@exatheist, your account is being suspended. It is obvious that you are not here to engage in reasonable debate. Go back to your lair under the bridge. C ya…
Your points are low tier reddit and you are coping you are a copecel
Profit and Sustainability Rules???
You are gone. Warned you.
What Cyber was clearly asking is do you have a SPECIFIC example of somebody on here asserting a “truth claim”? And address who made that claim. I’m pretty sure whoever it was (if it is anybody on this site) is more than capable of defending his/her position. Otherwise, as others have already noted, to include “all atheists” in your remarks is rather silly. Each and every atheist is his/her own person with his/her own position as an INDIVIDUAL. There is no overall “atheist mindset”. Come to think of it, with your claiming to be a “former atheist”, I find it rather peculiar that you are not aware of that.
But - hey - don’t mind me, though. I’m just automatically skeptical of any “Christian” who starts a post by pointing out how they were once an atheist. For some odd reason, my olfactory nerves immediately start detecting a distinct odor of bovine biological waste material. Please forgive my suspicious nature.
(But I digress…) Anyway, if you could simply provide us an example of one of the “truth claims” that seems to have you all in a tizzy, then I’m pretty sure there will be several here who would love to discuss the topic with you. Welcome to the AR Ex-godlessheathen.
(Oh, by the way, just out of curiosity, how did you manage to get back into your god’s good graces? Last time I checked, turning your back on god and denying him is suppose to be the absolute unforgivable sin. Your god’s biggest “No-no.” Or is the bible lying about that part?)
HEY! What the hell do you mean he’s gone??? He just got here, dammit!!! And now he’s not gonna get to see my post. As usual, NOT FAIR!
After all this time, I finally get a chance to mix it up with one of these guys, just like old times. I know what it is. You KNEW I would be getting on here tonight to engage that “ex atheist”, and you kicked him out to purposely annoy me. Don’t deny it, Old Man. I knew you would use your power to mess with me. Geeez… Some things never change.
And I was just getting warmed up and looking forward to his lame excuses. I swear, sometimes I think you just don’t love me anymore. ![]()
Poor old clanker all those bon mots going to waste.
However in this case the trolling was so egregious that chew toy or not the “exatheist had overstepped the bounds” and was finally despatched by our very own RedQueen…“off with his head” she decreed and I wholeheartedly agreed.
And so he went…
Sorry TM…we will get you another sqeaky toy. I promise.
Every theist is an ex atheist, no one is born with any beliefs. I also don’t accept the premise of your question, as atheism makes no claims to knowledge, if any atheists do, then please quote them, and they can answer, though what we most often get is a string of straw man claims.
So do people who don’t believe in mermaids, what’s your point?
Again this makes little sense, what an atheist claims has nothing to do with atheism, since atheism is the lack of absence of belief in any deity or deities.
You’re simply wrong, but since all you have offered is a bare claim there is little to debate, and again the LOL at the end screams troll!
Only you have done that, either atheists, as you claimed, are incapable of morality, or they are morally critiquing the appallingly barbaric and cruel deity depicted on the bible, you can’t have it both ways, else you have misled everyone, and are simply claiming that your belief is that biblical morality depicting genocide, infanticide, slavery to name but a few, are objectively moral, if so knock yourself out, and explain to us why you think it is moral for example, to buy sell and own other people, or for a deity to torture a newborn baby to death, simply to punish the adulterous affair of the parents?
Off you go, and we will give it due diligence, while you’re at it you will need to evidence why you imagine a deity exists, as the two claims are parenthetical.
So made up bullshit then, there are different types of atheist, but atheism encompasses them all, and is defined in the OED as the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities.
It seems I called it correctly from the first post, you were trolling, quelle surprise.
Exathiest names Matt Dillahunty and later claims that atheists, as a group practice the…
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Rejection of metaphysical claims about gods or spiritual beings.
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Denial that any divine or supernatural entities exist.
Clearly he doesn’t know or understand Matt’s position on these two points.
Matt holds to the null position of not rejecting or denying these things, but he keeps an open mind on them and awaits the theists to make good on their claims about them with evidence.
Oh dear.
Clearly he doesn’t know or understand Matt’s position on these two points.
He also doesn’t understand that an atheist’s beliefs are irrelevant to the definition of atheism, which is the lack or absence of beliefs in any deity or deities. Any beliefs any atheist holds is not relevant, since the broadest definition there covers all atheists. Though of course when polled here and I have to say most other forums I’ve countered, atheists generally don’t go any farther than that.
This is the same hasty generalisation fallacy theists use when they cite Stalin and Mao’s actions as evidence that atheists are immoral. Laughable nonsense of course, but then it was clear from the first post that this clown was just here to troll.
You aren’t here for respectful discussion; you are just trolling.
Can you explain why an atheist would have no grounding? Or why they would have any less than anyone else?
as atheists, we dont need to have an explanation for not believing. we arent making the assertive claim. we simply see the information and deem it as rediculous
as atheists, we dont need to have an explanation for not believing.
