Ateism: a belief or lack there of?

>conflating
Gnosticism: a prominent heretical movement of the 2nd-century Christian Church, partly of pre-Christian origin. Gnostic doctrine taught that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, the demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being, esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit.

Theism: belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.

I don't see how I'm conflating the two, care to explain?

Atheism is a negative belief, while theism is positive

If you were from a part of the world with an obscure religion and you believed in a god I have never conceived of before would I have a "negative belief" in that god? Can you have a "negative belief" in things you've never heard of before?

That's simply ignorance. A belief can only form around something you are aware of.

so we have negative belief in the FSM?

It's the lack thereof. How is this still up for debate?

You can't just debate what's the accurate definition of a word, you need to look at its use. And both uses are correct nowadays.

Oh shut the fuck up nigger

Yes?
The FSM is a simple statement that the existence of any deity is unfalsifiable and unprovable.

FSM is the creator of the universe though.

Agnosticism is a definer of certainty, it doesn't mean anything by itself. You can be agnostic towards anything.
The etymological meaning of atheist just means "not a theist". I define myself as a theist but I do not make a claim that god does not exist

And Shiva is my neighbor

I don't see how I can actively have a negative belief about all the non-falsifiable things. Its an infinite set, I couldn't even consider them all in a hundred lifetimes , let alone hold active beliefs about them all.

The rent must be through the roof.

Belief is not necessarily something you actively do.
Biases for example are often unconscious and can contain a variety of negative and positive beliefs.

'A' isn't only a prefix for not, it's also a prefix for 'non-existing' or 'not present', you damn anencephalus.

>it seems to me an important distinction
go to the library and pick an intro to philosophy. it will save you from making stupid threads, maybe.

No, you literally don't understand what the words mean.
Theism addresses the question of whether one believes in a God, Gnosticism addresses the question of whether one possesses knowledge or evidence of a God (or X given topic).
Therefore, an Agnostic Atheist does not believe in any proposed God but also claims to have no knowledge or evidence that there is or is not a God. Conversely, a Gnostic Theist claims to believe in a God, and also claims to have explicit knowledge or evidence of there being said God.

While there are militant Atheists who hold a Gnostic position, they are in the minority and are usually highschoolers. Nominally, an Agnostic Atheist fails to believe in the claims posited by Gnostic Theists but also holds no Gnostic claim themselves. This is what separates Atheism from any given Theistic ideology - Atheists do not make a claim to knowledge, neither to prove nor disprove the existence of a God. At best, Atheists can only critique the claims made by Gnostic Theists and debunk their evidence.

This is the reason I see contemporary atheism as basically Protestantism 2.0. The whole thing is a repudiation of a vaguely Christian God, but they miss the assumed cultural context, where that God is posited in the first place. The entire movement is so specifically ex-Christian.

for anyone reading this guy's posts, please disregard them. He has no idea what gnosticism (a vehemently contested term) is

Gnosticism the Christian offshoot religion is separate from concept of Gnostos, the Greek word by which we derive the work Knowledge. I'm not talking about neoPlatonist Gnosticism you dense fuck.

"Gnostic" as opposed to "a-gnostic"
That guy isn't referring to Gnosticism as a religion.

Fucking thank you

It's a lack of belief. Anyone who is aware of the idea of God but doesn't believe he exists is an atheist. However, the idea that there's a difference between saying (explicitly) "I have no belief whatosever that X is true" and saying "I believe X isn't true" is pretty dubious to me and I think a lot of "agnostic" atheists would do better to drop the label.

Theists do not put atheism on the same level as them.

Is denial a belief?

Theist doesn't mean god, it means follower or believer of god, are you seriously interpreting atheist as "non-existent believer of god?" Fuck off, atheist can only mean "not theist" in the original language, just as apathy could not mean "nonexistence of pathos"

>apathy could not mean "nonexistence of pathos"
Calm down and rethink this part.

No. You do that. There's a difference between absence and non-existence.

They do though, for example this post

>Atheism IS a belief - the belief that there is no god
Atheism is the lack of belief in a god, not the claim the he doesn't exist. Basically 99% of atheists use thhe term like this

Atheist derives from atheism, dimmit. Atheism stands for 'belief in a lack of theos'.

No. Atheism just means "not being theistic in nature. Lack of theism. Not theism." There is no way to interpret the "a" prefix as a declaration of non-belief. Even if there was the reality is that almost no one uses it this way

I see it as more of a denial that the god(s) that people worship are social constructs rather than a denial that there couldn't be a god or higher power. Atheism denies that if there was a god that it would not require worshiping or sacrifice to appease.

Ultimately I think that Atheism does have a god and that is mathematics. The same methods (science) that make people disbelieve are the same that ultimately force an Atheist to accept that there is actually some large framework in place that in some sense is predetermined.

