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The problem is that the guy who creared it, started adding tenets like pro-mask and now, it appears, pro-vaxx. He is a massive hypocrite.

yes. i understand the point of it.

but thats got nothing to do with either OP or my reply.

OP shows a letter from an atheist group attempting to gain a religious exemption.

my response was to someone stating atheism isnt a religion therefore completly fucking themselves out of an exemption.

I like you.

whos the anti vaxxer?

the coof jab is not a vaccine.



paganism is religion bruh

Fair enough.


That's a more interesting claim. It's possible that if God did not exist, the belief in God would never have existed in the world. A flying spaghetti monster doesn't exist, so we shouldn't be surprised that no such belief ever existed anywhere. It would not be strange for one group, here or there, to have formed a false belief (like a belief in something that does not exist), but it seems much less probable that all groups for all of human history (until the most recent century) held such a similar false belief; that beliefs which refer to literally nothing (as you say), all seemed to converge on such a similar concept (even between people with no geographical or cultural contact, separated by centuries and millennia) is hard to explain.

The question is not really whether there 'is a God', but what 'God' refers to. Even on the atheistic account, we must acknowledge that God is real in the abstract sense of objects - sort of like the idea that there is no traffic jam. A traffic jam is not an object. It is an abstract thing made out of many real objects (cars). I believe a lot of atheists fail to make this distinction. They focus on arguing against the external reality of God, but they are never able to explain that, if God is not mind-independently real, then at least God's reality in the mind is a universal still in need of explanation. I mean universal here in the sense that all people know the meaning of the word (they have a concept of it), whether or not they have a positive belief in the existence claim for the concept. The atheist cannot really just chalk nearly all of human history up to 'being wrong'. This would be like saying that people are wrong about most of folk psychology, when we know that folk psychology is still, all around, a more successful theory of mind than most of our explicit theories in the discipline of psychology today.


Certainly you do. How else would you know what you are talking about. You've said that neither your grandparents or your parents believed, and therefore you shouldn't have inherited a God concept. But you do think you know what you're talking about when you say, "God". You have some idea, or collection of concepts in your mind that orbit this word - and oddly enough, even though generations before you have not had a belief in such a thing, your sense of God is probably not that far off from what most religious believers think God is. This is stranger than it appears at first glance.


I believe it is normal in specific contexts (i.e. among certain people at certain times). Think of something like phlogiston. So a scientific caste of society at one time held a bad idea about the nature of combustion. What are the conditions for a belief like phlogiston to form? You have to presuppose a scientific paradigm. That also means that you could expect that such a belief - if false - would be replaced by something better. I'm sure there are similar situations throughout history.

But this is nothing like the belief in God. God belief is not even, in principle, open to empirical 'correction'. But it is open to rational correction. Think of the debates in early Christianity all the way up through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas - remarkably sophisticated growth and correction. Belief in God is somehow more like belief in mathematics. You couldn't prove that numbers existed empirically - they are purely rational constructs. But they show evidence for belief in them going back to the earliest civilizations we know of. And of course, there has been corrections about the way numbers relate to one another throughout history, until we get to the really complex debates about foundations of math in the 20th century.

Of course you'd never say you don't believe in the number 2. But your response will probably be: "Sure, but my belief in the number 2 does things. It does work. We need numbers for our best scientific theories to work. Therefore we should believe that numbers are real even though, like God, we cannot find them anywhere in nature."

To this I'd just say that numbers cover one domain of reality, a quantitative domain. Consider that God is like that which covers the moral domain of reality - that which governs how things ought to be versus how they are.

No, you misunderstand. I'm playing for a team, but atheists are not. It can get confusing b/c many of the loud and obnoxious ones are lefty-faggots who try to wrap their atheism in their moral fabric and stitch it onto their "I fUCkInG lOVe ScIEncE!" t-shirts.

@Wahaha hit the nail on the head with his no-appeler analogy. I like the Patriots and you're a Cowboys fan. I'm telling you "hey man, not everyone likes sports" and you're like "NO! Everyone has a favorite sports team! it might not be football, maybe it's basketball!. And Wahaha is like, "No, dude, I don't watch any sports" and you're like "Not watching sports is a sport!"

Nope. They assert a dogma as fact. That's a religion.

People who grow up with all the advantages of what national religion built can atheism all they want. Until they can't anymore. Then you'll find out that the religion is there to protect you from your neighbour. If you think that when everyone sat in church on Sundays and everyone to a man truly believed that would be very short sighted.

Without any national religion, the laws you make are based on nothing more than some guy said. Your neighbour may not think so. Your other neighbour doesn't know what to think and isn't any help We've been watching the slow increase of this for the last 50 years.

That Jew Kallenbach who coached and created Gandhi taught him that the British Empire was successful because it was built on a spiritual foundation, and if one attacked the spiritual, constitutions would have no meaning because it would have no agreed upon foundation. The attack on the constitution your seeing today is only possible by non Christians. It means nothing to them, and it means the constitutional protections will fall eventually unless Christians war and kill, and they can and should.

Atheists are either jews or fallen to jews, and don't know it. They'll be forced to find their place in a pew and shut up like their grandpas did.

Gnosticism, in and of itself, is a belief system that arose out of the early Christian milieu, which thought that knowledge itself was redemptive/salvific, as in the only means for liberating the human soul from the material world. To me, letting Gnosticism hinge on whether one has certainty or uncertainty is too subjective. Human belief is tricky, and there are some who even question the reality of belief states.

Gnosticism implies strong realism. There is a God, but there is also deceit from lower beings. It entails supernatural claims. There are problems with a theory that human knowledge can be grounded with 100% certainty without faith-based claims, or faith in something transcendent. I personally think the terminology 'gnostic atheist' is absurd, although I recognize it is a real term used in that kind of discourse.

If the agnostic atheist says, "I do not have appropriate evidence for a belief claim either way", then what could possibly constitute evidence for the gnostic atheist as proof for the non-existence of God? I mentioned above that specifying objective evidence for that certainty is practically impossible, so that what constitutes evidence is subjective. What you find if you drill down on any such certainty claims is that faith-based claims are found at bottom. That is, there is no logically provable or empirically verifiable basis for the principled claims against the existence of God.

This is a different claim than the agnostic one, which is really skepticism about the possibility for any such evidence. So a better way to think of gnosticism versus agnosticism is that the agnostic disbelieves that belief either way is justifiable (you can have unjustified 'tendencies' toward belief). The gnostic believes that true knowledge is possible, but importantly, the Gnostics also thought that in order to say this, true knowledge had to be grounded in a transcendent being called God.

I think that what @yesiknow meant is that atheists are usually not aware that their claims are, at bottom, neither logically provable nor empirical, so they behave like religious claims.