Kudos, this is precisely correct. What’s the collective word for people who don’t believe in unicorns, or mermaids?
i believe that’s called “people with rational thought”, also known as common sense
Why do atheists constantly critique religion
It is quite simple, really. When someone put forth non-evidenced assertions or assertions that go against established science and the corresponding interpretation on how nature works, I view it as prudent to comment it and/or refute it and/or debunk it in order to not let potential dangerous bullshit be left unchallenged. This is for the benefit of other readers who otherwise might just happen to believe it, just because someone is being insistent.
It is not really important to me whether these non-evidenced or wrong assertions are about the claims of the existence of a god/gods, the efficacy of alternative “medicine” (like acupunture, homeopathy, remote healing, etc), pseudoscience (like creationism, flat earth, free energy, numerology, etc), or conspiracy theories (like international jewish conspiracies, holocaust denial, chemtrails, etc.), or whatnot.
and assert truth claims even though they have no way to ground their own epistemology?
Today, the closest one can get to truth claims are scientific facts, scientific theories, and mathematics (logic included). So claims based on these are not ungrounded. Religious claims about the factual existence of gods are ungrounded in facts, on the other hand, are not grounded in facts in any meaningful way.
- Rejection of metaphysical claims about gods or spiritual beings.
Claims about gods and spiritual beings, whether metaphysical or physical, are not grounded in empirical facts. Thus, they are essentially no more than mere speculation. Until they can be proven, it quite rational to not believe them.
- Denial that any divine or supernatural entities exist.
Non-belief is not the same as denial.
- Critique of religious or spiritual explanations
That is quite prudent all the time they are not grounded in empirical data or established scientific principles.
- Emphasis on naturalistic or material explanations for phenomena traditionally attributed to divine forces.
That is quite prudent because time and time again phenomena that was believed to be caused by gods have been shown to have natural explanations (e.g. thunder and lightning, illnesses of diverse kinds, floods and draughts, unexplainable deaths, good/bad agricultural crops, remission of diseases, etc.) Besides, just attributing phenomena to a god without examining it further is nothing but pure intellectual laziness.
- Positioning in contrast to theism, which affirms the existence of a divine being or beings.
So what? There is nothing wrong in taking a position against unevidenced claims and ideologies which can have far-reaching negative consequences if not opposed. By the way, religionists do exactly the same as you accuse non-relgionists to do, only with the opposite sign.
- Differentiation from theism’s attempts to provide arguments or evidence for God’s existence.
Yeah, because the theist claims are unevidenced speculation. And I consider it good practice to not swallow claims just because some random Joe insist they are true.
- Distinction from agnosticism, which neither affirms nor denies the existence of a god.
Because they are two different things. Agnosticism and gnosticism deals with knowledge (do we know X, or not?) Atheism deals with the absence of belief in a god or deity. A christian will typically only believe in one god, with an absence of belief in all the other claimed gods. An atheist just takes it one god further.
As atheists, there is a false premise: saying that god doesnt exist isnt an truth claim, it is a rejection OF a truth claim
Can you explain why an atheist would have no grounding? Or why they would have any less than anyone else?
I presume that exatheist, like many theists, regards morality as invalid / null / void unless it is a ruleset externally imposed on humanity by a deity (and of course not just ANY deity, but THEIRS), and backed by that deity’s authority / threats. Generally they will argue that without this “backing authority”, anything goes, so to speak. That such faux morality without their god is random, relative, and capricious.
This often arises from some variation of the Utter Depravity of Man, the notion that humans are inherently selfish, malignant and evil and unless this is tamed by rigorous guard rails and enforced consequences, any “ungrounded” attempt at morality is doomed to fail.
I think this come from a misunderstanding (magical understanding?) of the actual problem, which is that human mentation is sloppy and tends to be driven by primal instinct and personal gain. So it is actually true that humans require certain kinds of self-discipline and guardrails in the form of the rule of law and the conventions of civil society – a bitter lesson we are currently learning here in the US as both of those things are considerably degraded. People are herd animals with a strong need to “belong”, so they look around them to see what others are doing and then “fit in”. If enough others are lying, stealing, cheating and assaulting, then they will tend to go along to get along. Hilarity ensues. Likewise if enough people have and value integrity, honesty, kindness, empathy, etc., then people will tend to go along with THAT.
If we are a herd then it’s easy to argue that we need a shepherd of some kind. I’d argue however that human intelligence is sufficient that we can self-regulate rather than outsourcing to actors that inevitably accumulate too much power and end up not acting in our best interest, or at least not impartially in everyone’s best interest. The system of English Common Law has worked well, if imperfectly, and shows what is possible.
The problem with deities as capital-S Shepherds is that it just provides cover for religious leaders to claim they accurately represent that will of the Shepherd, which has absolute power such that people cannot displace or challenge them. It ends up leaning towards authoritarian systems of control and, in my observation, ends up being abusive in various ways, regardless of how good the original intentions are.
As an atheist I argue that there IS no Shepherd, only humans claiming to channel it. So we are stuck with the need for leaders to coordinate operations and enforce mutually agreed-upon rules, and checks and balances. The theist conceit that they are the inventors and protectors of all that is good and just is simply holy horseshit to enable them to get people to cede control to them on penalty of divine retribution.
That seems to sum things up pretty well. They just appear to be operating under a delusion that the metaphysical categories they mentionedrely on a god to exist.