Faggot are we discussing etimology or language use?

Yes. My post refuted you on both fronts, so it doesn't matter. I have told you the truth of the matter, I am right, the only thing left is for you to accept that

>beat me on etymology
Literally believed 'a' stood for 'non' and got rekt. Whether or not 'a-the-ism' was formed 'a-the'-ism, and thus stands for believe in a lack of God or a-'the-ism' is something we shouldn't be able to know. HOWEVER, since it was a crime in ancient Athens, as displayed by the Apology, it was most likely the former.
>language use
People use it for both meanings ya retard, that's why there is a fucking argument.

This is ridiculous. As one of those things is brought to your awareness, you THEN have the concept of the thing, and THEN attach other qualities to it.

You always accept the concept as a concept first, in this case God, then, if you are an atheist, tag the value of not true on afterwards.

Yoy don't need to have a belief in the non-existence of every concept you've never thought of, but to say something doesn't exist, you first need to accept the concept in the first place.

If you're talking about gnosis as an epistemic category then don't use the very loaded term gnosticism, a term in no way appropriate to your usage, you illiterate troglodyte

>deliberately misinterpreting a statement to score semantic victory points
Better tell everyone who uses the term Agnostic to stop, huh

Claimed absence becomes a belief. Your thoughts are a part of this world, else they wouldn't exist, no?

Yes but there is no claimed absence. There is absence of the claim, not a negative claim

>There is absense of the claim
This isn't atheism or agnosticism, though, this is literally nothing, like NEVER opening your mouth about the subject or thinking about it at all.

But that's wrong you retard, one can debate the claims of a given group without positing a counterclaim by attacking their evidence by itself.

It is and it isn't. In fact that's what the problem with it is is its a belief in no belief which is the most sickening and monstrous contradiction you could come up with.

How would you do that without making any claims yourself? Even if you said "well you have no evidence," the hidden implication is that in order to believe in someone it must be supported by physical evidence. This is a claim.

And why should we accept Belief to be the normative scenario? People aren't born believing in God, otherwise there'd be no needs for these mass education systems we call Churches, Temples, Synagogues, Mosques etc.
In fact you can't even attempt to determine whether a neutral individual has Faith without corrupting your own test by introducing foreign ideology into their experience, it's a communicative oxymoron. So tell me exactly why we should treat Faith as the "normal" position to take?

>Yes but there is no claimed absence.
Then why is this important to you? It should be as relevant as the winds of Uranus.

Its not a theistic claim, though.
I can disprove the great Flood all day, which is not a claim on the existence or non-existence of some theoretical God, its only a claim on the falsehood of Jimmy Christian's retarded book of nonsense penned by stone-age goatfuckers. It does not implicitly conclude that there is no God, only that Jimmy's evidence for his God is wrong.

This is why atheists say 'give us evidence of God and we'll assent that God exists'. If incontrovertible evidence of a higher power could be identified, Atheists would have to either A: assent to a theistic belief system that cannot be disproven, or B: lie, become intellectually dishonest and accept a theistic disbelief system against a provably existent God.

>Atheism denies that if there was a god that it would not require worshiping or sacrifice to appease.
Jesus teaches us that to God, our good deeds are as worthwhile as used tampons. It is us who need God and the worship that is natural aspect of our relationship. Of course, this relies on the distinction of our nature as humans and the nature of the world.

Listen, forget "shoulds" for a moment, user. The religious worldview DID come first, historically. Now we are at a point where we might take the reins about what we believe and how we relate to the world, but it's not a simple matter of starting from scratch. We evolved with certain capacities at our foundation, and one of those is a sense of agency that we imbue into the world. Meaning and purpose cannot exist without agency, and ULTIMATE meaning and purpose cannot exist without ultimate agency.

You have said nothing about my comments on the underlying value implicit in that argument. You can't NOT have a position on this, because your line of reasoning there says that "for God to be real it must be observable is physical senses" and this is a claim. It's not neutral.

>I can disprove the great Flood all day
While that may be so, we can also indicate the necessity of a cataclysm of such magnitude. Those ancient civilizations and even mythical ones, such as Atlantis, require an explanation.
The flood of Noah, despite being "Scifi" of its time (with Enoch) was also a story where you could learn how to handle cataclysms.

I find it curious that the bronze age nations had myths of greater civilizations in the past. Why is this? Considering that most of those nations were egoistic towards others. Most of the /pol/ arguments against Judaism are these remnants of Bronze age, written down and surviving. The Greeks weren't exactly saints to other people, nor did they believe in equality among nations.

