Why you disbelieve in any deity(s)

I’m confused.

You just said MS had just killed one of your computers (???).

They pushed an update. The computer then restarted, only nothing worked. The disks were whirring and the LEDs flashing, but the monitor said no signal. I tried every remedy offered by Microshift, including a recovery disk and reinstalling Windows. Every process ended with cryptic messages about not being able to install an ABC on a DEF because of XYZ. In the process the system drive appears to have been formatted. Some of the instructions have to be seen to be believed. If your computer won’t start, put this program on a USB drive and then access it through file manager.

I may try to install Linux on it. It’s an old computer that I was using for video streaming on my TV. It was working perfectly until Microshit decided I needed some “features”.

There are many Linux distros that are customized for pushing video/streaming to a TV. Not saying this is a “good” list, only providing it in case you didn’t know such things exist.

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I know absolutely nothing about Linux. Thanks for the info.

You might want to do some research to make sure the distro you choose can easily handle your favorite streaming service(s).

eta:For a novice, picking the right distro is important if you want things to go easily. A funny comic strip from XKCD about this subject:

Good try…but C- …

DISBELIEF and UNBELIEF are VERY different concepts.

…as in, for instance: “I don’t like cats” vs. “I dislike cats”

Don’t like is FAILURE to like

Dislike is I HATE THEM FUZZY CRITTERS.

Similarly…

Unbelief is simply “I don’t believe in a god”

Disbelief is “There is NO god”

In any discussion / debate…it is necessary to understand word meanings.

The xtian apologists often wander into fantasy land that way…as when they talk about “kind” when discussing evolution.

Is the way somebody goes about finding truth important?

Nope…as long as the end result can be verified.

HOW…ever…

" Is the way somebody goes about SEEKING truth important "

BETCHURASS

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I’m not sure that’s true. Here is the dictionary definition.

disbelief

noun

  1. inability or refusal to accept that something is true or real.

There is a significant difference between disbelieving something, and claiming something is untrue. On that I agree, but disbelief and unbelief are both simply the lack or absence of belief. The only difference I’m aware of is that unbelief is defined as the specific lack of religious belief and an absence of faith.

SheldonAtheist
Beat me to it. I didn’t like the comparison at all.
I disbelieve in god, gods, spirits, and all things supernatural in most of the threads on this site. In most cases, I do not have to make the assertion that they are not true.

I am confused as to what you mean by being agnostic to unfalsifiable claims. Would you please give me an example?

Agnosticism is a statement that nothing is known or can be known about a claim. It’s commonly used and defined in a theistic context, to state that nothing is known or can be known about the nature or existence of a deity.

If something is unfalsifiable that means there is no way to falsify it even if it is false.

Thus it follows we cannot know if an unfalsifiable claim is false or not. When I encounter such claims I withhold belief, but remain agnostic.

So I am an atheist as I lack belief in any deity or deities, but I am also an agnostic when god claims are presented that are unfalsifiable.

Theists and religious apologists often make the irrational assertion that “you can’t prove no deity exists” as if this validates their belief in an extant deity. This is a known common logical fallacy, called argumentum ad ignorantiam, also called an argument from, or appeal to, ignorance fallacy.

Logic dictates that a claim or belief is neither validated or invalidated by a lack of evidence.

Yes indeed, i’d like to add that the burden of proof is on them, not us.

I know the definitions of agnosticism and unfalsifiable @Sheldon lol :rofl:

I wanted an example of one such claim, in your perspective

My main point was that methodology for finding truth is important, epistemology specifically. If one Christian asks another if their view point is “true”, the other will “verify” it. This of course doesn’t make it true. Faith as an epistemology is why there are over 4000 different religions with each “knowing” they are true. Faith is a knowledge claim. Meanwhile, somebody using the Scientific Method as an epistemology, which features measurability and falsifiability, will get very different results. Most religious people I talked to don’t really understand the Scientific Method yet try to use scientific data to bolster their logical fallacies.

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It’s funny :grin:, because without understanding the methodology they focus on the one word they somewhat grasp, Science, and feel if they destroy this part - you’ll come to faith.

The methodology works in all areas of life. It’s a decision, fact finding process that works for me.

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This is very important. What I call ‘Rational Atheism’ goes hand in hand with epistemology.

Empiricism completely obliterates faith so we need to go there. Rationality on the other hand is more tricky, but still I maintain that logically speaking, their are no premises that would lead you to theism if you were a lone thinker that had been exposed to logic but not religion especially since explaining how the universe around us works is exclusively the province of science, no matter how much religious apologists try to wedge their baseless assumptions in there.

Being mindful of epistemology, specifically empiricism, the scientific method is the only way a person can ever claim to know a thing and by extension, the faithful dont know a damn thing about the things they claim

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Well I am an atheist, so such claims are not at all from my perspective. Nor do I keep a stock list of such claims, but unfalsifiable claims are easy to create.

I can tell you that scientists often refer to unfalsifiable claims as not even wrong, because evidencing something as wrong means we have learned something, and that is the way I view unfalsifiable god claims, I don’t believe them because they are not supported by any objective evidence, and I don’t waste my time denying them as that would be irrational, because by definition such claims can teach us nothing.

This is what I have been talking about in another discussion please tell me what you think:

I also struggled once with the fact that you cannot disprove god, then I realized that the very idea of god was created to be unfalsifiable.

Why ‘should’ there be a god in the very first place? Because the human brain wants to see patterns of agency everywhere. The human mind demands an explanation to everything it sees, and will invent one if one is not forthcoming in an obvious way.

That is why with science being as advanced as it is today with empirical explanations of natural phenomena, it would be impossible to create a new faith-based religion that would garner any significant following today, because what observations would one even base it on?

Religion began because people wanted answers, and science was not yet there to provide them.

So, really, if you think about it, there is no god to falsify because the very phenomena that urged man to hold some deity responsible for what they saw, now have purely scientific explanations!

Consider Russell’s teapot.

Should I hold that god is even worth falsifying just because its an idea that is so very common?

If a claim is made, past present or future, no matter how popular it ends up being, being even agnostic about it is unjustifiable, ESPECIALLY if it is made without evidence. Why do ancient greek and roman gods DEFINITELY not exist yet the best we can do with the Abrahamic God is ‘very strong doubt?’.

I mean if you cannot totally refute god just because its existence is ‘unfalsifiable’ then logically you should be agnostic about ALL gods. Every single one of them because EVERYTHING supernatural is by its very nature, unfalsifiable.

As Hitch put it:

“That which is asserted without evidence can just as well be dismissed without evidence.”

A lot of them that I have encountered don’t want to understand it, faith based superstitions have a long history of antipathy towards reason, and with good cause.

Yes I agree, and the irony of theists who deny scientific facts in favour of faith based superstition, trying to claim science lends some credence to those superstitious beliefs is not lost on me. An example is creatards denying the overwhelming scientific evidence for species evolution, then glibly claiming physics supports a deity as a first cause creator for the universe, despite this news having escaped the attention of the entire global scientific community.

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What’s worse, is that many of them I met are cynical, and think that I must have faith in things because they do, thus, completely missing the point.

This goes back to it being easy for people to make things up and then saying “you can’t prove me wrong”, which of course is the appeal to ignorance fallacy. Falsifiability is a tool that can help keep people from using logical fallacies. One could call logical fallacies known bad epistemologies. The only way that somebody can accept something unfalsifiable as being true is by using logical fallacies or using faith. There is no way around this and religion must have belief in unfalsifiable things to exist.