So how can saying “justify themselves through their utility” (a reason for believing them) be reconciled with “and yet without reason”?
How can you say some beliefs are held for no reason and then give an example that shows a belief that’s believed for the reason it has utility?
If belief X has utility then hold belief X - that’s rational belief ONLY because it has a reason.
If avoiding controversy makes for an easy life then believe that controversies should be avoided.
Let’s try another way to get through then, I’m sure it will sink in eventually, just keep trying.
Give me an example please of a rational belief you hold and the reasons why you hold it.
Irrelevant, as you asserted that:
Then when I asked you where this initial belief came from you asserted:
If you have no idea, how then can you assert it must come itself from an initial belief?
It is you who needs to let that contradiction sink in.
I can’t make this any simpler for you, maybe a venn diagram? You made a claim about where ALL beliefs come from, now you admit you don’t know where our first or initial belief comes from, do you see the problem yet?
Your conflating the necessity for X and the origin of X, these are not the same thing, hence your confusion.
No I am not, and I quoted you verbatim. lets try again then:
It was you who made a claim about the origin of ALL beliefs, but admit you don’t know what the origin of our first or initial beliefs is. I have conflated nothing, just quoted your claims verbatim, so please don’t just shift the goal posts dishonestly.
Do you disagree? do you disagree that a rational belief must include one or more premises? answer this question it will help me see where you are coming off the rails.
We can regard a premise as itself being a belief, and we can see that every rational belief has to include some prior belief.
To avoid infinite regress therefore we can conclude that the human mind must hold at least one initial belief, how that belief became established is a great question but it cannot be based on some other belief because it is the first belief.
That first belief might be irrational or self evident, but it cannot be a rational belief for the obvious reason that rational beliefs are built on top of prior beliefs.
Straw man fallacy, you made an assertion about ALL beliefs requiring an initial belief. Here:
When I asked where that initial belief came from you admitted you did not know, here:
Do you see the problem yet? Focus on your claim, and leave straw men designed to shift away from that claim alone.
Sorry, I can’t help you any more, your on your own from here.
Your is a possessive pronoun, not an abbreviation of you are.
I don’t need any help here, you made a claim that all beliefs require an initial belief, then when asked where our first or initial belief comes from, you admitted to not knowing, so you can’t you support an absolute claim about the origin of all beliefs, when you admit you don’t know where our initial belief came from.
Quod erat demonstrandum…and this one is justified, as it has been demonstrated.
I’ll quote your assertions again for you, as I am sure the answer must eventually come to you, as it is very simple and very obvious:
Think hard now.
Instead you offer this nonsense:
Yes you did, here:
Here you admit you don’t now where those initial beliefs come from, you cannot RATIONALLY claim where they come from, and claim not to know.
That’s two contradictions you made right there, and you seem to think you can ignore the fact this makes your claims irrational, while creating straw man non-sequiturs about how we form logical beliefs.
Ignoring irrational contradictions in your claims is not a very compelling stance for all neutral observers you claimed you could convince, anymore than lying you hadn’t made the claim about the origins of initial beliefs.
Are you calling me a liar? How dare you…
Wah wah wah wah… 
Almost as if the evidence for those can be demonstrated, but not for any deity…
Wow, a massive own goal, try replacing the word god with unicorn or mermaid and see if you can understand where you went wrong.
From stack exchange and typical of what one will find when learning about when to use and not use insults like "liar:
and
and
nothing new here of course, most people know this stuff already.
How dare you call all the atheists here liars, I will accept your apology now. 
The references to slander and libel were fucking hilarious though, well done.
Also if no deity existed, obviously.
"INTELLECTUAL HONESTY IS ABOUT HAVING HIGH STANDARDS FOR THE TRUTH.
It’s not just about not lying; it’s about stating the truth when you know it, hiding nothing, twisting nothing, leaving nothing out.
Intellectual dishonesty, on the other hand, is a sort of blanket term for being dishonest without necessarily straight out lying. It’s the failure to apply high standards for truth."
For the record anyone can read this discourse to see for themselves the level of dishonesty @Sherlock-Holmes has shown throughout this debate, and from the start.
For example his insistence on repeatedly lying in a sweeping generic way about how atheism is defined, in order to create a straw man argument, even when the atheists here had specifically and repeatedly told him how they defined their lack of belief. Turning into a crybaby now to play the victim after many months of such blatant dishonest is fooling no one, though it is perhaps apropos that rather than honestly address his relentless mendacity, he is continuing in that vein.