>The religious worldview DID come first, historically
Unfalsifiable. Can't ask the first caveman whether he believes in a higher power without introducing YOUR ideas of a higher power to him.

>You can't NOT have a position on this
My position is that your evidence of your God is poor and conflicts with provable reality. Bring me another God and I will judge your evidence of its existence accordingly. On the day that evidence of a God that cannot be refuted is brought to me, I will accept it with open mind and heart.
And no, my position does not imply that God must be empirically proven to exist - in fact, my position explicitly states that people CANNOT empirically prove God's existence. Because you can't, or otherwise the Atheism debate would no longer exist.
Now, if God wants to come down from Heaven and prove itself, its welcome to.

>we can also indicate the necessity of a cataclysm of such magnitude.
Irrelevant to the theistic debate. While a fascinating topic, you either have to trear the OT and NT consistently a priori or else you're not even arguing for the Judeo-Christian God, you're arguing for some homebrewed offshoot which actually makes your position WEAKER since you're just cherrypicking parts of this supposedly Holy text.

>>The religious worldview DID come first, historically
>Unfalsifiable. Can't ask the first caveman whether he believes in a higher power without introducing YOUR ideas of a higher power to him.
OK, well you're at odds with basically every anthropological account of the human race then, as long as you're OK with that.

>My position is that your evidence of your God is poor and conflicts with provable reality.
There you go, so you DO have a claim. And again, this implies a deeper position, which is that beliefs must be in line with a probable (empirical) reality. How are you missing this?

>Bring me another God and I will judge your evidence of its existence accordingly
Judge on what criteria? On your own positive claims about reality? You DO have a position, you see? It's unavoidable.

>my position explicitly states that people CANNOT empirically prove God's existence.
And (implied) we should only believe in what we can empirically prove: Therefore, we should not believe in God?

Ah, you're strawmanning my argument pretty hard. I do not care what YOU believe, I just don't believe it myself. There is no SHOULD, until you get Ethical and Political principles involved which affect people outside yourself.
This is also why many prominent Atheists attack organized religious bodies, because they have the power to affect these external systems and by extension other people.
But no, you can continue believing whatever. I have no intention to convert you, and any debate between us should not be taken as such. It is merely my own explanation for why your theoretical arguments would fail to convert ME.

I'm not strawmanning, you're sidestepping. Im not sure if you're the same user but if you backtrack you'll see the debate was about atheism or agnosticism being a non-claim. My argument was that your cannot NOT have a claim if you enter the argument about theism. You have shown me again and again that you DO have claims. The fact that you only are motivated to act on them in the political, rather than purely theological or philosophical arena, is irrelevant (and I would also say unsupported by your participation in this thread).

Im not trying to strawman or be a jerk, I just legitimately love this topic of debate, and my position is always that I want people to actually face the presupposition claims at the foundation of their positions. I have a hard time ignoring people who say they have none because it is my belief that this is psychologically impossible past a certain point of development.

>you're just cherrypicking parts of this supposedly Holy text.
I'm not Jewish, so I keep what I understand.

Its a debate on the nature of theism, and I possess no theistic claim. You say that my refuting theistic claims with empirical evidence implies a theistic claim on empirical evidence itself, but I have also stated that by the nature of the task a human CANNOT prove God by means of empiricism, which leaves only divine inspiration itself as the possible answer. So even that statement is untrue.

>refuting theistic claims with empirical evidence

>I possess no theistic claim.
>a human CANNOT prove God by means of empiricism
Do you honestly not see the contradiction here?

Do you agree with this statement:
We should only believe in what can be proved with physical evidence.

As I said before, there is no SHOULD.

A human cannot prove an omnipotent force because humans are not omnipotent, this is basic logic. It'd be like trying to count the age of the Universe in real time - humans lack that capability.

You are sidestepping the issue so radically, you knoe EXACTLY what I'm asking.

Your claim is that humans CANNOT prove the existence of God with physical evidence. I understand that. So, for you, is that reason to believe God DOES NOT EXIST? Or is your position strong agnosticism, where you basically are saying we cannot ever know and I will not claim whether God exists or not?

>is that reason to believe God DOES NOT EXIST
Of course not, my position has always been that God cannot be disproven. By the same metric that it cannot be proven in the first place, at least by Human measures.
But, that does not provide the impetus for me to believe, especially in Gods that come bottled with blatantly disprovable nonsense backstories and fanfictions.

Please read
Atheism (Agnostic atheism, at least, and the militants are shitheads) does not claim to know God does not exist, because that's unprovable nonsense on the exact same level as claiming to know that it does.

I think even calling that atheism is misleading. It's strong agnosticism.

And it still claims that physical evidence is a prerequisite for belief. It's just that you also believe that in terms of this domain, that evidence will never arrive.