Is Neo[Atheism] a Rational Religion?

"More Pathetic"---Translation---impossible to defeat in logic and reason, A Philosophical superhero in sorting out neoatheology's word salad!

Thats what Im talkin bout!

 

I think you just proved your failure. Morons and emoticons are about the same intellectual level.

 

my personal beliefs have no bearing on the proposition what so ever.

non sequitur
Its just emphasis

The morons come out here claiming they have proven something when they have not even tried much less submitted a rational counter claim.

So you think that the neoatheists have some kind of safe harbor from rebuttal, is that it? Labeling a counterargument that pulls the rug out from the neoatheists word salad is not "pathetic" by any stretch of the imagination, its inevitable, and the genius is, as i have said, prove me wrong you prove them wrong!

 

A new born baby 'lacks belief' in the nonexistence of God doesnt give a rat ass about anything either, they simply lack belief, actually they lack belief in anything at all.

Rocks lack belief, in the nonexistence of God what makes you think they give a rats ass?

You think a new born baby gives a rats ass about God one way or the other?

They simply lack belief in the nonexistence of God, and a theist lacks believe in the nonexistence of God therefore theism is the default condition.

They are all theists by default.

 

Well, I've been asking you for the explanations, not for the conclusions. If you've supplied any information that you think addresses my arguments, then you have either not made it clear how it addresses my arguments, or I've responded to them in a manner which I believe is sufficient to discredit them. If you disagree, point me to them, and I can elaborate. I am fairly certain on how I want to address your arguments, but if you hide your workings, I can't point to them.

Perhaps. It's coming across as avoidant, and very conveniently failing to address questions that are aimed at what I believe are the flaws in your logic.

Nope, Flew didn't redefine theism. It is true that theists lack the belief that there is no god, but that is not a definition. Definitions are required to be necessary and sufficient, and it is not sufficient to lack the belief in there being no god. I.e. it is fair to say that theists lack belief in the proposition "there is no god", but it is not to say that theism "is" the lack of belief in that statement. Therein lies a fundamental difference between the definitions of atheism and theism which breaks your symmetric little example.

But in a way, yes. We are all allowed to define whichever words we want in whatever way we want. Indeed, we could change the entire language and end up speaking French or Japanese. However, if we do, we can't assume that our old statements are true when we've changed the definitions. You will recall that I have not attacked you for using the "there is no god" definition of atheism, I think you are fully entitled to do so. I am challenging your rejection of others' ideas, and your failure to interpret others' arguments as intended.

Says nothing about levels of education in the Stanford article, that seems to be conjecture by you.

They don't imply that other definitions are perfectly usable, though, and that's all I need for my arguments.

No, you have made some noises in that direction, but none of your argument actually reach that conclusion.

As I've mentioned, I'm primarily concerned with you addressing arguments provided by others and denying the meaning intended in those arguments. When you bring up arguments made by others, you can't demand that they fit into another context which they never intended.

You do not seem to know what a negation is, or under what circumstances words are meant to be negations of one another. If you understood how negations actually worked, you wouldn't end up failing to take into account fundamental rules of thinking. There are several kind of opposites, negations, reversals, mirrorings, etc.. Negations happen to follow the law of the excluded middle, and if you fail to come to that conclusion, then you have committed a failure of thought.

You are of course allowed to argue the other direction, but the way to do that is to display each piece of the logic, and so far, you seem to latch onto some notion of mirroring of the two concepts. I agree there is a concept of mirroring, but not the one you think. However, you're hiding your argument, and defend parts of your argument that aren't the ones I'm attacking (and so, you seem to think that you've defended your argument, while the actual flaw in your logic remains).

I more or less agree, and in this case, they've specified exactly what meaning they intend to convey, the only limit is your arbitrary decision not to understand it.

You're missing my argument. I'm attacking your point that there is some aspect of propriety of language which is required. Clearly, you don't actually believe that, or your punctuation would be at least decent. Instead, it seems more likely that you pick and mix your values, based on what saves face.

