this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
87 points (81.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43138 readers
1287 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Perhaps not exactly what you're asking but one thing many religious people don't seem to get is that they're "atheists" aswell when it comes to all the other gods out there. The difference to atheism is that we just don't believe in their god either.
I don't know how many gods there are but for the sake of an argument, lets say 500. A Christian believes in 1 out of 500 gods and an atheist believes in 0 out of 500. We're not that different from each other after all.
Atheism means you believe in no god whatsoever, not that you don't believe in a particular set of gods.
That's what they're saying. An atheist believes in 0 of the total options for gods and religions that you get if you add them all up. A believer believes in 1 or a few of them. So really, the religious are also non-believers when it comes to most gods and religions.
Not sure about that. It takes a pretty big leap to go from believing in 0 gods to 1. I think the line dividing atheists from theists is a pretty huge rift because they hold opposing views on very fundamental matters like the concept of God itself, how the world came to be, our purpose in life, what happens after we die... I don't think it's something you can quite reduce down to a matter of numbers.
Yeah, I agree. I was just trying to clarify the intent of the comment.
But also I think that's the point of that line of debate. It is an attempt to show a religious stance from an atheist perspective in which belief is a while load of possible strange things accepted as true. It's not really much use other than when you're faced with someone who things your lack of theism is the opposite of their particular brand of religion and frames the discussion around which bits you have issue with, as if they might prove to you that you're wrong. Or to show that their belief that their religion is correct and all the others, including atheism, are the wrong ones, isn't really the other side of what an atheist thinks.
More a thought experiment than meant to characterise the entirety of atheism.
Do they? I know plenty of people who follow the Christian faith but still believe in science.
Sure, but only as far as science doesn't contradict their religious beliefs. For example, there are many Creationist Christians who reject Evolution, Natural Selection and the Big Bang.