Athiests start religious wars, too!

[Polaris]

...Mao? I don't recall reading anything about his beliefs; likely he started out as a Confucian or whatever.... Which is only vaguely a religion.
Starting war? Is the Revolution a war? ...

That's debatable, but entering the Korean War with an enormous army and creating conditions that left us with the divided peninsula to this day certainly counts.

 

[Belz...]

But you just did. You told me that I'm religious, even though I've never said whether or not I am.

You could clear that up, you know, by actually answering.

 

[Belz...]

My favorite is:

Bob: I'm not voting for A
Tim: Why do you love B so much

Actually, considering how often people actually do make that argument, it's easy to see why so many of them can confuse disbelief with belief.

 

[Belz...]

Good post.

Semantic arguments are often pointless. It's not about the words. It's about the ideas in people's heads. Words are simply the tools to convey those ideas.

Well, that's why it's important to agree on the words used, hence the semantics argument. It's when the argument becomes a distraction to avoid having to debate the issue that problems arise.

 

[cosmicaug]

Atheism is most definitively and explicitly a belief. It doesn't have any associated hierarchy and not much in the way of dogma, so may you can argue that it's not a belief system, but it is by its very definition a belief.

That implies that the number of beliefs I hold is infinite. Furthermore, I only knowingly hold some of those beliefs and the fraction of total beliefs that I hold knowingly is, essentially, zero.

Only in a trivial sense that certain sets contain an infinite number of members. But you have had a finite number of thoughts, and if you don't think about something, you don't have a belief about it.

I don't even know what a believer is thinking about when they think about a god (only they do) so I am not thinking about it therefore I am not an atheist?

What I am addressing in part, as I am sure you must realize, is burden of proof in the manner of Russell's celestial teapot argument. You seem to be suggesting (and I certainly might be misunderstanding you) that rejecting belief in something implies thinking about that something. I contend that belief in god(s) is like belief in woodland fairies (or celestial teapots) and that rejecting belief in god(s) is like rejecting belief in woodland fairies (or celestial teapots). But it doesn't have to be a teapot or a woodland fairy, it can be anything for which we have no good reason to believe in its existence. In effect, for the category of things which lacks any supporting evidence, even if we often cannot have true logical disbelief in them (because we really cannot logically rule out a celestial teapot) we can have something that is very much like it as a consequence of where the burden of proof lies and thus reject the belief.

But the point of Russell's celestial teapot is not to show that celestial teapots do not exist (or, more properly, that they are so unlikely to exist as to make perverse the assignment of any significance to the possibility of their existence) but to show, by analogy, that belief in other things which are like a celestial teapot (for instance, a celestial tea cup) is equally unwarranted. My point though, is that this applies even if you are not specifically thinking of a particular kind of tableware. Therefore, if I have not ever specifically thought about it, it does not mean that I am agnostic about its existence until you bring it up and I think about it. Under this circumstance, I have justification to a priori reject the existence of these things and therefore I will not call myself agnostic on this issue.

In other words, disbelieving in celestial teapots also implies disbelief in other kinds of tableware even if I am not thinking about celestial tableware at all. That is, not believing in something is not necessarily a type of thought about that something (just like not playing chess is not a kind of game). The beliefs I do not hold are infinite (just like there are an infinite number of games one could play which haven't even been created) but I am not thinking about an infinite number of things (just like no one plays an infinite number of games --as would be the case if not playing a game was in itself a type of game).

Let's put it differently. I am an atheist. I lack a belief in Zeus. My contention is that I lack a belief in Zeus because there are no compelling reasons to believe in such a being. Your contention seems to be that it is only because I can think about Zeus so that I may actively disbelieve him that I can call myself an atheist. But I contend that (unless you can give me compelling reasons to do otherwise) I am also rejecting a Zeus like god who shoots cobalt blue colored lightning bolts (rather than regular lightning bolts), or a Zeus like god who shoots bolts of lightning only in pairs or any of an infinite number of Zeus like gods which I have not ever even thought about. I can most definitely lack a belief in something which I call gods without thinking about it. If I could not do that, I could never be an atheist because there are always possible gods which I have never thought about (for which we also happen to lack any reason to think they exist) which I would have to actively disbelieve in order to truly be able to call myself an atheist.

If the answer is yes, then you're an atheist. If the answer is no, then you're not an atheist. Quite simple, really. And it hinges upon your belief, which you haven't told me. So I can't answer your question.

No, it hinges upon a lack of belief.

 

[Ziggurat]

You could clear that up, you know, by actually answering.

I could, but I choose not to. Because it's none of your damn business.

 

[Belz...]

I could, but I choose not to. Because it's none of your damn business.

I don't know why you're being so aggressive, unless the subject has emotional significance to you. Either way, your answer might shed some light on the cause of your opinon on this matter. That you choose to remain opaque doesn't help.

 

[Ziggurat]

I don't know why you're being so aggressive

You could find out easily enough by simply reviewing the thread.

