everybody on ilx complains about reddit

(lol jk we don't pray for souls in judaism yr just fucked!)

voila

nah darragh i wasn't saying you were being smug and superior, i was suggesting that the pose is quite enough to make people take the piss out of a certain kind of proselytising atheist irrespective of personal religious beliefs

i mean on the other hand i have noticed that a benign tolerance and respectful request to disagree doesn't always shoo the Mormons/JWs away from my front door on a Saturday morning at god knows what time

my point was really just that the two axes don't align - i've known smart + dumb atheists and smart + dumb theists. it seems to have no correlation at all.

oh yeah, obv, of anyone of any belief, im not an atheist cos i dislike smug catholics or cos i want to be smug about catholics, tho, i just yknow i dont feel god

well yeah plus i would want to extend "smart" and "dumb" to include things like people skills, rhetoric etc

it seems to have no correlation at all.

there's a huge correlation with what yr dad told you, other than that it's random afaict

http://m.washingtonpost.com/externalimage/image_600w/www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2013/11/masked_rageface-1024x576.jpg

this is a dumb complaint but

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

should be renamed http://www.reddit.com/r/Helpmewriteapaper

thats what I get for thinking I would learn something useful on reddit

xp

my dad (and mum) were much less religiously-inclined than i was as a kid, apart from my dad thinking that the 10 commandments was a top notch moral code. he was actively a bit concerned/piss-takey when i went thru my "interested in reading the bible cos it is a big interesting book" phase

shurely that reddit thing should be "AskSoi-DisantHistorians"??

atheism is no different. if you say you dont believe in God you are implicitly endorsing a whole host of other beliefs. you've created a "belief system" and that system will have vulnerabilities.

What... naturalism?
Like, "the belief in gods is not supported by any evidence" Theist: "that's because the evidence for gods are outside of what you can detect"

strictly speaking, "only certain kinds of beliefs should be regarded as meaningful"

yeh, agnosticism rly covers all the ground you need for asserting that you don't believe in god, once you're claiming atheism you're beginning to construct a more generalised theory of what counts as knowledge.

yeah i use "agnostic" as code for "atheist w/o being weird about it"

For me there are three distinct categories here:

Agnostic theism: I believe in a higher power but I don't know what it is.
Atheism: I don't think there's a god.
Agnostic atheism: I don't believe or not believe in god. Either could be true. Who knows.

As an atheist, my gut feeling is that there isn't a god. That doesn't mean that I can't be wrong, but it's different from agnosticism.

I'm a different type of agnostic theist I think. I don't know if there's a god, and I don't think it's knowledge that can be known, but I choose to believe anyway.

I have a fear that most people think agnosticism means you think god or spirits is kind of a 50/50 chance. For example, I would be conveying a dishonest impression if I said, say, that after you die "who knows what happens". In fact I'm actually pretty gnostic about it.

Maybe it's semantics but I don't think belief is really a choice.

i described myself as atheist Taoist for a while, now i will settle for "shit is complicated" i think

Don't you evaluate ppl's trustworthiness + chose to believe (or disbelieve them) all the time?

I identify as communist

lol i used to do that too, now i identify politically as "shit is complicated"

on fb my religious status is listed as amor fati

yeah i use "agnostic" as code for "atheist w/o being weird about it"

ditto

yeah mordy that's the kind of agnosticism i'm thinking of too, i think. you have the basic principle that knowledge of whether or not there's a god isn't the kind of knowledge we can have, and from there you can go towards some variety of theism or some variety of atheism or some wacky thing in between, or instead you should do what most self-proclaimed atheists should probably do and just decide it's not really a question that interests them so why bother having an opinion on it.

"agnostic" to me just gives too much credit to a belief that I'm pretty confident is astronomically less probable.

xxp that choice for agnosticism seems evidence of a weird set of projected beliefs about what atheism must necessarily be, imo

xxp you COULD do what most self-proclaimed etc etc, i mean. i don't wanna say that's necessarily the correct path.

xp: more like a not-so-weird decision to make when a big chunk of your life involves interacting with ppl in a church (who are paying you to be there)

If I lost my keys I wouldn't be agnostic about whether they sprouted legs and ran away or not.

instead you should do what most self-proclaimed atheists should probably do and just decide it's not really a question that interests them so why bother having an opinion on it.

but there are, unforch, several large reasons to bother with an opinion on it ime, growing up in a catholic country in a catholic area in a catholic family. no firebrand atheist here, but it is not simply something you're let relax with as a non-question, on any number of levels that are, as i said, unfortunately quite relevant to the way in which i'd like to live.

Don't you evaluate ppl's trustworthiness + chose to believe (or disbelieve them) all the time?

Your beliefs can change, of course, but I find my lizard brain hard to reason with logically.

fuckin djp playin the milking the believer agnostic card

now we know how he got that beemer imo

considering my community if i ever decided to no longer believe in the existence of god i'd probably just keep that shit to myself - my own private cross to bear (puns lolz)

considering my community if i ever decided to no longer believe in the existence of god i'd probably just keep that shit to myself

aka me at thanksgiving every year

Guys just convert to communism. I love being godless

I'm an apatheist, it means I don't want to talk about any of this shit

乒乓 otm

xxp you'll be looking for a god after that first dose of krokodil wears off u commie godless fuck

i can't quite settle on an appropriate tone for this thread tbh

keep at it, darragh, I have faith in you

^ should just change his dname to mmh and pretend to be my dad fulltime tbh

The lesson is we should never generalize people's beliefs.

We can also leave theology to one side whilst pointing out that in this thing that some of us call 'the atheist movement' there's a pretty deep ignorance about the history of religion.

Like, have any of these people studied the pieces of history they use to build their 'religion is bad' arguments?

people being assholes about people who were assholes

I guess that I just don't know

first they came for the assholes and i did not speak out because i was not, um, oh shit.

lol @ whoever called these sagan-worshipping reddit posters the "atheist movement". i can see the purpose of an formalized atheist movement to raise awareness and counteract shady lobbying/donations by religious organizations (mormons pushing for prop 8 for example) but these guys clearly aren't it.