 

Understand it?
I have given a counterargument, have you noticed?

The default condition is theist because theists lack belief in the nonexistence of God.

Very simple.

 

Ive given them to you

refer to the last post where stanford explains it to you. you should have already read it.

But you have not shown any flaws in my logic, only claimed they exist LOL

I did not say flew redefined theism.
It is now, its a pure negation and it carries as much weight as flew.
More lip service no evidence as usual

They only need to express what they mean, I have done that, you pretend I have not.

Theists lack belief in the nonexistence of God, not any more, there is no fundamental difference. nice try. lame, ineffective, but nice.

You just said I cant make up your mind.

Yeh, should be fun, lets state everything as a negative.

others? flew? what others? we are talking about flew here. Are there more?

sure it does, I suppose you think that gay 'used' as homosexual was an academic creation? Can you be at least a little bit real here? No its boneheads at the bar who dont know squat playing word salad games.

Sure if you continue to insist on dragging this completely out of the logical philosophical realm, which I refuse to do regardless how hard you stomp and scream.

Sure it does, you want to disqualify it but provide nothing to counter it with, well you supply plenty of your opinion, that and a dollar.......

Im primarily concerned with pointing out that I did address them, you just dont like the answers because you have no reasonable defense.

Im not the one with logic issues here, by all means explain what a negation is LOL

if?
I didnt however, so that was a pointless statement.

You dont even know what you are attacking, you have no made so much as one cogent argument that scratches the surface of the argument I have provided.

 

Repetition does nothing. What you need is to provide a reason to believe that you are not mistaken. No repetition in the world will make good a bad argument.

It seems to me reasonably clear in a different direction. I agree, that theism is best understood as a proposition, something that is either true or false. This does not contradict Flew, it only contradicts your strawman version of Flew, Flew understands theism as a proposition held and atheism as failure to hold that proposition. Flew never argued that theism is a lack of belief that there are no gods, that's a conjecture on your part. If you wrote out the logic you use, I could point you to the flaw in it, but you seem to like your reasoning unexamined.

It is not just a restatement, Flew himself writes "In this interpretation an atheist becomes: not someone who positively asserts the non-existence of God; but someone who is simply not a theist", which is not the same statement (since there are people like agnostics).

Nope, a person who accepts neither "there is a god" nor "there are no gods" falls in the first version but not the latter, so they can't be the same thing.

Stop pretending like you are the one who gets to decide which one we're talking about. Theism is not (necessarily) the content of the belief that there is a god, it is the belief in it.

The idea that negation of a belief is the belief in the negation of the first belief, you have to argue, but you have failed to. The idea that the negation of a belief is anything where the belief is not present does also need to be argued, and I have done so, in the form of the law of the excluded middle.

Why would identical rules apply to both? If it was so, you should be able to present your reasoning for thinking that it is so. It seems to me any "rule" that says identical rules apply to both goes out the window if we use a different definition (just like "oranges taste nice" goes out the window if we start using the paint definition). In other words, whatever reason you have to believe that rules apply the same way to both is merely a failure of yours to understand what "neoatheists" mean by the word.

 

huh?
its the content of the proposition. dont care what you believe outside yes or no.

Im not arguing the 'belief' outside its construct, you are the one trying to bring all this extraneous garbage.

If there is an included middle which there is then your definition is bunk, which I have proved.

Im not discussing agnostic.

Oh, that easy, then a theist becomes: not someone who positively asserts the existence of God; but someone who is simply not an atheist, thats what lack of belief is designed to do.

Just did.

Not using a different definition, using flews definition for atheist, and an identical construct for theism, as a negation.

nope it means its your hand waving away the fact that I have given you identical constructs, which destroys flew.

 

You haven't really given a counterargument. You've hinted at the idea of using replacing the word atheism with the word theism and developing a similar argument, but you have not shown that those are allowed modifications, nor how that takes you to any conclusions. I've seen you writing that idea every time you wrote it, and I asked you to fill in the blanks.

