AP: I like how atheists use the definition of what an atheist is supposed to be ( lack of belief ), when in 90% of cases they are totally with a belief in a godless universe.
Me: This original post was a response to someone who debated me and ended their argument with I don’t have enough faith to believe in a god. That sat with me for a bit, then I realized, I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.
I would have to declare that maybe for the sake of the debate, we were both agnostic in light of our views.
At this point, a lot of this is in light of observation of evidence. I see animals that look similar to each other, and I see (to borrow from software engineer term) base classes, with a lot of different implemented polymorphism. I see versioning of code, but I don’t see the evolutionary jump of one kind of code (JRE) jumping to another kind of code (.NET). But I do see conde code base tackling the challenges of the other code base in different ways, and even the same code written more than once across multiple code bases. But that doesn’t mean that the code evolved, it means that the creator of the code evolved the code to solve other problems with varying degrees of code compatibility.
Unlike Flat earthers, I don’t kick atheists from discussions, because most atheists I know love science and tech as much as I do, so we get to enjoy discussions. 🙂
Jeremy Harding: Atheists don’t claim “a lack of belief” – that’s a strawman. They claim a lack of belief IN A GOD. Of course we’re fine with a belief in a godless universe, in the same way we’re fine with a belief in a unicornless universe. It brings it back to the old point – you’re not upset that I’m atheist toward any god but yours. Not believing in Zeus or Jupiter doesn’t upset most people, but reject the Bible, and they’re very opposed – even though they reject all other gods with the same methodology.
Maybe don’t strawman us, and you’ll end up at better conclusions, Adam.
Me:
Jeremy Harding I don’t see hundreds of insults or lies being made about Zeus or Oden a day, if it happenned, I suspect we would see a lot of pissed off odenites.
Christians, who are following their Lord’s instructions glorify their lord, and may state something simple as Odin is a myth or not real. We don’t generally go around generating insulting memes that slanders both their god and them. That job seems to be left to the atheists who love to be insulting to Christians first, then the Jews, then everyone else at a fraction of the volume.
Your comment was nothing more than strawman, so get off your high horse.
Jeremy Harding: My comment is specifically not strawman – it responds directly to points made about atheists (I’m one of those).
And I grew up in the largest church in my town – I bore witness to countless mockeries of literally everyone else handed down from the pulpit and I suspect I’m not alone there. Many such cases. As to social media – yeah; many (not all, granted) Christians make a wide variety of memes and other insults about other religions. And what’s generated online is manifested in physical reality by people like Westboro. And that’s not even the most fringe group – the BHI is a rabbithole unto its own, and has many chapters in the US, at thousands of committed members apiece. I’m not saying all Christians are like this, either – my sister is still a Christian, and she and I have had long conversations about how anti-biblical many Christians are, and how much they need Matt 7 in their lives. But to be clear, there are examples of the inverse.
As to why you don’t see many pissed off Odinites, it’s because there simply aren’t that many Odinites, whereas Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, remain extremely large, very vocal religions everywhere around the world. So you see pushback from insults to those much more. But I’ve specifically gotten a ton of hate and insults from Christians about my atheism, so I reject the notion that my comment was strawman. It’s accurate, and it details things that happen daily.
Me: Personally I have never attacked your atheism, and even appreciated it. But my original post was directly a reflection of an atheist that approached me to insult my beliefs, in that I was able to defend my position on every text book attack.
However: ‘Atheists don’t claim “a lack of belief” – that’s a strawman. They claim a lack of belief IN A GOD’. That statement is assuming that singular use of the word belief. Only an insane person, like a statist 🙂 , can hold contrary beliefs, which is what is meant to not have enough belief. It isn’t a qualitative value of all of one’s capacity of believing. This is why I called that out as strawman. We are not using “believe” in the same way.
Even the pissed off Odinites rebuttal didn’t address the context of my statement. A collection of atheists go out of their way to insult Christians and expect the Christians to be silent and take it like a good boi.
I find that mentality to be as bad as Christian’s who lambast Atheists with derogatory memes and expect them to take it like a $5 prostitute.
So that is why I claimed that was a strawman reply.
What is more than interesting is that this whole discussion has ballooned well outside of the original post, which tells me that this is a real schism that is being developed between people who should be living peaceably together.
I have lost faith in a unified peaceful dissolution of the federal government, because the two largest subsets of libertarians seem to go out of their way to either offend the other side, or be offended by the other side. Such as my initial post was not meant to be offensive, rather it was a summary of a discussion I held with someone who I decided to keep anonymous.
I’m going to drop off of this discussion, because this is not constructive. Though, I may be willing to have a live discussion. I just don’t see this format as working out.
Notes:
- There was no follow up discussion
- Some things that could have made this a better discussion.
- I shouldn’t have said “Get off your high horse”
- He should have asked me to clarify things that may have seemed insulting, just as I should have asked him to clarify his position.
- I should have made it clear what I saw in his comment, that made it a staw-man statement, and asked him to clear it up. It probably would have ended the discussion quickly.
Brian By Experience 