Either way, your answer might shed some light on the cause of your opinon on this matter. That you choose to remain opaque doesn't help.

Nothing I said depends upon my religious beliefs, or lack thereof. I don't owe anyone an explanation of those personal details, and I'm not here to "help" you figure them out. And anyone who presumes to tell me what my beliefs are is talking out their ass.

 

[yomero]

So whenever I beat senseless facebookers who think "Athiests start wars, too you know", they always come up with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Che

I assume the answer is no, but is there any way these people started their conflicts due to athiesm?

To me it seems like a massively stupid question but I've been known to be wrong before so I just want to ensure that none of the above dolts were Athiest, and if they were, they didn't start wars because of it....

There is nothing inherent to atheism that would dictate persecution. That is the result of in-group out-group thinking. Which is also a basis for much of religious atrocity. The difference is that theism actually calls for murdering infidels and punishing people for blasphemy.

Do you see the difference?

I tend to agree with RandFan. As an atheist, it is impossible for me to understand how our unbelief in god could lead us to attack those that believe. But I think it has happened.

In the 1920's we had Plutarco Elías Calles as president of Mexico. He was anticlerical, perhaps fanatically so, but I couldn't find any confirmation that Calles was an atheist. Once on the presidency, Calles decided to apply strictly articles 27 and 130 of the Constitution of 1917. Religious public displays were prohibitted, the Church was not recognized as a juridic entity, cult ministers were denied political rights, the Church was forbidden to own real state, taxes were demanded from the Church and its ministers, and several more statutes. State governors were allowed to interpret those articles at their discretion. This led to abuses such as those comitted by Tomás Garrido Canabal, governor of the state of Tabasco. Garrido was indeed an atheist and was responsible for the deaths of several Catholics.

The Catholic population of west-central Mexico felt they were being subjected to intolerable persecution and provocation. Calles' actions were deemed excesive. They rebelled against the government in the Cristeros War or La Cristiada from 1926 to 1929. Dozens of thousands died. The Catholic hierarchy (which had never really backed the Cristeros) came to an understanding with Calles' succesor, Emilio Portes Gil in 1929, in part thanks to the good offices of the US ambassador Dwight Morrow. The Church accepted some limitations, the government didn't insist in enforcing strictly the Constitution.

The way I see it, it was mainly anticlericalism responsible for those provocations that led to the Cristeros War, but there were some (Garrido Canabal) who felt that their atheism dictated that they commit atrocities against believers. That's a state of mind that I just can't understand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristero_War If you can read Spanish, the article in Spanish wiki is a bit less biased.

 

[Ziggurat]

Let's put it differently. I am an atheist. I lack a belief in Zeus. My contention is that I lack a belief in Zeus because there are no compelling reasons to believe in such a being. Your contention seems to be that it is only because I can think about Zeus so that I may actively disbelieve him that I can call myself an atheist. But I contend that (unless you can give me compelling reasons to do otherwise) I am also rejecting a Zeus like god who shoots cobalt blue colored lightning bolts (rather than regular lightning bolts), or a Zeus like god who shoots bolts of lightning only in pairs or any of an infinite number of Zeus like gods which I have not ever even thought about. I can most definitely lack a belief in something which I call gods without thinking about it. If I could not do that, I could never be an atheist because there are always possible gods which I have never thought about (for which we also happen to lack any reason to think they exist) which I would have to actively disbelieve in order to truly be able to call myself an atheist.

First off, you quite clearly have thought about the set of things called gods. Not about every single possible member of that set, but about the set itself. You have rejected the actual existence of this set. You need not consider every member in order to reject this set, just like you need not consider every prime number in order to conclude that 2 is the only even prime number.

But if you had never even thought about the set of things called gods, then you could not be called an atheist any more than every baby is an atheist, and at that point the word become detached from its actual usage. Fredrik is right on that score.

 

[angrysoba]

Isn't a language defined by how people use the words, and if so, doesn't this mean that these definitions can't be considered wrong?

I donkey what you sail but if Scrut ice creams the dibble then how can we coil what dairy car waffles?

Do you whiff whaff?

 

[Ziggurat]

Do you whiff whaff?

I think I've heard something like that before.

 

[angrysoba]

Semantic arguments are often pointless. It's not about the words. It's about the ideas in people's heads. Words are simply the tools to convey those ideas. They are not laws of physics. Once you understand that it is possible to hold the null hypothesis or that it's possible to hold a probabilistic belief then it's rather disingenuous to assert that an atheist must be one who believes there is no god.

Yes, but words have come in handy in their time for expressing the ideas in people's heads. They seem to perform a valuable function in that way. If there isn't any kind of socially agreed upon meaning of words and we all spoke Humpty-Dumpty-like then we wouldn't be able to engage in any kind of reliable communication and certainly wouldn't be able to argue with theists who love to exploit the idea that maybe what they think of when they think of God is so mega-awesome that words don't do it justice. They could also declare that faith has its own special meaning that can't be analyzed and they could also argue that what it seems to say in the Bibbly isn't exactly what it means etc...

