Wayne Delia

Suppose I started referring to Christians as "Fucking Assholes?" No agenda or specific reason, it's just something I could do. Would that be OK with you?

Of course not. I really don't care. All I did was point out that you continue to do it, after you've been corrected multiple times that the term doesn't need capitalization. Since you continue to do so, that strongly appears that you are either doing it on purpose, in order to designate atheism as being similar to a religion (that's your agenda), or you are genuinely unable to understand or comprehend your mistake, due to a problem with short-term memory or a deeper difficulty. Either way, you're not coming across as someone who can hold his own in the debate.

Well...sorry, but if you keep doing that, you will be considered to not really know what you are talking about. At least two people in this thread already have that impression. If you're doing it intentionally, that's a shame, because it's not serving its intended purpose.

The corresponding reputation you've already gotten is that of someone who intentionally cannot or will not refer to a group of people in the syntactically correct manner which they prefer, nor can you understand why that's important for you to correct. That lack of understanding on your part indicates you've got an agenda you're pushing, which causes people to assign much less credibility to you than you would otherwise receive. If that doesn't bother you, that's fine. We don't actually take you as seriously as you think we do.

Absolutely - not only posting on IIDB, but posting anywhere. All we know of you is what you write, and if your credibility doesn't matter to you, it certainly doesn't matter to us. "I was screwing around then, but I'm not screwing around now" never sells.

It didn't work out nearly as well as you thought it would, did it? Are you surprised? You said that atheists followed a "creed", and when asked to produce this "creed", you instead produced a "screed" from a Christian Apologetics site which wasn't actually very funny at all.

On the contrary, I might even be giving you too much credit as it is.

Man, your flaws were exposed in a big way. Again, it's a false dichotomy: your ability to feed your children or pay your bills is generally unrelated to whether you can act inappropriately on IIDB.

The contradiction in your own words probably flew right over your head. If your concern for your children and bills makes you feel entitled to be less than serious on IIDB, so that you can throw around the bullshit whenever the mood strikes you, we can't take you seriously when you say that feeding your children or paying your bills is important. For all we know, you may not have any children at all. That's the price you pay when you impeach your own testimony by admitting you're screwing around when it was time for you to back up your position.

Christians who have given a righteous stomp of the foot, saying "This will be my last post on the subject!" and return shortly thereafter to continue posting, are a dime a dozen. You can demonstrate your indifference to the criticism you've received by refraining from responding; you are unable to do that, so you are therefore not indifferent.

I suppose someone posting under an anonymous ID would have no problem with that, but I've got much more personal integrity than that.

And what you've said is that you don't have a great concern with your reputation, which now is pretty much in the dumper.

Personally, your sleep problems don't concern me in the least. The problem that you chose a very bad time to act like a jerk, based on the fact that you don't care about your reputation, ought to concern you even just a little bit.

WMD

Wayne Delia

There's no need to capitalize... aaah, forget it. You're either unable, or stubbornly unwilling, to correct your mistake. You will be treated accordingly.

Looks like that "fair amount of time" spent correcting you was in vain. You are unable or unwilling to correct your mistake.

Who claimed you did?

And, correspondingly, you simply made a mistake which you are repeating.

It's not quite so "amazingly pedantic" when you consider that if you capitalize atheism inappropriately, as you are doing, you're relying on an "argument by assertion" logical fallacy that atheism is a religion, in part, because you spell the term with a capital A, much like other religions are capitalized. When you are corrected, you continue to repeat your assertion.

I understand you are confused, but you're not accurately portraying the argument. I've claimed that atheism is based on a lack of belief, not the necessary holding of any specific belief, and have backed it up with sound and valid logical reasoning. You snipped my reasoning, then repeated your main assertion that was already refuted - as you are doing now. As a footnote, I pointed out that you're not really in any position to speak from authority, since you're not able to stop improperly capitalizing atheism. You continue to do so, which gives the strong impression that you're stubbornly going to hold on to your mistakes after being corrected, which indicates - as Sven pointed out - habits of sloppy thinking in other areas.

On alt.atheism, many years ago, a well-meaning but somewhat ignorant Christian apologist wanted to make an argument in favor of Bible authenticity and reliability by referring to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Her arguments were somewhat off the mark, and were shown to be so, but what really torpedoed any kind of credibility she had was the plain fact that she misspelled two words among the three words in the subject she was arguing: she actually wrote "Dead See Schrolls." It's very difficult to assign credibility to anyone claiming expertise in a subject which she couldn't even spell. Of course, you haven't necessarily misspelled words, but if you did, and continued to do so after being corrected, while still claiming any kind of competency in the subject area, you'd be in pretty much the same position you find yourself in right now.

No. If you were to do the same thing at a hunting club, you'd be expecting them to accept that their group is a religion. You were the one dragging out alternative, less commonly used definitions of atheism, and insisting it applied to atheism so as to suit your agenda. I understand your reluctance to do that in the example of the hunting club, because after all, they have guns.

The problem is, you didn't barge in here and assert that atheism is a good thing, a worthwhile thing, something that atheists can enjoy. No. You had to assert that it was a religion, and you based that crappy-ass assertion on your further unsupported assertion that atheism had a creed. It doesn't. So, atheism isn't nearly as similar to religion as you would like to believe, but your pride is too insurmountable for you to abandon that position.

Absolutely not. For one thing, atheists don't have door-to-door evangelists, nor do they have any kind of divine mandate they feel they need to fulfill, such as "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" that the Christians seem to think authorizes them to talk the ear off their neighbors until we want to stuff socks down their throats.

You can also determine the inaccuracy of your conjecture by comparing the number of programs, programming networks, satellites, and amount of money spent each year on promoting the positions of atheism and Christian fundamentalism on TV. Not surprisingly, the atheists spend several hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, less than the Christian fundamentalists whom you think are on an equal footing with atheists.

What you offered was easily refuted just off the top of my head. The problem you face, though, is that if you persist on committing mistakes after being corrected on them, and if you refer to Christian fundamentalist stereotypes of atheists as if it was some sort of atheist creed, nobody is going to take you seriously. Your idea here (although fatally flawed) risked being dismissed because it's never certain when you're being serious, when you're trying to be funny, or when you're straight-out messing around - so the prudent course of action is to dismiss you outright.

WMD

Alethias

I am dissatisfied with the tone and the level of productiveness of the conversation going on in this thread currently. I am going to close it and discuss with the other EoG mods whether or not it needs to be re-opened.

Alethias
EoG Mod