You present yourself as an agnostic but are very one sided in the debate, and you only have criticism for religious people. If you’re going to use words like irrational and illogical for religious beliefs, at least have the intellectual honesty that your position is far more atheist than you’re admitting to us or yourself. It’s not nuanced or balanced at all.
You really don’t need to go far to find proof that what you just said was false. I said people who claim with certainty that matter came before conciousness are as unintelligent as someone claiming they know what happens in the afterlife.
Sure, and Trump claims to respect women equally and has no qualms promoting women, but his contempt for them leaks out and the overall picture is starkly clear.
Maybe you don’t realise that normal people consider words like “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” pejorative.
Your behaviour is very like the people on here before the election spending at their time explaining why the Democrats are terrible and people shouldn’t vote for them, but when challenged, claimed that they didn’t support Trump at all. It was never clear whether they were lying to others or themselves
You’re being condescendingly dismissive about other people’s beliefs, overwhelmingly about religious beliefs, and I begin to think that you yourself believe that agnostism is the most defensible intellectual position, so you adopt it in theory, but you use it mainly to belittle religious viewpoints. I think emotionally and in behaviour you’re an atheist, but you’re not prepared to admit it to yourself because your intellectual heroes are agnostic and you look down on staunchly atheistic people, despite behaving like one online.
Ah I see what the problem is, you think you know me and you’ve created an entire personality based on things I never said. Then when I give you proof of your false accusations you try to paint me as a villain that is harassing all religious people even though I haven’t. Ad hominem. Have a good night buddy
Would it help you if we called it anti-theistic rather than atheistic? Regarding your overwhelmingly anti-theistic perspective, there’s a difference between belief and proof that you’re ignoring - you can’t prove your atheism and you disrespect people who believe things without proof, so you deny your atheism.
But you believe lots of things without proof. It’s how we go about our daily lives. It’s normal. You don’t get your spectrometer out so that you don’t inadvertently believe without proof that the skirt is blue despite knowing full well that you are vulnerable to optical illusions, and you don’t have to have proof that the creepy guy is a creep to avoid him. This is normal. This is how we evolved to learn about the world.
I think the reason that I’ve upset you is that I’ve caused you cognitive dissonance, because I assert that you believe atheism without proof and it seriously challenges your self image because the one argument you used against religion all the time was that believing things without proof is illogical, irrational and unintelligent, and whilst you’re happy to claim that you mean that in the nicest, most neutral, inoffensive and non-insulting way, you don’t half react badly when I put you at the receiving end of your own criticism.
If you really in your heart truly believed that atheism and religious belief both have equal merit and there’s no rational way to decide between them, you wouldn’t spend the whole day inviting religious folk to explain to you why they’re so irrational, illogical and unintelligent when it comes to religion. You have an opinion, and it’s very strongly held, but you never admit it, because it’s not as logical as claiming there’s no answer and you so very strongly want to believe that you’re logical and rational. But I want you to accept yourself as you really are, a bunch of flesh and blood, leaping to conclusions every day on everything based on flimsy evidence and little logical deduction, controlled by emotions and flooded with hormones all day long. We all are. It’s ok. We evolved to have gut feelings for our own protection. You believe atheism but you assert agnostism intellectually. You dismiss the evidence of your own behaviour and attitudes to keep up the self pretence that you drew beliefs are exclusively deduced logically from cast iron evidence, but that’s just not how humans decide things that they care about at all. It’s how they solve maths problems, not how they decide how to treat each other on social media.
I think you really need to come to terms with the fact that you’re fundamentally human and accept that you have some beliefs you can’t prove, like everyone does.
Remember that you believe in the supremacy of science because your parents and teachers taught you to and told you stories of the empirical method’s victory over philosophy for making accurate predictions, not because you preformed some grand comparative experimental study of different philosophies yourself. We believe what we believe because it seems right to us, and we so very very very rarely get out the tape measure and national statistics when we think someone is unusually tall. It’s ok to have things you believe that you didn’t prove, it’s not ok to believe that you prove everything that you think is true; you wouldn’t even be able to have breakfast before it was too late if you did.
No, I don’t know you at all, all I’ve got to go on is the way you’re behaving in this thread.