Expecting people to tap dance around such dishonesty with euphemisms, or even expecting them to pretend a blatant lie is just a difference of opinion, is simply risible. If you want respect then understand it involves reciprocity.
Now while this is just the second post, note the contradiction and the dishonesty that set the tone, describing atheism as “lofty talk”. When he just stated unequivocally that not knowing obviously mean you don’t believe, emboldened and underlined above. So his own assertion shows agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive, indeed they are synonymous. As I have asked repeatedly who bases belief on not knowing, no cogent answer ever offered. Lets move on and see how this dishonesty develops.
No it isn’t, it is saying I don’t hold any belief in any deity, we note again he is dishonestly trying to portray atheism as a claim. We are all born atheists before we even know it.
Note now he has deliberately misrepresented me again, just waved the fallacy away, and then states again that one needs to reject claims in order to be an atheist, when one cannot know whether they are true and would then in his own words above obviously not believe. Here it is again then:
Miracle
noun
Note in order to disbelieve such claims we make no assumptions about what can and cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws, all we need do is note the claim for divine causation is unevidenced and irrational.
Note this was in mid February where I very specifically explained that not all atheists define their atheism in the same way, but that when deviating from the common usage in the dictionary it is incumbent on anyone to say so, and specifically define what they mean. I encourage everyone to read the discourse and see that @Sherlock-Holmes continued to bait atheists here by dishonestly misrepresenting people’s atheism in a generic way that does not reflect the dictionary definition of the word, and despite every atheist I saw contributing to the discourse telling him specifically he was wrong, yet he dishonestly persist to this day, and is now hurling accusation of incivility at anyone pointing out his dishonesty.
Now there’s this:
I tried to highlight this contradiction and he dishonestly tap danced away from it.
Don’t sweat it my pommy mate. Whenever this charlatan has been presented with incontrovertible contradictions of his (admittedly amorphous positions) he has resorted to even more aphorisms.
The very definition of a dead beat theist, philosopher and honest human.
Understand something. Symmetry and conservation laws are two sides of the same coin, different mathematical ways of interpreting observations. Yes of course conservation laws arise naturally from invariants under coordinate system transformations, but that does not alter the fact that we are assuming something.
Symmetry is assumed, it is an axiom, an assumption just as you cannot prove conservation laws are never violated we also cannot prove that symmetry is never violated.
Tell me please what is “more than assumptions”? A proposition is either assumed to be true/false or proven to be true/false these are the only two scenarios.
Just to be clear symmetry being assumed is fine, I’m fine with it, but it is not proven, we cannot prove that symmetry can never ever be violated, all of our claims about the natural world are ultimately the result of assumptions.
Perhaps you don’t like this? don’t like to hear “assume” and “science” tied together like this? well tough, this is science and we shouldn’t sugar coat it just so that the fairy tales that atheism pedals needs that.
How many times does it have to be said that atheism is only a lack of belief in god/s before you grab it? Atheism does not peddle fairy tales. It sells nothing.
Well I know both agnostics and atheists who do not share that definition, if you choose to use the Flewsian definition that’s fine, you have every right but there is no single definition, it doesn’t hurt to point this out sometimes.
Atheism as espoused here in this website embodies more than a mere absence of belief, clearly there is a belief that theism is wrong, enough people here make this claim anyway, it’s a clear characteristic, far beyond “absence of belief” a great many of the posts directed at me across several threads espouse far far more than the innocent sounding “absence of belief”.
Many here are anti-theists not atheists, keep reading to see why I say this.
This website has a shop and sells atheist slogan t-shirts, speaking of which - how do these slogan follow from “I have an absence of belief in God”
Those are all affirmations of belief not absence of belief. The beliefs expressed are 1. Theists delude themselves, 2. Theists do not think and 3. There is no God and 4. Intolerance is good - to a theist these are indeed fairy tales, representing a cozy make believe world where the worship of scientism is the central doctrine.
Each t-shirt belittles, insults, ridicules those who are not atheists, this is bigotry, plain and simple, it’s a terrible shame that so many here cannot see this for what it is.
If you had the single slogan “I do not hold a belief in God” you might have a smattering of credibility, but please, don’t piss down my neck then tell me it’s raining.
Axioms that fit extremely well with empirical data. Data is king. Science has lots of data. What empirical data does religion have?
