Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: Why do people hate islam?
by
Biomech
on 10/12/2015, 00:26:54 UTC

Only a religious person could consider an atheist to be religious. While an atheist may indeed hold some religious beliefs (religion, religare, to bind (oneself to a creed)), the term itself comes from religious people. We just don't have a better label. Look at what the word actually means. a, without. theism, a belief in specific gods. Or literally, without gods. What an individual atheist believes regarding a great many things is not in any way associated with the label atheist. It tells you what we DON'T believe, not what we do. A christian, by that label, likely believes that Yeheshua Ben Jacob was a real person, conceived by a spirit creature to be an Avatar of Yahweh, that said person made a huge ruckus from about 1 to 33 AD, and was crucified by Jews, rather than Romans. My knowledge of Islam is far less than my knowledge of Christianity, but I can posit from a person identifying themselves as a Muslim that they believe that Mohammed was Allah's last prophet, and that the Q'uran is an inspired book (in the spiritual sense).

Since I self identify as an atheist, all you really know of me from that, prior to interaction, is that I believe in three less gods than you.

Since you self identify as an atheist, I know which god you believe in. You believe in yourself as god, and, perhaps you believe in others who self identify in the same way as you do to be gods as well.

How does that work? Like this. Since there isn't enough information around to say for a fact that God doesn't exist, and since there is a lot of information around that suggests that God DOES exist, and since science actually proves in some ways that God DOES exist, by being a self proclaimed atheist, you are setting yourself up as god by attempting to hide the facts of the probable existence of God from yourself.

This doesn't only make you wrong, but it makes you appear to be a hypocrite, since you are setting yourself up as the thing that you "want" to NOT exist.

If someone said, I believe in the God of the Bible, and then he went on his way, neither praying to God, nor joining a church, nor doing anything else that a believer in the God of the Bible would do, would he be a religious person? Perhaps, slightly, if he occasionally repeated that he believed in the God of the Bible. But he certainly would be a religious person if he prayed to God. And the more he studied the Bible, and the more he participated in a Christian church, the greater he would be into the religion of the God of the Bible.

If someone said, I don't believe God exists, and then he went on his way, never thinking about or participating in the atheism the idea again, would he be a religious person? Perhaps, slightly, if he occasionally repeated the point that he was an atheist. But he certainly would be a religious person if he built up all kinds of points about how his atheism kept him from being a religious person. Those points would be his religious doctrine, even though his religion would be built around a form of self inflicted ignorance, hypocrisy, and at times, downright lies because he knew better.

The stronger an atheist becomes in attempting to prove that his atheism isn't a religion, the greater his religion of non religion is becoming.

Smiley

EDIT: If you don't respond at all to the things I have posted here, will it be because you are trying to become less religious by starting to ignore your atheism religion, thereby making it less of a religion for you?

For this to be true, you would have to know a number of things about me that you actually should have gleaned by now.

So, I'll have a brief stab at it.

One, I never said that I believe there is no god, I said I don't believe in any particular god. Your set calls my position "weak" atheism, while more secular people tend to refer to it as "negative" atheism. Now, the so called "strong" or "positive" atheists, yes, I believe you could classify that as a religion, as they strongly believe that there is not, was not, and cannot be a god. Despite the labels, theirs is the weaker position as opposed to mine, as mine is simply based on what can be proven, whereas they are doing exactly what theists are doing: Stating the unprovable as a categoric truth.

To my knowledge, I've never made that error, and if I have, it was poor wording as it's certainly not my position.

Two. That I "want" there to be no god. This is one of the biggest and most used strawmen in Theistic Apologetics. In my experience, it is true perhaps one time out of a million, and I'm being generous. I think that most of us would LIKE to believe that there's some all-powerful being looking after us. It would be very nice. In my own case, I spent well over a decade trying very hard to prove Christianity, as losing one's lifelong faith is painful. Unfortunately, and you too will experience this if you can get past your will against thought, the deeper down that particular rabbit hole you go, the more you find the untruths. I've never said that I can prove or disprove the God Concept itself. Disproving Christianity, and pretty much any other formal relgion, that is frankly a High School philosophy project. It's not even difficult. One cannot, of course, overcome willful cognitive dissonance, but it must make you uncomfortable, no?

Three. Yes, I'm god. When I close my eyes, I am King of All I survey. Seriously, dude? You actually expect anyone to buy that tripe? It's not even a particularly clever ad-hominem.