If you think that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” isn’t condescending and dismissive, your social awareness is extremely low, and I also think your self awareness about your own beliefs is rather low.
You like to assert that you are balanced, but you also like to spend all day calling religious folk unintelligent, illogical and irrational.
Your “have a good night buddy” is as utterly unconvincing as your neutrality.
So after accusing me of everything under the sun in a few comments based on lies, you now claim you don’t know me at all. Well if you don’t know me at all then stop categorizing me as a democrat and trump-like because you could not be further from the truth. You’re not using any logic as evidenced by your random accusations, you’re acting purely on emotion because you feel that I am attacking religious people even though you can read the conversations I’ve had with theists capable of being pleasant in this thread.
The words logical, irrational, and unintelligent are used because that is literally the topic of the post. If that bothers you I recommend you move on and reply to some other posts more relatable for you.
Again, ad hominem fallacies all over your comments because you are not arguing with me because you believe I’m wrong, you are arguing with me because you’ve projected a personality onto me that is not based on truths. You are the type of person to give religion a bad name because you’re unable to hold a converation like an adult and prefer to throw a tantrum if someone’s beliefs don’t align with yours. Don’t waste my time
Uh, the politics was an example of similar debating techniques, I made no assertion about your political viewpoint at all, that’s entirely opaque to me.
I also made no assertion about your personality, just that your viewpoint is atheist, and I made no ad hominem about you unless you have contempt for atheists and you consider that me asserting that you believe in atheism is offensive.
I did assert that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” is condescending and dismissive and that if you don’t believe that, you need to improve your social awareness, and I absolutely stand by that.
The words logical, irrational, and unintelligent are used because that is literally the topic of the post.
You say that as if it’s an external environment that didn’t come from your own beliefs about religion. You’re the OP! You set the topic yourself! You yourself framed it this way! The self dissociation and lack of awareness of your own beliefs is even more striking than normal here.
I don’t believe that you’re wrong about lack of scientific evidence on the issue of theism vs atheism at all. I do think you’re wrong about whether you’re at all neutral on the subject.
You present yourself as an agnostic but are very one sided in the debate, and you only have criticism for religious people. If you’re going to use words like irrational and illogical for religious beliefs, at least have the intellectual honesty that your position is far more atheist than you’re admitting to us or yourself. It’s not nuanced or balanced at all.
You really don’t need to go far to find proof that what you just said was false. I said people who claim with certainty that matter came before conciousness are as unintelligent as someone claiming they know what happens in the afterlife.
Sure, and Trump claims to respect women equally and has no qualms promoting women, but his contempt for them leaks out and the overall picture is starkly clear.
Maybe you don’t realise that normal people consider words like “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” pejorative.
Your behaviour is very like the people on here before the election spending at their time explaining why the Democrats are terrible and people shouldn’t vote for them, but when challenged, claimed that they didn’t support Trump at all. It was never clear whether they were lying to others or themselves
You’re being condescendingly dismissive about other people’s beliefs, overwhelmingly about religious beliefs, and I begin to think that you yourself believe that agnostism is the most defensible intellectual position, so you adopt it in theory, but you use it mainly to belittle religious viewpoints. I think emotionally and in behaviour you’re an atheist, but you’re not prepared to admit it to yourself because your intellectual heroes are agnostic and you look down on staunchly atheistic people, despite behaving like one online.
Give in. It’s 2025. Be yourself.
Ah I see what the problem is, you think you know me and you’ve created an entire personality based on things I never said. Then when I give you proof of your false accusations you try to paint me as a villain that is harassing all religious people even though I haven’t. Ad hominem. Have a good night buddy
Would it help you if we called it anti-theistic rather than atheistic? Regarding your overwhelmingly anti-theistic perspective, there’s a difference between belief and proof that you’re ignoring - you can’t prove your atheism and you disrespect people who believe things without proof, so you deny your atheism.
But you believe lots of things without proof. It’s how we go about our daily lives. It’s normal. You don’t get your spectrometer out so that you don’t inadvertently believe without proof that the skirt is blue despite knowing full well that you are vulnerable to optical illusions, and you don’t have to have proof that the creepy guy is a creep to avoid him. This is normal. This is how we evolved to learn about the world.
