14-04-2003 00:33									#61
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GRAH!

Would you please, please, please, please repeat this after me a couple hundred times:

Agnosticism does not mean that you aren't sure about the existence of (a) god. Agnosticism does not mean that you aren't sure about the existence of (a) god. Agnosticism does not mean...

Agnosticism means that you believe there is no proof about the existence of (a) god. More accurately, weak agnosticism means that you believe there is no proof about the existence of (a) god, while hard agnosticism means that you believe there can't ever be any proof about the existence of (a) god.

Let's try to pound this into your thick minds with a couple of examples:

Person A: "I believe in Lord God and I can feel his eternal love for mankind. But for reason only He can understand, He has chosen to not give any proof to men about his existence. And I know I do not need any proof to believe. I am already sure of it. I have faith."

Person B: "Nobody has ever given me any proof about the existence of a god, therefore I do not believe in one. However, if Allah was to give me an irrefutable proof of his existence tomorrow, I would believe - heck, I would do all that praying-five-times-a-day stuff and all that. I do want to live forever, it's just that as long as I know that this earthly life is all I've got I'd rather spend it as well as possible."

Person C: "I don't really know about it. I was raised a catholic, allright, but lately I've been pondering this whole God thing a lot. OK, I do believe that He exists, in fact that has been proven to me beyond any practical thought by a series of events when I was young that just could not have been a coincidence, but I don't know if all these rituals and dogmas are really right. I've been reading a lot about other religions lately and there's some really exciting stuff in some of them!"

OK... now. The hard part. Which of these people are agnosticists? A and B. More accurately A, the believer, is a hard agnostic while B, the atheist, is a weak agnostic. Person C is not an agnostic at all. How can this be? Because AGNOSTICISM DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU AREN'T SURE ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF GOD! IT IS NOT A DAMN THIRD WAY! IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHETHER YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN A GOD OR NOT!

OK... finished whining about pet peeve, /me can go to sleep...

	14-04-2003 00:37									#62
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I found an old essay I had written on Atheism and what it truly means to me. No science, no trying to debunk religion, just what I believe as an atheist:

Atheism, to me at least, is not about the pursuit of nothingness and extending the void. It is about people, all six billion of them crowded onto this world. With no God or gods, it falls down to us to strive to be better than what we currently are. I have to believe, if that is the right word to use, that the vast majority are honestly and truly good inside. That our species is nobler and kinder than we seem to be.

We are a flawed species, with half a dozen wars for each peace treaty and the cries of the innocent for each symphony. We have many, many shortcomings that are our responsibility. We are to blame for every atrocity, every injustice.

Yet this also means that every achievement, every thing of beauty that we've ever made, is our's and our's alone.

	14-04-2003 00:41									#63
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quote: Originally posted by Sava Atheism does not proclaim there is no God. It fosters an absence of belief. It's more like, we don't know if there is a God, we choose not to believe in one.

That's agnosticism.

Atheism posits the non-existence of an external reality to the physical world. We know there are no gods in which to believe. There no heaven. There is no hell. There is no astral plane.

	14-04-2003 00:41									#64
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Ari :
Thanks, that was interesting and instructive. I didn't know that.

	14-04-2003 00:42									#65
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quote: Originally posted by chegitz guevara That's agnosticism.

Yes and No. It's a Venn Diagram, they share certain parts. You can be an atheist and disagree with the statement, "There is no God".

	14-04-2003 00:45									#66
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quote: Originally posted by Sava You can be an atheist and disagree with the statement, "There is no God".

No you can't. The very definition of atheism is no belief in gods. A=none, theism=belief in deities.

	14-04-2003 00:45									#67
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I cannot prove that there is a unicorn on the moon right now dancing to hip hop music. However, I cannot prove that there isn't. However, I think it is more difficult to assume that there is one then that there isn't. So until I get some sort of proof that there is a unicorn on the moon, I will assume otherwise.

Same applies to God.

	14-04-2003 00:47									#68
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I don't believe in any Gods.... I am an atheist.

But I don't believe there is no God.

Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

	14-04-2003 00:50									#69
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quote: Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

That's a fallacy. Try again, Sava. ( I support you, kind of, but this is not a valid debating technique )

	14-04-2003 00:50									#70
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quote: Originally posted by Sava I don't believe in any Gods.... I am an atheist. But I don't believe there is no God. Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

So you think there could be a God but you don't know what/who he/she is so you've decided **** it, I won't believe in anything?

	14-04-2003 00:54									#71
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If it is so, it's great.

	14-04-2003 00:55									#72
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quote: Originally posted by Sava I don't believe in any Gods.... I am an atheist. But I don't believe there is no God. Sorry Chegitz, I've read a lot about this, taken 4 college religion courses. You are wrong.

You're an agnositic, then.

At a Catholic university.

Atheism is a philosophy, so your religion courses don't mean didly squat.

Not only does atheism posit that there are no gods, it posits there cannot be any. It is simply irreconcilable with the laws of reality as we know them.

	14-04-2003 00:56									#73
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You're hopeless.

	14-04-2003 01:02									#74
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Atheism to religion is what sobriety is to intoxication. It is an absence of something.

Asserting that atheism is some sort of a religion of science is absurd because theists also accept science. It is not an either/or proposition. Televangelists like the electromagnetic spectrum, but it doesn't make them into atheists.

There may be a significant correlation between atheism and an appreciation of science, but that doesn't make the two phenomena one and the same.


Where did the "big bang" material come from, if you go that direction?
Poof ?

There was no "where" or "when" before the Big Bang. Ergo, your question is invalid.

Last edited by St Leo on 14-04-2003 at 01:48

	14-04-2003 01:06									#75
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I don't believe in the Big Bang as the starting point for all matter in the universe. I tend to think that massive blackholes collapse into each other until a critical mass is reached, then the mass expands like a Big Bang. Assuming the universe is infinite, the Big Bang that was responsible for our region of the universe was localized. I think these events are cyclical. Expanding, contracting, repeat, etc. And assuming the universe is infinite there are an infinite amount of these phenomena occuring. In fact, there's one going on right now some where out there.

	14-04-2003 01:08									#76
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quote: Originally posted by Sava You're hopeless.

No, I'm an atheist, and have been one for thirteen years. I don't let Catholic priests tell me what I believe, even if Father Halstead is a very nice guy.

BTW, I've had three or four religion classes, as well as having studied it in my free time.

	14-04-2003 01:26									#77
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Well, you have to tell me what "belief" is. If you equate belief with the certainty of validity, I don't believe in anything. But I'm an atheist.

I don't know for certain that I exist (I could be some computer program, etc.). I don't know for certain that my senses give me a valid view of reality. However, my experience allows me to assign a probablity distribution to various concepts. I think it's almost certain that I exist, for instance, since my past experience hasn't given me any examples of individuals who think they exist, but actually don't, outside of movies and the like. I think it's almost certain that I'm typing on a computer at the moment and am conversing with a bunch of people. But I don't know that for certain.

Similarly, I can assign a probability distribution to the question of the existence of Gods. Since I haven't dealt with any Gods, or seen any real empirical evidence pointing to the existence of such beings, I can say that it's extremely unlikely that any Gods exist.

But, the English language is a pretty damn cumbersome tool if I have to say assuming a, b, c, d, and e, f is true instead of saying f is true. As far as I'm concerned, "there is no God" is just as valid an assertion as "there is a computer in front of me." There very well could be a God, just as there very well could not be a computer in front of me, but I think the likelyhood of such things being true as so insignificant, to be disregardable totally.

	14-04-2003 01:28									#78
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umm sava I think we're pretty confident now that not only is our universe expanding the but the expansion is accelerating. so the whole contraction thing is a lil faded.

	14-04-2003 01:30									#79
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Che we could argue semantics until our fingers bleed. But the fact remains. I do not believe in any Gods. I am an atheist. I don't believe that there is sufficient evidence to say there are no Gods. While this is an agnostic belief, it doesn't exclude me from being an atheist.