 

Is comedy a new hobby? Seriously? Now you want to tell us that you dont even know what a counter argument is? Even after I posted those details for you, maybe 3 posts ago? Seriously?????

Allowed? By whom? If you have a problem with it being allowed feel free to post your counterargument showing why its not allowed.

Fill in the blanks?
If you dont comprehend my counter argument then neither do you comprehend flews argument, they are the same.

Im off to make some word salad with dressing yum!

 

No you could not, we have thousands of posts here on record proving that you do not understand how to set up logic algorithms.

Thats double talk btw. See if you can figure out why, lets start there. You need to get off of square one before I am willing to move on to more complex logic. I can predict with confidence you do not see (or are unwilling to admit.....whichever the case) the orwellian double talk in that quote.

 

Delete please.

 

I assumed it was as that since that’s how you referred to the god described in the Bible in this thread.

According to a biblical story, they asked God who He was. God said: “I am who I am.”

Any idea I give of God is going to be filtered through the conditioned mind, which is limited and imperfect. What I think has nothing to do with it. Enlightenment only comes when there is no longer an I, but only Reality and Truth.

So what? People who want happiness attain happiness. People who want Truth attain Truth.

 

29 pages and atheism remains, by definition, not a religion. Atheists remain, by definition, not theists.

 

I see you still haven't learned to draw a Venn Diagram. Cool beans.

 

According to your "logic" (which, no, Stanford isn't going to back up), everyone either actively denies the existence of God or denies the non-existence of God, and no one is agnostic. Funny claim to make for a supposed "agnostic."

 

I know full well what a counterargument is, I just don't think yours is a successful or valid one.

Allowed in the sense that the logic you attack stays true if you flip the words.

The core of my argument is to defend arguments which you have attacked (not in general, just a particular angle). In particular, I argue that you are taking the arguments out of their linguistic context. In that linguistic context, theism is (as it often is) defined as something like "the belief that there is a god". In that context, atheism is defined, something along the lines of "the absence of theism", much like amorality is the absence of morality. The latter can be rewritten a number of (for our purposes) equivalent ways, "the failure to assert that there is a god", "anyone who isn't a theist", etc.

Note that the definition of theism is not made in terms of "absence of atheism" or "absence of the belief that there is no god".

Now, if you decide to swap the two around, to define theism as "absence of the belief that there is no god", you break the context. There is nothing inherently wrong with breaking the context, but it is not valid to address arguments that are made in one context using another context (or at least not in a context in which words mean different things). The reason your counterargument doesn't work is that "theism is the absence of a belief that there is no god" is not consistent with the context, whereas "atheism is the absence of belief in god" is.

They're not the same, I'm addressing your points specifically from the context of the "neoatheist" arguments, and in that context, "theism as an absence of the belief that there is no god" is simply not true. You can construct contexts in which it is true, but you can't address "neoatheist" arguments in that context, since that would constitute taking them out of context.

 

Don't mind Koko. He was introduced to the concept of a counterargument earlier in this thread and he was completely unable to address the one presented, so now he is borrowing the word and misapplying it to something else entirely.

 

I mean, you're right in that I disagree that there is double talk in it. Do please point it out if you can see it.

 

I was thinking he seemed to have mixed up counterarguments with reductio ad absurdum arguments, but since my objections were the same regardless, I figured there'd be no particular point in dragging it up.

 

Talk about a total waste of font ink! LOL
All that gooblety gook notwithstanding;
I am not talking about any definition, chalk up another blunder.
I gave you a proposition, its either true or false.
You dodged the question and responded with yet another set of strawmen,
The proposition:
Theists lack belief that God does not exist True____ False____
That proposition is either true or false.
Relax, take your time!

 

According to that proposition, you (and all agnostics) are theists. And according to the converse proposition, you (and all agnostics) are atheists. If you see the flaw in that logic, you see the flaw in your logic

 

No? Seriously? Yeh but lack of belief has its foundation based solidly on the laws of the included middle?

 

Atheism is lack of belief. Theism is active belief.