Atheism as a belief

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There are, of course, consequences to either believing in a god or not including a god in the conception of a universe. If you believe in a god you most frequently (but not always) live with the assumption that the laws of the universe are somewhat flexible and respond to the whims or the directives of your god and an approved method of pleading can result in changing or modifying natural phenomena. If you ignore or deny a god you look to the discovered laws of the universe to lie behind all phenomena and these laws are inflexible. Science depends upon the assumption that all phenomena are explainable through an understanding of natural laws. It is the basis of technology upon which the tremendous improvement of living standards into modern times depends.

Virtual high-five!

Yes, it's kind of hard to combine belief in an absolute truth with significant learning.

One would tend to feel not as much urgent need to learn if one believed that a benevolent and all-powerful Being looks after us all. Also, a significant part of what one did learn would concern the specific nature and will of that Being, so that if the Being doesn't exist, it could be argues that one had wasted some time and effort.

Wasted effort in human life makes me sad, there's so much of it. So many people chasing things they'll naver catch, looking for things they'll never find, fighting fights they'll never win. Not to mention all the effort people put into preventing other from reaching their goals. It's really very sad.

No. That's why they're coming to be called theories more often and laws less often. They're just the best guess which science has at any given time.

I am not speaking of human perception of the laws. I am speaking of the laws themselves which are inflexible. Humans are gradually coming to understand these laws and when they are well understood, they are inflexible. You cannot, under the understanding of the laws of nature, make rain by dancing or raise the dead by begging some assumed deity to do so. There may be ways of making rain or raising the dead but requesting a god to temporarily revoke the laws of meteorology or physiology simply doesn't work.

Believing there is not God and lack of belief in God are two different things. The first is a positive statement (an assertion of belief) while the second is a negitive statement (the lack of a belief).

It is simmilar to believing wormholes exist or do not exist. They are both belief.

Atheism is most definitely NOT a religion(by the definition of a religion). Yes it is a belief, but I dont quite agree that the existance/nonexistance of God is necessarily non-falsifiable.Lest we forget: The Burden of Proof rests on those who are Making The Claim(of existance) and NOT on those who question the claim! The need for a god comes from the inherent limitations on what can be known and what can be "computed". No one knows where the Universe came from yet and why its here in the first place. No one knows for sure what exactly is operating the Universe. Could the universe itself be a natural automaton?....

No, not really.

There is no evidence either way to prove God's existence. Wormholes are something that physicists have theorized may exist using mathematical methods.

There are 2 kinds of atheists:

- The atheists by reason: These atheists usually read deeply about science , they read deeply about religions and the history of religions, they can see the gaps , the scientific errors and some of the immoral values in religions , they usually understand evolution and the laws of nature. These atheists are usually very attached to human rights and humanity , even much more than religious people who help people so ,as they believe, to get prizes from God in heaven later.



-The atheists by ideology : These atheists are political fanatics , they adopt atheism just because of their political ideology (ie. communism). They are usually enemies of human rights and democracy and they worship a man instead of a god. ie. Stalin , castro...
These atheists , like the fanatic religious ppl, are blood thirty , unethical and have no sense of humanity.

lpp (and griff, bollinger):
you always refer to scientific method as the scale by which is to be measured what is a worthwhile system and what is not.
however, you fail to explkain how scientific method achieves that status... you take that status as given as a religious person states that status for the bible, torah, q'ran, etcetera...

it doesnt matter whether religion is valuable by scientific questions... scientific questions arent a way to absolute truth, they are a method of making highly probable guesstimations (talking of those guesstimations, like evolution, laws of nature etcetera, as ontologically existing things whose understanding yields true insight is not scientific, lpp. its actually a perversion of scientific method. read the hell up on epistemology and science theory before you go on making claims on what science does or does not. im tired of that uneducated blabber) - at no point is science concerned with the "why", as science by definition of its method never considers anything else besides causality (whose axiomatic status equals the religious axiom that god exists). religion, ion th eother side, is concerned exclusively with the "why" behind things.

Wow ....so we are uneducated to you because we are atheists and you are educated because of your stupid theory about this status achievement.

Let me simplify the things for your little educated mind , when the Qur'an for example states that the comets are missiles against demons in the skies and when it says that thunders are shot by a angel's tail or when the bible states that people were giants ....then of course the whole religion is proved to be wrong. Because simply it's not possible that the creator , if he ever exists, can make such scientific mistakes in his holy books.

