On 2/1/2017 3:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I agree with the video. You might also like this:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/a6/a9/9f/a6a99fb6a3ad81cefc08ba8a67dab9e0.jpg
The narrator says: "putting god ahead of humanity is a terrible
thing". I agree, but what I meant from the beginning is even more
general. I would say:
"putting absolute belief ahead of humanity is a terrible thing"
But that is exactly what theism demands - God is the ultimate arbiter of
all morality and is to be worshipped and obeyed.
This includes organised religion but also stalinism, the Chinese
cultural revolution and other horrors. These were also done in the
name of absolute belief. I don't think that it matters if absolute
belief comes with the label "god" or something else.
But they didn't claim revelation from a supernatural being and they
didn't demand faith as the basis of morality. They made arguments for
their position, which implies that they recognized the importance of
facts and reason - even though they lied about what they were. It is
only theism which says, "It's a mystery. You must accept God on faith."
Science and atheism are different things. The first is a method of
inquiry, the second is a belief system (which is not coherent, because
the thing that it opposes is also not coherent).
Sure they are different. But, no, atheism is not a belief system. It's
no more a belief system than failing to believe there are fairies in the
garden is a belief system. Atheism is failure to believe in a certain
class gods: Supernatural eternal beings who created the universe and who
judge human behavior. I partly agree with Sam Harris when he say
"atheism" is an unnecessary word; we don't have a word, "a-fairiest",
for those who don't believe in fairies, or "a-yetist" for those who
don't believe in yetis. But only partly, because theism is (a) common
and (b) demands faith (absolute belief independent of evidence); which
is different from belief in fairies and yetis. Even the advocates of
fairies and yetis don't say you should believe in them by faith.
You are accepting the theists framing of atheism as an absolute belief
that there is no god of theism. But that's wrong. Atheism is just
saying that based on the evidence theism is no more likely true than
fairies in the garden or yetis in the Himalaya's. When Dawkins, who is
often castigated as a radical atheist, was asked, on a scale of 1 to 7
how certain was he that there is no God, he said "6". And since you
like to credence original usage of words over current usage you should
know that agnosticism was originally just considered a form of atheism -
since it implies not believing in God. And even deists, like Thomas
Jefferson and Tom Paine, were considered atheists because they didn't
believe in the god of theism.
Brent
"Atheism is a belief system the way "Off" is a TV channel."
--- George Carlin
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