The Pots should stop calling the Kettles black...

Ironic…

Your first statement: “The worst aspect of an Atheists superstition is their inability to accurately represent their opponents beliefs;”

After that statement you proceeded to misrepresent atheists, including the comment in which you misrepresented myself and the Rational Response Squad, where you said:

“There are many atheists (this one group called the Rational Response Squad) who believe that all theists have mental disorders and need to be locked away in asylums…literally.”

I believe that theism is similar to a mental disorder. In some cases (note some, not all) people who believe they speak to God and that God speaks back are suffering from grandiose delusional disorder. I believe that certain anti-psychotic drugs could help people who worship a god. In some cases a theist could be helped with a therapist. In extremely severe cases a person might be best treated for their theism by receiving in patient treatment at a care center set up for such a delusion. Society doesn’t treat theism as a mental disorder because it has reached a degree of normalcy, otherwise it qualifies under current diagnostical terms as a delusional disorder.

With that said, it would be considered a gross mischaracterization to claim that RRS believe that all theists or even many theists need to be locked up in mental asylums. It was highly ironic for you to mistate my position considering your argument that atheists do so.

In Reason,

Brian Sapient
Creator
http://www.rationalresponders.com

As a theological noncognitivist, I will ask you the same thing I ask every theist and atheist. What is this “God” thing you are talking about? What would cause you to change your beliefs (i.e., how could your belief be falsified?)

The god that most atheists deny is so simplistic as to be denied even by most theists, while the god that most theists confirm isn’t coherent enough to even be be wrong.

I don’t want students who could make the next major breakthrough in
renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that
anything they don’t understand, and that nobody yet understands, is
divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual
capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of
what we don’t understand, while we watch the rest of the world
boldly go where no mortal has gone before. — Neil deGrasse Tyson

I stopped reading after that first sentence. Wrong! Religion is a superstition. Atheism is the lack of belief in any superstitions, ie: god/s and/or religions. Based on your first sentence I will assume the rest of that statement is as just as rediculous and not worth the time and effort to read it. Nice job.

Sounds like you have a lot of anxiety. Calm down, man.

I always get a laugh when you folks fall back on the “you’re just as bad as we are” argument.

As I pointed out before, you do not possess an open mind, you have one that lacks the necessary skepticism to avoid making wildly wrong conclusions.

And I’ll point out again that this is a false argument unless you’re willing to actually outline the specifics of how your “faith” is otherwise.

Simply declaring your faith to be something other than the unquestioned belief we’re denigrating doesn’t actually make it so. The fact is that all religious faith is “unquestioned belief”, because what you believe is untestable, and those tests are what it means to “question” a belief.

Switching from one untestable superstition to another is not “questioning”, it’s mere credulity.

I assume you wish to include me in this, but I say you’re wrong. Simply saying “my claims are reasonable” does not make them reasonable. Saying “I had a mystical experience” doesn’t mean you did have one.

You have yet to make a “reasonable” argument in favor of your faith.

You’re right. But it’s not just any old “different point of view”, the different point of view from which I start is rationality, and I’m afraid that does make my point-of-view more rational.

In fact, I am often skeptical of the things I believe. The problem is that you wildly misjudge the rational foundations of your beliefs. What you believe is no more credible than the Santa stories. The fact that you believe it doesn’t actually lend it any credibility. The fact that very many people believe it, or something similar, does mean it’s worth considering, but I have considered it, and found it to be wanting.

You gotta be fucking kidding me. Where’s the atheist book that infallibly tells us to murder millions? Compare that to the Christian Bible—the “infallible” word of a god—that repeatedly instructs such, and often for the sole crime of not believing.

A blatantly false dichotomy. You suggest that, had they been religious, their god-belief would have prevented their crimes. Just like they prevented bin Laden’s, Torquemada, and Hitler (the Trekkie in me wants to add, “and Klepnor of Rigel Six”).

Sorry, but I think it pretty obvious that history shows that Christianity is just as bloody and intolerant as Islam. That they aren’t today is the direct result of encroaching secularism and the restraints that secular government places on that sort of behavior.

They seemed to have answered that one adequately on their own, but your response to it was pretty lame. You say, “I didn’t mean to make your sick view more sick than it really is. I guess I’ll have to simply admit that it speaks for itself.”

I don’t think it counts as a “sick view” to think that those who suffer from a mental illness should get treatment. You see it as “sick” because you disagree with the assessment that it’s an illness. Of course, the guy who thinks he’s Napoleon says the same thing, so that’s not really much of an argument.

The line between mental illness and religion is a very fine one. I’d say that this woman is well into the mental illness range, and does a pretty fine job of dismissing your claim that we’re arguing against a “strawman” while she’s at it.

Nonsense. “Atheism” means the absence of belief in gods. I am an atheist, which means nothing more than that I don’t believe in gods. I am also many other things.