Science doesn't explain everything till now , yet it evolves and it expands to better understand the universe .


In other hand, religion explains s**t , religions explains nothing why we are here and why the 'creator' has created us (he was bored so he decided to create adam?).
When you study the history of religions , you'll find out that all religions are inspired from older pagan religions and myths.

And btw , why there are so many religions and in every religion the God is so desperate to spread his word and denies the other religions....why the creator of the universe would be so desperate to let some apes on a planet that doesn't exceed a grain of sand in the universe to follow his rules? Why he doesn't just write the correct religion on the sky and let all the people following it instead of sending all these prophets/saints/sons?



The idea of gods came because of the ignorance....ancient people were unable to explain the Sun in the past so they thought that it must be a superior being and so they worship. People still ignore the source of universe ...that's why they still adopt the simplest explanation : God!.
Same for the ancient people who were unable to explain the strange weather phenomenas so they believed that it must be magic or gods' anger.

The god idea have their origins in fear too.
Primitive man found himself in a dangerous and hostile world, the fear of wild animals, of not being able to find enough food, of injury or disease, and of natural phenomena like thunder, lightning and volcanoes was constantly with him. Finding no security, he created the idea of god in order to give him comfort in good times, courage in times of danger and consolation when things went wrong. To this day, you will notice that people become more religious at times of crises, you will hear them say that the belief in a god gives them the strength they need to deal with life. You will hear them explain that they believe in god because they prayed in time of need and their prayer was answered. All this seems to support the Buddha’s teaching that the god-idea is a response to fear and frustration. The Buddha taught us to try to understand our fears, to lessen our desires and to calmly and courageously accept the things we cannot change. He replaced fear, not with irrational belief but with rational understanding.


In other hand , science explains a lot about weather and about our behavior and origins as humans etc....we don't know everything yet , there a lot yet to be discovered.


i assume you all believe in physics? the first rule of physics would be that all physical actions needs a physical cause.. and thats how we explain nature and our universe.
also our brain and consciousness is physical.

thats why whenever a religious text such as the bible was written, no knowledge could have suddenly appeared in the writers brain, correct?

spirits, gods, souls and all those things can not exist in the world of physics.
yet you say these things somehow interact with us on a daily basis.
That would be a matter of science, and science disproves that.

Its obvious that all texts in the bible was written by people living at that time.

all brain research shows that all feelings, human emotions, memories etc are caused by physical actions and substances in the human brain.

so where does souls and spirits come in?

the god hypothesis is false. where is your proof? and why do you believe it?

Probably true, but this is a red herring. You are making the insinuation that atheism is an ideology, and it is not. Different people could dismiss the idea of a deity for different reasons. Some of these reasons can be very bad, such as the premise of it being a threat to the state. In much of Western society, it is often based upon enlightened thought. I am sure that some people just find the idea threatening to their ego or simply disturbing.

My reason for being an atheist is this: as a child, I was taught two competing ideas as to how I ought to go about forming beliefs. On one hand, I was taught that I should hold one belief over another because something dreadful would happen to me if I did not. This sentiment is strongly attached, in my mind, to Christianity. It is a classic argumentum ad consequentiam, actually, which is a type of red herring.



I don't think that many of you would disagree that this is a horrible reason to have any kind of religious belief. I was a toddler, though, and this is what I was taught religion was. I may well have remained a devout Christian if I had been given a more sophisticated understanding of the religion. There is no unravelling the past, though.

On the other hand, I was taught that I should, above all things, stick by the truth and what I know is right. This didn't have any direct bearing on my belief or disbelief in God. However, it was the most important part of my moral upbringing. When I realized that the threat of Hellfire was a very bad reason for me to adhere to the Christian doctrine, I had to do something to set my conscience right.

In my case, atheism is partially a symbol of my devotion to what I was taught, throughout my lifetime, to believe was right. All that this proves, though, is that I am not just some computing machine that can only be influenced or affected by logical functions. The thing is, though, neither are you. We are people, and, to a large degree, we are a product of our respective upbringings. Atheism is nothing like a religion. However, it can be a factor or consequence of a person's living religion. When I say "living religion," I mean the mores and principles upon which one goes about one's life, not anything necessarily to do with supernatural entities.