I think the reason that I’ve upset you is that I’ve caused you cognitive dissonance, because I assert that you believe atheism without proof and it seriously challenges your self image because the one argument you used against religion all the time was that believing things without proof is illogical, irrational and unintelligent, and whilst you’re happy to claim that you mean that in the nicest, most neutral, inoffensive and non-insulting way, you don’t half react badly when I put you at the receiving end of your own criticism.
If you really in your heart truly believed that atheism and religious belief both have equal merit and there’s no rational way to decide between them, you wouldn’t spend the whole day inviting religious folk to explain to you why they’re so irrational, illogical and unintelligent when it comes to religion. You have an opinion, and it’s very strongly held, but you never admit it, because it’s not as logical as claiming there’s no answer and you so very strongly want to believe that you’re logical and rational. But I want you to accept yourself as you really are, a bunch of flesh and blood, leaping to conclusions every day on everything based on flimsy evidence and little logical deduction, controlled by emotions and flooded with hormones all day long. We all are. It’s ok. We evolved to have gut feelings for our own protection. You believe atheism but you assert agnostism intellectually. You dismiss the evidence of your own behaviour and attitudes to keep up the self pretence that you drew beliefs are exclusively deduced logically from cast iron evidence, but that’s just not how humans decide things that they care about at all. It’s how they solve maths problems, not how they decide how to treat each other on social media.
I think you really need to come to terms with the fact that you’re fundamentally human and accept that you have some beliefs you can’t prove, like everyone does.
Remember that you believe in the supremacy of science because your parents and teachers taught you to and told you stories of the empirical method’s victory over philosophy for making accurate predictions, not because you preformed some grand comparative experimental study of different philosophies yourself. We believe what we believe because it seems right to us, and we so very very very rarely get out the tape measure and national statistics when we think someone is unusually tall. It’s ok to have things you believe that you didn’t prove, it’s not ok to believe that you prove everything that you think is true; you wouldn’t even be able to have breakfast before it was too late if you did.
No, I don’t know you at all, all I’ve got to go on is the way you’re behaving in this thread.
If you think that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” isn’t condescending and dismissive, your social awareness is extremely low, and I also think your self awareness about your own beliefs is rather low.
You like to assert that you are balanced, but you also like to spend all day calling religious folk unintelligent, illogical and irrational.
Your “have a good night buddy” is as utterly unconvincing as your neutrality.
So after accusing me of everything under the sun in a few comments based on lies, you now claim you don’t know me at all. Well if you don’t know me at all then stop categorizing me as a democrat and trump-like because you could not be further from the truth. You’re not using any logic as evidenced by your random accusations, you’re acting purely on emotion because you feel that I am attacking religious people even though you can read the conversations I’ve had with theists capable of being pleasant in this thread.
The words logical, irrational, and unintelligent are used because that is literally the topic of the post. If that bothers you I recommend you move on and reply to some other posts more relatable for you.
Again, ad hominem fallacies all over your comments because you are not arguing with me because you believe I’m wrong, you are arguing with me because you’ve projected a personality onto me that is not based on truths. You are the type of person to give religion a bad name because you’re unable to hold a converation like an adult and prefer to throw a tantrum if someone’s beliefs don’t align with yours. Don’t waste my time
Uh, the politics was an example of similar debating techniques, I made no assertion about your political viewpoint at all, that’s entirely opaque to me.
I also made no assertion about your personality, just that your viewpoint is atheist, and I made no ad hominem about you unless you have contempt for atheists and you consider that me asserting that you believe in atheism is offensive.
I did assert that calling people “illogical”, “irrational” and “unintelligent” is condescending and dismissive and that if you don’t believe that, you need to improve your social awareness, and I absolutely stand by that.
You say that as if it’s an external environment that didn’t come from your own beliefs about religion. You’re the OP! You set the topic yourself! You yourself framed it this way! The self dissociation and lack of awareness of your own beliefs is even more striking than normal here.
I don’t believe that you’re wrong about lack of scientific evidence on the issue of theism vs atheism at all. I do think you’re wrong about whether you’re at all neutral on the subject.