Fellow O-nerd wyldeling calls himself an agnostic. He is also an atheist—he doesn’t believe in gods. In calling himself an agnostic, he adds a further claim that discerning the truth of whether any gods exist is an unanswerable question, but that doesn’t make him any less an atheist.

I am not agnostic (at least with respect to this question). I think the question is fairly easily decidable following a line of argument that’s structurally similar to the arguments against the luminiferous æther of 19th century physics. The hypothesis (that some particular flavor of god exists) suggests lots of experiments that should reveal its presence. When carried out, they reveal no such thing. It has remained so consistently immune to testing for so long that we can conclude that the hypothesized god doesn’t exist. More specifically, that its power is so minuscule that its existence is irrelevant.

That line of reason has nothing, really, to do with atheism. Strictly speaking, it’s positivism.

But you’re not attacking positivists, you’re attacking atheists. So declaring atheism to be something other than the absence of god-belief is, strictly speaking, a strawman argument.

You could, but you’d look foolish. A “lack of belief in atheism” is ridiculous—atheists manifestly exist. I don’t disbelieve in Mormonism—I think it’s false, but I believe it exists.

A “lack of belief in metaphysical naturalism” would be a better start at what you’re really trying to say. In fact, you are a theist and a supernaturalist—as are most theists. Nothing incompatible with that.

The difference is that theism and metaphysical naturalism are generally incompatible, while atheism is not incompatible with either naturalism or supernaturalism (or positivism or any of a pretty wide range of -isms).

I know atheists who believe in UFO abductions. I know atheists who hold a wide range of pseudo-religious beliefs, usually under the rubric of “new age”.

I even know an atheist who’s a Catholic priest. He takes the entire Bible to be nothing more than cultural mythology, to be interpreted by tradition and scholarship. He doesn’t actually believe the “god” they talk about to actually exist as a real-world entity, but rather as a symbol that Catholics agree to use to represent a sort of transcendent metaphysical ideal.

I consider them all atheists.

Arguing against religion can be difficult because the term “god” is wildly ambiguous. It means different things to different people, and many theists disingenuously switch the definition they’re using at the drop of a hat. The term “atheism” isn’t ambiguous—it means one specific thing, but as it’s a purely negative definition, it naturally means that there’s an incredibly wide range of possible belief systems behind it, and I certainly would expect theists to find that just as frustrating.

Doesn’t change the fact that it’s true, and your arguments ought to reflect it. If you’re arguing against just me, then some of your preconceptions might be right. If you’re arguing against atheism in general, as you often appear to be doing, you’re just showing your ignorance.

As I keep saying, from what evidence? Your answers thus far indicate that it’s from a personal mystical experience, but that’s not actually evidence. So, you can view it as a conclusion, but it’s a faulty one.

In practice, it goes the other way around. You accept the existence of gods as axiomatic, and you conclude that the peculiarities of Mormonism are your favorite brand of Kool Aid.

No, they cannot. They can strive for rationality and sometimes fail, whereby the can reach false conclusions, but if they are actually rational, then they’re correct. You cannot even (correctly) say what it means to be correct in a conclusion without including that the argument be rational.

Really? If you were here defending your belief in Santa Claus, would it show my position to be “weak” if, in addition to providing counter-arguments to every one of your arguments, I also pointed out that you’re nuts?

You’re nuts.

Because I think it’s a fair charge to claim that it’s specifically their religious beliefs that led them to do what they do, while I don’t think it’s accurate to say that their religious beliefs are what led Stalin, et al., to their crimes.

It’s hard to discern for sure whether Stalin was actually an atheist. His diaries seem to suggest he was a believer who was “angry at god”, as so many theists claim is true for all atheists.

Sure. Sometimes those who are trying to be rational come to bad conclusions. How much worse for those who abandon reason altogether? Who invent fictions and then act as if they were true in the real world?

You still haven’t shown there’s a baby in there. Throwing out just the bathwater is perfectly reasonable, and I’d say that’s exactly what secularism has done.

Society used to be run by religion—the Dark Ages. Scientists used to almost universally believe in gods: Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Kepler, Mendel, all great scientists, and all very devout. As modern science developed, though, those beliefs became harder to maintain. Scientists today are far less religious than the rest of society, and the more prominent the scientist, the less religious.

Today’s secularism is the baby, washed clean of the stain of superstition.

Sorry, but until atheism and religion are on a level playing field, your side has the lock on bigotry.

Another of my favorite Christian hypocrisies. Intolerant bigotry with a friendly closing. “We hate you and you’re going to burn in hell… yours in Christ”.

Your book says your guy “came not to bring peace, but the sword”, so I’ll have to take your closing with a grain of salt.

What a wonderful display of Christian ignorance and bigotry. Way to go retard.

So to sum it up… you’re stupid and ignorant. Not just one, but both.

I hope you’re just a kid… maybe you still have time.