I guess that what I really find most offensive about your OP is that it bears the suggestion that my beliefs and way of life are based upon godlessness. It bears the suggestion that, when faced with a moral decision, the first question I ask is, "is there a God to tell me that it is wrong?" It is a premise that small-minded Christians use to argue that atheists are amoral. The statement, "Atheism is a belief," cannot be but true. It is literally the belief that there is not such a thing as God. It is a positive claim by exclusion. I can live with that. What I don't like is what I feel you are insinuating with this remark. If you said it in innocence, then you have my deepest apologies, but, in light of my experiences with Western culture, I see it as a classic statement of Christian bigotry.

If, by "atheism is a belief," you mean only that, I will argue with you no further. However, if you are using this to make the insinuation that atheism is my "religion," then you have made an egregious insult against my character. My atheism is a consequence of my core values, not the basis of them. Don't take my beliefs out of context. On one hand, it makes you look asinine, and, on the other hand, it makes you unpleasant to be around.

Atheism is a default position. I'm an atheist towards everything untill I see sufficient evidence to support it.

lpp:
a) its not that you are uneducated because you are an atheist and i have a theory, its because you make absolutist statements about matters you cant make absolute statements on, and obviously dont even see how fundamentalist your argumentation is. i am educated because i study that exact subject. science theory is my own backyard. let me spell that out clear to you: the subject of my study is the foundation of the very possibility of science as well as the concrete ruleset of science.

the way you make statements about science, that the explanations of science rival those of religion or any other metaphysics ('meta ta physica', are you versed enough in greek? it means "beyond the material" - by definition stuff beyond empirical grasp, which is unfortunately is all of the narrow scope of science), are, in their entirety, unscientific.
the mere notion that any product of scientific method has ontological quality is so absurd when you have only the slightest idea of the rules science is played by.
since you repeatedly make these kind of statements and tote them around as if they were fact, and not just another belief, i conclude that you obviously dont have a clue of science theory. to talk scientific content, its enough to be a scientist. to talk about science as a whole (that includes what science does), you need a scope that includes science theory. hence, i call you uneducated.

when a religion of your choice (say christianity) makes the statement that men exist because god wanted them to exist, based on interpretation of the bible, there is not the least point of leverage your argument has when you say: "oh, but look here, before modern man obviously existed proto-humans! hence man comes from proto-man and not from god and religion is objectively proved wrong." this religious statement is only proved wrong in relation to another statement. its your choice to ascertain more authority to one system of statements or another, but science is at no point at all about anything objective.

you should actually come to see the difference between science and the kind of metaphysically bloated science-religion you follow with fundamentalist fervour. but then, youd need to get a bit more knowledge about science in your head: descartes, hume, kant and husserl for a few basics in epistemology, as well as popper, feyerabend and kuhn to have read at least a bit on science theory.

b) religions, philosophies and all kinds of metaphysical systems answer questions outside the narrowly defined scope of science (subject-constructed causal patterns in empirical data). its your choice whether you accept any of those answers for yourself or even if the questions matter to you at all - pray tell me how science could only vaguely answer what the meaning of existence is - not its mere causation.
same error of categories on your paragraph on soul etcetera... science doesnt disprove s**t because science isnt even capable of grasping the subject. simple example: the first axiom of science is causality as a structuring element. so, in the confines of science, neither freedom nor randomness can be defined. science doesnt have the vocabulary to delineate these concepts. so, all science can do concerning freedom and randomness is to shut up - and shutting up is not exactly disproving.
same thing about everything that is not empirical. science is only concerned with empirical data - hence, there can not be scientific statements on non-empirical things. period. its just not sciences job, unfortunately.
if the whole debate around freedom of will wold be as easy as you reduce it to be, it would have been over ages ago. however, its only easy to those who have limited insight in their tools, and thus, still going on, as you undoubtedly know (and its not fought on the ground of religion - and until now, none of the blown-up causation stories told by some ex-neuroscientists held longer than it needed to refresh their knowledge of science theory)

and please... you know better than trying to pull the historical argument on me. lets argue about the things themselves, instead. your nice but outrageously assumptive run-down on the history of religion doesnt touch the question of godlike entities in the least.

and just to set one thing straight: i dont believe in any kind of god myself, but im not an atheist - im an agnostic, tending towards proto-existentialism, phenomenological wing.

Now now, let's be fair: lots of things make matsuiny2004 look asinine and make him unpleasant to be around.

You are reassuring the insult. Shut up you insect !...you don't deserve to be debated with.