re amusing atheists and agnostics timmbake mcl ucsb edu bake timmons writes atheism denies the existence of god this is logically bankrupt where is the proof of this nonexistence it s a joke this is one of my favorite fallacious points against atheism i e the belief that you can t deny anything that you can t prove doesn t exist this is easily nailed by showing that an infinite number of beings are conceivable but not observed to exist does this mean that we would have to believe in all of them according to the above poster we must believe in objects or beings that haven t been proved not to exist so why stop at god there could be a huge number of beings identical to ronald reagan except for trivial differences say one is missing a finger one has blond hair and they all live on other planets so we can t see them the reason no one but atheists bring this up is that none of these christians have a vested interest in these unknown beings with the exception of god fine but why do these people shoot themselves in the foot and mock the idea of a god here again is a classic atheist fallacy how did they shoot themselves in the foot radical muslims the crusades the inquisition are common examples that atheists like to bring up as marks against religion how weak only fools can take that drivel seriously how about the grand daddy of all human atrocities the stalinist movement twenty eight million people killed under this leadership which proudly featured atheism there is a big difference here stalin didn t say that he stood for a particular moral position i e against murder and terrorism etc and then did the opposite like the religious movements he was at least an honest killer this is not a support of stalin but an attack on this viewpoint saying that atheism supports murder and violence just because one man was a tyrant and an atheist is just bad logic look at all the russians that helped stalin that weren t atheists don t they contradict your point besides your point assumes that his atheism was relevant to his murdering people this is just the common assumption that atheists can t value life as much as theists which you didn t support agnostics are not as funny because they are more reasonable yet they do in some sense seem funny because they believe that the existence of god is unknowable this in itself is every bit the assumption that atheism is though it s less arrogant and pompous ah and here s another point you didn t get out of the faq an atheist doesn t have to hold the positive view that god doesn t exist he she may just have the non existence of the positive belief here s the example strong atheism i believe god does not exist a positive belief weak atheism i don t believe in a god a negative belief these are not the same some one that has never thought of the idea of god in their whole life is technically an atheist but not the kind that you are calling unreasonable or let s look at it this way in sets suppose that a given person has a huge set of ideas that i will represent as capital letters and these people then either believe that these ideas exist as real objects or not so if s santa then e s no is the person not believing in santa but still having the idea of santa but notice that even e s no is itself another idea this means you have lots of cases christian a e a yes b e b no g e g yes where g god atheist strong a e a g e g no atheist weak a e i e no g at all in the set agnostic a g e g indeterminate e why are people so afraid to say undecided it must just be another feature of human nature undecided is not a sexy trendy or glamorous word it does not inspire much hate or conflict it s not blasphemous it s not political in fact it is too often taken to mean unsophisticated nietzsche once said that a man would rather will nonexistence than not will at all but the darwinist way to put this is that humanity always prefers no or yes to a maybe because indecision is not a useful survival trait evolution has drilled it in us to take positions even false ones bake timmons iii m s
