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Old 08-22-2003, 02:07 PM   #281
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I think atheism entails belief, but not religious belief by the usual definition of the word. It's simply the belief that there is/are no God(s), everything else can vary from person to person. Heck, there are Buddhists who are atheists and I once even encountered an atheist who believed in ghosts. So... as long as not believing in unfalsifiable assertions does not count as religious belief, atheism is not a religion.
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Old 08-22-2003, 02:51 PM   #282
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Default Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Does atheism entail religious beliefs?

Quote:
Originally posted by Charles Darwin
What is the strawman that you think I am advancing?
I think it's the far-too-common creationist strawman that people believe in evolution only because materialism requires it - that the theory is justified only by the philosophy.
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Old 08-22-2003, 06:25 PM   #283
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Originally posted by Charles Darwin
What is the strawman that you think I am advancing?

Quote:
Originally posted by Kalkin
I think it's the far-too-common creationist strawman that people believe in evolution only because materialism requires it - that the theory is justified only by the philosophy.
However, ... I didn't say that.
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Old 08-25-2003, 03:05 AM   #284
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My Collins Concise English Dictionary defines Atheism as a belief that there is no God.
I think it is incorrect.
Non-belief cannot be belief, any more than a person can be in two different places simultaneously.

An atheist might be tempted to say: “I believe there is np God,” but that statement is synonymous with the statements: “I believe fairies / Santa Clause do not exists. I believe that the moon is not made of cheese (except where samples were taken by the Apollo moon landings) /that we do not grow two heads when it’s so dark we can’t see” or any other nonsense. In these contexts, “I believe” means: “In the absence of persuasive evidence that these things are real or true, I conclude that they aren’t.”
This does not entail a belief system. It entails a judgment. A judgment of this sort should never be confused with a religious belief which has an internal origin and has absolutely nothing to do with “evidence” of the sort we might seek when deciding that a cake is properly baked, or that the clock on the office wall is two minutes slow, or that the nation’s leader is mentally de-arranged.
Non-belief, as has been pointed out three billion times, is absence of belief. Like when you’ve sucked all the air out of a chamber, the chamber cannot be said to contain air. When belief doesn’t exist, there is no belief.
(It seems quite straightforward to me.)
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