	14-04-2003 01:31									#80
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quote: Originally posted by yavoon umm sava I think we're pretty confident now that not only is our universe expanding the but the expansion is accelerating. so the whole contraction thing is a lil faded.

It's expanding at this point. At some point in the future, the matter in our region of the universe will start to collapse. You misunderstood my point.

	14-04-2003 01:33									#81
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hrrm wut will cause it to contract? if contraction were evident by mechanisms we would normally think then expansion would be decelerating, but its not.

	14-04-2003 01:37									#82
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Che, I refer you to Ari's post.

There are only two ways: Theism and Atheism. There's nothing inbetween. A theist simply is someone who believes in God. Within Atheism are "soft" and "hard" atheists.

Soft Atheists: I do not believe in God (and the "I am unsure of God's existence" camp fits here).

Hard Atheists: I believe God does not exist.

There is nothing in Agnosticism that denotes one's belief in God, it is merely a denotion of the belief in God's existence being provable. Indeed, both theists and atheists can be Agnostics.

I argued this with loinburger (I formerly adopting your current position), and acknowledge I was wrong then and loinburger is correct.

	14-04-2003 01:39									#83
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Gravity. Not all matter from the "Big Bang" of our region will contract. But as orbits decay and stars die, black holes will form. Black holes will eventually fall into each other, reaching a point where another "Big Bang" will occur. I don't profess to know how or when or why this occurs, it is just my conclusion based on what I've learned over the years. AFAIK we could be at the very beginning of such a scale of events, it may be hundreds of billions of years before such a contraction occurs.

Also, all of our knowledge of expansion comes from what we can detect within our range. There may be matter outside this range that is collapsing, but we simply can't see it.

I'm not proclaiming this to be a law or anything, it's just my opinion at this point in time. Some new info could come to my attention that would change my opinion.

	14-04-2003 01:40									#84
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Boris... thank you, you explained it much better than I did.

	14-04-2003 01:42									#85
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ur opinion sounds kind of religoius. . if gravity was causing us to contract then our expansion would be slowing(decelerating). but its not, it is accelerating, or increasing in rate. we are flying away from each other at increasingly faster speeds.

	14-04-2003 01:48									#86
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Sure, again, think about the timeline of such an event I described. What if we are near the beginning of such an event. WHen a bullet is fired out of a gun, it accelerates rapidly. The force causing expansion may be constant, or it may be a single event. Gravity is a constant. Our expansion would only start to slow when we reach the peak of the force of acceleration.

	14-04-2003 01:53									#87
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if we were at the beginning of such an event which would be a miscalculation of the scale of the universe by many many powers of 10.

there would still e another issue, if we were off by that much we are already supposing unseeable matter as 90% of the universe. the new amt of matter in the universe required to contract the universe back on itself(considering the strength of gravity) would quickly become (INCOMING PUN) astronomical.

	14-04-2003 02:08									#88
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quote: Soft Atheists: I do not believe in God (and the "I am unsure of God's existence" camp fits here). Hard Atheists: I believe God does not exist. There is nothing in Agnosticism that denotes one's belief in God, it is merely a denotion of the belief in God's existence being provable. Indeed, both theists and atheists can be Agnostics.

Exactly Boris. Good to see someone who knows the difference between strong and weak (or as you term it hard and soft) belief. Strong/hard atheism doesn't make any sense since we have no way of knowing that our senses aren't so completely fallable what we're not missing moutains of evidence to theism (so God is very improbable but possible).

	14-04-2003 02:11									#89
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actually, AFAIK it's not like that.

Soft Atheist: god doesn't exist.
Hard Atheist: god CANNOT exist.

	14-04-2003 02:18									#90
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quote: Originally posted by Azazel actually, AFAIK it's not like that. Soft Atheist: god doesn't exist. Hard Atheist: god CANNOT exist.

That makes no sense, as there is no practical difference between the two beliefs.

Once again... If Theism is the belief in God, Atheism is the absence of belief in God--all of its permutations. "I don't know" is still absence of belief in God, so it is Atheism.