Posted on 11/11/2010 6:27:00 PM PST by Nachum
I was sure you'd quit digging while you were ahead.
Wish there was a way to block your further attempts at rationalization.
I am truly amazed by how angered you are in reading any opinion that does not match your own.
Fortunately, there is a way to block my further attempts at rationalization. Simply skip over any post of mine without reading it.
“Atheists don’t have beliefs, by definition.”
What dictionary have you been reading? They believe there is no God. That counts.
“And they don’t feel the need to ‘admit it’ because they don’t have guilt.”
But they do like to admit it (or, in other words, simply tell it to people), because like everyone else they like to talk about what they believe in.
“I have never met an atheist who expressed guilt about it”
This has nothing, really, to do with the preceeding conversation. I think you read a bit too far into the word “admit.”
“Have you?”
I don’t know. Maybe. Frankly, I haven’t discussed atheism with many atheists. It’s not terribly enlightening. Nor, really, is it fun to talk about faith, qua faith, with the faithful.
Disbelief in the existence of deity. Pretty plain that it is NOT a belief, wouldn’t you say?
And then:
Frankly, I haven’t discussed atheism with many atheists. It’s not terribly enlightening. Nor, really, is it fun to talk about faith, qua faith, with the faithful.
So you are not like everyone else?
It doesn’t matter whether Beck forgives him or not. Soros ultimately has to face God one of these days, and it is God who Soros should seek forgiveness from, but, if he has no regrets, then he won’t ask for it. It doesn’t matter how much money he has or that he is an atheist - the fool has said in his heart that there is no God. Soros is a fool, and will one day come face to face and have to answer to a God he doesn’t believe in.
“So you are not like everyone else?”
I am like everyone else, and do like to talk about my beliefs. It so happens, being an agnostic, I don’t have any belief on the subject at hand. Which is why talking to atheists about atheism and theists about theism consists of me listening. As such, I naturally find them boring and unelightening.
“Disbelief in the existence of deity. Pretty plain that it is NOT a belief, wouldn’t you say?”
No. “Disbelief” is only one way to put it. An active belief that God doesn’t exist is another. Some people put it as an absence of theistic beliefs. But that never satisfied me. It could as easily describe agnosticism. The absensce of belief implies a passivity which I assume most atheists lack. If they were that passive, they’d call themselves agnostics.
Belief that there is no God is the best way to put it. it’s a narrower definition than an absense of belief, but a much more accurate description of what people currently have in mind when we speak of an atheist.
Also, I should add, a “disbelief” is not the absence of belief so much as it is the opposite of belief. That is, it is an anti-belief; a belief of not believing.
That's not exactly true. If you replace "admitted" with "boasted" you'd be more accurate.
Sophistry.
“Sophistry.”
To what do you refer? If it’s my wrangling over definitions, that’s semantics. If it’s something else, what?
I’m not into semantics. Let’s quit here and have some breakfast.
The pope was about the same age as Soros when he was forced to leave the seminary and join the Germany military. The press can’t stop harping on that. Soros, on the other hand, was serving people who were killing his own people. Yet, to many it seems like nothing.
Of course it is a belief. How could one possibly prove that God does not exist.
LLS
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