why not? There go objective morals you can instill in society down the drain. God is absolute and inescapable (whether he "really" exists or not, we're talking of the concept here), and heaven and hell are also absolute and universal, not subject to personal taste. some atheists may decide to live peacfully, but they have NO rationale against those who choose not to. If I were an atheist I'd be the latter, if life's one chance it may as well be a bang Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!. I skipped the third word first time I read this, made perfect sense.
Your first mistake is assuming that the FSM must have arisen from an atheistic perspective. There is no logical reason to believe this. The ideals behind the original letter, and the ensuing religion, are secular rather than atheistic. Secular ideals can be shared by anyone, regardless of their faith, and do not require anything other than a desire for equality. Not wanting to see science bastardized by Evangelical nonsense likewise is not exclusively an atheistic desire. Even the Catholic Church has accepted evolution, so atheists certainly aren't the only ones holding a view opposing that of the Evangelical movement. Not even close. The point of the CFSM is to show how ridiculous the claims of the Intelligent Design community are. It has literally nothing to do with the existence or nonexistence of God, and instead has to do with the naked absurdity of the pseudoscientific ID. Typical deflection when you can't answer the question. :shrug: Again, how do you know they're atheists? :shrug: Again, how do you know they're atheists? :shrug: It doesn't have to be an actual worldview. It doesn't have to be anything other than a claim. It could be the Church of Da Shrug that worships lightgigantic as its slow but affable prophet in the service of The Magnificent Shoe. The point is that if we play by your rules, any claim is valid because you can't use evidence, logic, or reason to debunk it. So the truth claims of my faith--which I've just now founded--are just as valid as those of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, Pastafarianism, Raelianism, Mormonism, you name it. :shrug:
So not only do you side with the intellectual midget of the thread, but you prove yourself to have the emotional maturity of an 11-year-old by using the phrase "No homo." Congrats on outing yourself as a buffoon twice before making even one relevant point. Looks like I touched a nerve there. Incoherence. So this next bit will actually make sense? You still haven't explained how it amounts to nothing. Do you see the temporary valuables you have owned and lost over the course of your life as having no value to you? A past relationship, perhaps, or a beloved pet. None of those things were of any value? Of course they were, and their nature as temporary doesn't change the fact that they meant something to you when they were a part of your life. Not absolutely. Most people have empathy, and avoid hurting others whenever they can, without any reference to an afterlife or "what it all means." It's an instinctual thing, a gut feeling. For the same reasons anyone doesn't abduct women or rape babies. I mean, does it not strike you as odd that every atheist you know isn't out doing any of these things? If your theory were true that a lack of eternal life would result in mass chaos, why aren't the people who actually believe life is temporary out raping and pillaging? Of course God is subject to personal taste. If he weren't, then why do you ignore his injunction to abstain from blended fabrics? Or the bit about lying--ever? Or that bit about a woman wearing a man's clothes, and vice-versa; meaning if your girlfriend wakes up and puts on your sweater, she's committing an abomination in God's eyes. Except nobody gives a shit about any of that stuff. They either ignore it outright or find a theologian to double-talk your way out of guilt. So even people who believe in an objective measure of good and evil still ignore it and live by some other code. Nonsense. Morals aren't arbitrary, they're merely subjective. Appeals to reason can be made. Secular morals, in fact, are based more on reason than any scriptural ones. I love how you're smiling as if you didn't just admit that without faith you'd abduct women and rape babies. No it doesn't, because I never said atheism was objectively true. My position is more rational than yours, of course, but that's got nothing to do with atheism.
