On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 3:18 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 1/24/2014 2:07 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 03:35:18PM -0500, John Clark wrote: > > True. As I said there is a small subset of the human race called > "philosophers" who are in love with the word G-O-D but not with the concept > of God, therefore they redefine the word accordingly. > > > Hence if a christian asks me whether I believe in God, I say no, and > if a philsopher asks me, I say "that depends on what you mean by > God". Heaven forbid I should meet a christian philosopher, though. Do > such fabled beasts exist? > > > "All thinking men are atheists." > --- Ernest Hemingway > How earnest of him. Then everybody that privately holds themselves to be weakly agnostic in the following sense doesn't think: There may be some supreme transcendental whatever because a lot of phenomena transcend our understanding and/or are undecidable; so we can relate to religious folks, understand why they can take things too literally and hurt or do good to people on that basis + we can relate to atheists, understand why they can take things too literally and hurt or do good to people on that basis. Atheism as some metaphor for critical posture and belief in reason is understandable through popular usage. But taken as "I don't believe stuff, like some religious idiot" is just not consistent with when we choose to have coffee black, wake up for reason/god x, buy something, bet on it, or generally do stuff. I guess that my best guess would be that perhaps guessing already implies some partial belief ;-) PGC > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