In other words, once you throw out the plain socially-accepted meaning of words then you undermine all argument.

 

[angrysoba]

but a false belief is a belief and a non belief is a belief....oh eck, im confused!

lxxx

I don't remember saying that a non-belief is a belief. I just said that a knowledge claim is, by definition, a belief.

 

[RandFan]

Semantic arguments are often pointless. It's not about the words. It's about the ideas in people's heads. Words are simply the tools to convey those ideas. They are not laws of physics. Once you understand that it is possible to hold the null hypothesis or that it's possible to hold a probabilistic belief then it's rather disingenuous to assert that an atheist must be one who believes there is no god.

Yes, but words have come in handy in their time for expressing the ideas in people's heads. They seem to perform a valuable function in that way. If there isn't any kind of socially agreed upon meaning of words and we all spoke Humpty-Dumpty-like then we wouldn't be able to engage in any kind of reliable communication and certainly wouldn't be able to argue with theists who love to exploit the idea that maybe what they think of when they think of God is so mega-awesome that words don't do it justice. They could also declare that faith has its own special meaning that can't be analyzed and they could also argue that what it seems to say in the Bibbly isn't exactly what it means etc...

In other words, once you throw out the plain socially-accepted meaning of words then you undermine all argument.

Please note that I did not make an absolute claim (see highlighted text). The arguments become pointless when the debate over the words become more important than the ideas that are meant to be conveyed. I would never suggest we throw out anything. I would suggest we try and figure out what is meant if we want to move the discussion forward.

And BTW: You're not going to change a lot of minds in any debate much less a semantic one. One of the biggest mistakes we make in these little discussions is to fail to move the discussion forward. I can think of few things that don't mire a discussion in the mud more than semantic debates. Often they aren't simply pointless, often if not usually, they are counter productive, IMHO.

So, if I could offer some advice it would be to try and understand what is meant and focus more on the ideas than the words. Nothing wrong with a small aside to correct a definition or offer an opinion on a word. But if you are sidetracked by the meaning of words then you are spinning your wheels and getting absolutely no where.

 

[cosmicaug]

But if you had never even thought about the set of things called gods, then you could not be called an atheist any more than every baby is an atheist, and at that point the word become detached from its actual usage. Fredrik is right on that score.

Sure you can because atheism is actually a default position (which one can elaborate upon --but that part is optional). That's why your insistence on active disbelief does not make sense. As to common usage,... well,... the reaction in theists of "oh, I suspected you didn't believe in god but I didn't realize you were an atheist" seems to be a lot less rare than one would hope. Common usage seems to include such things as hating god and often there's considerable surprise on the part of theists when they find out that atheists are not actively pursuing evil for its own sake. Should we make these things part of the definition as well?

 

[DC]

What makes you think I'm religious?

your use of the word god. pretty much a give away.

 

[DC]

I could, but I choose not to. Because it's none of your damn business.

you answered it already you do believe in a god, and most likely its the god aka YHWH. those that do believe in that creature's existence have the habbit of just calling it "God" while those not believing in it have the habit of talking about gods or a specific god and not call it just God like you did.

 

[Belz...]

You could find out easily enough by simply reviewing the thread.

Again I have to mention my previous projects manager. For some reason, when asked a question that required a yes or no answer, or multiple choice, he would answer in the most obscure way possible, because he was loathe to have to explain what he wanted, instead assuming we'd guess what that was. You'd have to press him quite a bit to get such a simple answer, and eventually he'd get mad at us for wasting his time, asking him to do his damn job. It didn't help that he was the owner's son.

Why don't you simply answer the question, lad ?

Nothing I said depends upon my religious beliefs, or lack thereof. I don't owe anyone an explanation of those personal details, and I'm not here to "help" you figure them out.

Who said anything about owing, helping or depending ? What's that chip on your shoulder ? Why are you so antagonistic ? Isn't this a discussion forum ?

 

[Ziggurat]

Again I have to mention my previous projects manager. For some reason, when asked a question that required a yes or no answer, or multiple choice, he would answer in the most obscure way possible, because he was loathe to have to explain what he wanted, instead assuming we'd guess what that was. You'd have to press him quite a bit to get such a simple answer, and eventually he'd get mad at us for wasting his time, asking him to do his damn job. It didn't help that he was the owner's son.

Why don't you simply answer the question, lad ?

You jumped into a fight where I had been directly insulted without provocation, and you took sides with the person who insulted me. Now, either you did that without knowing the context (in which case your refusal to find out that context when I told you to was negligence on your part), or you did know that and chose to play dumb. Neither of those options are endearing you to me right now. Neither is your condescending "lad" act. You don't get to pull crap like that and pretend that you're just trying to get along. You're not.

And I won't answer the question because it's none of your damn business.

Why are you so antagonistic ? Isn't this a discussion forum ?

I didn't start the fight. But you joined it. And it's not a discussion forum for personal topics that people don't want to share.