then that seems to me to be agnostic. the word agnostic just breaks down into ag, which means without, and nostic, which means knowledge. So to me, the only atheism is "hard atheism", that declares outright, there is no God. all the rest of the non-religious are agnostics, who are people, like myself, that have issues with trust and faith in that which we cannot explain.

you may be interested i to learn that i have a life. interestingly enough, i would like said life to be guided by the constant search for truth and meaning...and not black and white music videos from a long time ago.

Interesting point. If there is someone out there who relies on meditation in lieu of religion to attain these feelings of inspiration and comfort, your views and experiences would be appreciated. Or, a christian who uses meditation to supplement their prayer, or something along those lines. The differences between meditation and prayer could also be an interesting thread, if it isn't already.
that said, those feelings of comfort are for some a necessity in order to deal with the rigors of life. Any atheists who meditate, out there? Or are these feelings merely one of the "mirages" that nietzsche claimed needed to be done away with?

all right, those make sense. I suppose I fall into the agnostic theist category.

so for agnostic atheists, the first one, you mean that 'i don't believe god exists but don't know whether he does or not, not and don't know whether he does or not

i think you can interpret either way, but the point is the claims are non-dependent, they are separate philosophies that often get conflated

I was not taking any stance on god and faith in this thread. My comments concerned what I assert are logical inconsistencies commonly exhibted by atheists on this forum. Specifically, declaring themselves weak atheists while making assertions of strong atheists.


PairTheBoard

ok, so you are fine with pointing out what you perceive as logical fallacies in other's beliefs, but you do not state your own?

The topic of the thread is "i do not understand atheists". I thought my comments were relevant to that topic. I've been posting here and on SMP for several years now and have never revealed my personal beliefs. I don't intend to start now. Sorry if that offends you.

PairTheBoard

You either ignore or don't comprehend what I'm getting at here. Sadly, I don't which is worse....

I won't debate you further. I'll leave that to the good folks in here to defend what is real. You seem to like to pigeon hole people based on narrow contextual definitions as if the truth is to be found there. The truth is right in front of you yet you continually look past it as if you can actually see a further truth. What makes you do this?

Your next question for me of course is "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE?" So here it is. Oh and please, please, tell ME what brand of atheist I am...

"From what I see I do not believe their is a god. However if their is one, I'm sure he would respect me for thinking their isn't...."

I put that in the same category as ... well, it'd be like Barack saying, "Hey, I've NEVER said I was a liberal".

This seems silly. If the Christian God exists then of course he exists outside of meaningful human comprehension. That is why he reveals himself to us in ways we can understand. We don't know what God is, but we do know what he is like. i.e. We know God has traits X, Y, Z because he showed us or said so. He probably also has traits A, B, and C that we don't know about or cannot comprehend.

Of course by "know", I mean that we have faith that the first hand accounts described in the Bible are real.

What do you mean "what he is like." What is he like?

But usually faith is earned. Why do you have faith? I think where most of us atheists are boggled is why people have this faith rather then none at all, or instead of for Allah or Zeus.

I mean, whenever an atheist looks for good compelling reasons we look at things like studies on prayer. And when they study it, they see that, for instance, patients who are prayed for fare no better then patients who are not prayed for. So it appears that prayer doesn't work.

Certainly if you have Faith that the stories written by relatively primitive man 2000 years ago... by people who believed the eclipses were demons trying to steal the sun... certainly you would have to have pretty compelling reason to have faith that the accounts are real. That's what I'm curious to hear.

Oddly, that question has been asked endlessly on this and throughout the world and the answer is nearly always circular... Faith. You justify your faith with.... faith.

You seem to misunderstand. When I said "outside of meaningful human comprehension" i meant "outside of meaningful human comprehension." Not "outside of meaningful human comprehension except in the Bible."

I don't really misunderstand. I'm saying that the glimpses we have of God's nature isn't the full story. It may be just a tiny fraction of the truth. If you understand 1% of something can't the rest be "outside the realm of human comprehension?" I would argue that to some degree quantum mechanics or quantum gravity fits into this bucket. We know more than 1% probably, but we still don't really know what's going on.

<ramble>
As another example, I've posed the question - What if God is a kid in some greater universe doing a science experiment and our whole universe is in their equivalent of a petri dish? From our point of view, he is still God, omnipotent, etc. I personally don't find this sacrilegious but most of the christians I've asked do. I guess the point is that we don't really know what is really making reality tick, but it doesn't even matter. We can only perceive things from our point of view. What happened before life was created or what happened before the Big Bang really doesn't matter to our existence at all, yet these are the questions we all ask. Everyone is searching for "The Truth."
</ramble>

I'm not going to answer the question about faith because that wasn't the part of this discussion I was interested in and I don't want to side track it anymore than I have. My point about faith was just to clarify what I meant by "know" since I figured some smarty pants would just say, "but you can't know."

Perhaps poor wording on my part. I should have qualified it with "entirely outisde". I firmly believe there is no personal god that has any interest in our planet/species/intervening in any of it. I acknowledge that there could be a god in the deistic "first cause" sense.

I'm gonna go with I do not comprehend. Other people don't comprehend my perspective, omg how can they be so ignorant? Because it's your perspective and not mine. If you want to make your viewpoint known, state it in black and white, as we are not inside your head and you can lose a lot of inflection over the internet.

and also interesting, perception vs reality debates?

There is no reality we can intelligibly speak of. Everything is filtered through our perception. If every person on the planet realized this, religion would die instantly. Everyone would realize that all the different Gods, demons, angels, creation stories that humans have conjured up over the eons only tells us something about how our reality simulators (our brains) work. They say nothing about how reality works. Even science has nothing to say about reality. It speaks only of useful models. There are no truths to believe in because there are no truths period.

ok, so lets be logical.
A) there are are no truths, period.
B) If statement A is actually true, then it is true that there are no truths. That being a true statement, it refutes that there are no truths period.

then it would theoretically be true that there are no truths, in your view. Seems like a self-refuting argument, or circular reasoning at very best.

I screwed up. I meant to say there are no objective truths. This follows from the fact that we can't escape our perceptions. At first glance this may not look like an improvement of my position. It appears just as self-refuting as before, but there's a reason the qualifier "objective" saves me here. The claim "There are no objective truths" is not an objective truth itself. It is a subjective truth. Subjective truths do exist.

Then I'd discreetly suggest "maybe there are objective truths".

Well, it's not objectively true that there aren't, if that's what you mean.

And I'll actually expand on that, because many people seem to think that a disbelief in objective truth is some kind of contradiction. The position is that objective truth is a category error, not that it's objectively true there is no objective truth (which would be a contradiction).

Right. Humans can't speak of objective truths (in the Wittgenstein sense). We can only speak of human truths, i.e. subjective truths. Objective truth is nonsense.

Here I will help you understand & define them:

Psa 14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, [There is] no God............

God just spoke to me and told me to write, "Christians are idiots. This is God speaking." It's divinely inspired because it says so, so it must be true.