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crazyml -> RE: Court Rules: Atheism is a Religion (10/12/2011 1:59:19 AM)
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[ED to reinsert the spare comma I had left over]
Top quality thread.
The FR, before I get nerdy is that, on the whole, I agree with heather.
quote:
ORIGINAL: HeatherMcLeather
The court is basically right. Atheism is a religious belief.
I think she nailed it in her first post.
"Atheism is a religious belief" - Totally nails it. Atheism is a belief that relates directly to religion.
and "the court is basically right" the court is 'basically' right because of that fact. The 'basically' is important though - because to many people "Religion" implies a lot more than the simple belief or non belief in a god or gods. Intellectually, I can just about rationalise it down to that, but when someone says "Religion" to me, I think of a lot of things - doctrine, dogma, rituals, hierarchy etc. So I think that to generally boil the idea of a "religion" down to just the belief or non-belief in god isn't that helpful - not least because there's already a word for that - "Theism".
That said, the court has to try to nail the intention of the right and seems to have interpreted religion in a permissive way - concluding that religion relates to thinking about god/gods. Atheism certainly involves thinking about god/gods so I think it's done a reasonable job in doing so.
But fuck me.... what a collection of difficult concepts.
Theism/Atheism - I used to have a nice easy disinction. Theists believed in a god, Agnostics didn't believe that god exists or that god doesn't, Atheists believed that god does not exist. But fuckers like Rober Flint (in the 19th C) and Dawkins started introducing "softer" definitions - Which is always a sign that your thinking is going to hell in a hand basket (IMNSHO). Dawkins stated out with a pretty clear premise "Agnostics are wimpy fence-sitters, where as Atheists actually have it nailed" (and if you've read the god delusion, you might have got the impression that I did, that his premise was basically "I am Dawkins, I am clever, if you don't agree with me it's because you're just not clever enough" which kinda made me think of him as a bit of a cunt).
Now we have agnostic-atheists, atheistic-agnostics. Personally, I think it's intellectual trickery (and part of me wanted to say "weakness") to mash the terms together. I mean, the terms are there to mean something and ideally they should mean something definite.
I think it boils down to belief -
quote:
ORIGINAL: HeatherMcLeather
quote:
- Atheist: Does not believe in God. Lack of belief.
- Strong Atheist: Believes that God does not exists. Exactly how does not believing in a god differ from believing a god doesn't exist? They are just two ways of saying the same thing. Let's take god out of the question for a minute, I don't believe in dragons/I don't believe dragons exist; what's the difference?
Hmm... your "dragons exist" examples do say the same thing, but there really is a difference between the two atheist statements.
The correct translation from the atheistic statement would be...
"I don't believe in the existence of dragons" vs "I believe that dragons do not exist"
I think there is a difference, a pretty slim one but a really important one.
Take "I don't believe you've got $100,000 in your purse" vs "I believe that you do not have $100,000 in your purse".
The former statement implies that you might have $100,000 but that you've just failed to convince me. I'm not calling you a liar, and I'm open to the possibility but nah, I don't think you've got $100,000 in your purse. (I've added "think" to really fuck things up).
The latter is much more active, it adds a degree of conviction. You haven't got $100,000 in your purse. You're lying to me.
Now I might take the former stance in this case because who knows... you might be fabulously rich. Or I might take the latter stance because I know you, and based on everything I know, the balance of probabilities is enough to convince me that there's no way you can have $100,000 in your purse.
Another example - My ex lived in the delusion that she always put the car keys in the little bowl in the hallwhere we tended to put keys and stuff. So I'd ask "where are the keys" and she'd say "in the bowl". So I'd go and look, and they weren't there - so we'd search the house and, hey presto they'd be found behind the sofa, next to the kettle, in her bag, by the PC, inside the fridge (one one occasion - I shit you not). So eventually when she said "in the bowl" I wouldn't believe her. I'd walk towards the bowl, scanning surfaces as I went, because I kinda expected to see them elsewhere - and sure enough they weren't in the bowl.
And after doing this for a fucking hundred million times, every time discovering that the fuck-witted bint hadn't put them there, I came to the point where if she said "in the bowl" I would believe that they were not in the bowl. Because all of my experience had taught me that they wouldn't be.
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