Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Religion to me is any kind of belief without questioning, without observable proof.

Books, worship, in-group perks, rituals, supernatural; are just side-effects and the scale of it depends on the ability of its leaders to bullshit people.

I'm not an atheist btw - that also requires belief and too much energy. As I'm too lazy to answer the question "does God exist or not?" guess that makes me an agnostic - and truly I don't give a shit.

But then again, I'm an Ubuntu user that also uses Windows from time to time. And Ubuntu Christian Edition is a few clicks away if I ever make a decision :p

View on HN

If you cannot honestly make this claim: "I believe in god/s", you are an atheist by definition. You may not be a strong atheist which is someone who would make the claim: "There is/are no god/s", but you are still an atheist (a weak atheist, which anecdotally appears to be the most common variety). Just think about the roots, atheism - without theism.

You're also an agnostic if you can honestly make the claim: "It is unknowable whether or not there is/are god/s".

I used to call myself an agnostic because, for whatever reason, people always assume that if you are an atheist you hold the position that there are no gods (which you also seem to hold given your assumption that atheism is a position that requires belief).

Just as long as you realize you're using uncommon terminology with respect to 'religion'. I'd rather term faith-based thinking as religious-thinking (or religious-esque), but it's certainly not unique to religion, and some irrational atheists also suffer from it... (I'd also ask how many bits of evidence about a belief you require before you take something as proof but that's fairly off-topic..) In regards to the god question, for me I care about being right, and my number of bits for the proposition "the Christian god exists" is at least below -10 so I'm pretty sure it's false. :) If I was presented with a strong piece of evidence in the other direction, I might join you and uninstall Gentoo to use the holy Ubuntu Christian Edition.

You know, the problem with God is that it isn't really a falsifiable notion; but here's something to chew on ...

Do you admit the possibility that tomorrow, based on weird but explainable phenomenons, molecules in the air might collide and materialize a tuna-sandwitch right before your eyes? Think about it - possibility is so close to zero that intuition would tell you that it is impossible.

And yet atheists are ready to admin that this wonderful and full of life world that we live in (which is a lot more complex than a tuna-sandwich btw) - came into being by way of some kind of cosmic accident that we'll never understand, with our universe instantly expanding, forming lots of hydrogen-burning stars and rocks of all shapes and sizes - and somehow on one of these rocks, carbon-based life not only happened, but it also gave birth to sentience.

This story is even more unlikely to happen than a tuna-sandwich integrating right before your eyes tomorrow, or having a man in red suit driving a sleigh with flying reindeers and yet we consider it natural because it already happened.

That's why I said atheism also requires faith.

Eh, I'll spend a little karma. I believe the laws of physics, and it's the laws of physics which make the spontaneity of sandwich-appearance much less likely than the arising of homo sapiens based on billions of years of causality we have determined experimentally and then many many years of the very mathematical process of evolution. The big bang theory has some issues, but the idea that things were once really close together and now are expanding at an accelerating rate is pretty nailed down. Evolutionary theory is similarly nailed down, I believe both those propositions with a fairly high number of bits. I'm willing to admit I'm wrong, but not by merit of the possibility that I could be wrong. Not all possibilities are equal.

Can you point to some atheists who are as you say? As an atheist I've never considered this a particularly wonderful and full of life world (sure I like it and want to preserve parts of it but there's a lot of improvement to be made) nor have I considered the mysteries of the universe are incomprehensible. We are as Sagan said "the universe trying to understand itself".

You may say our lives coming into being by the known fundamental laws of physics is as unlikely as Santa existing, but here we are, the evidence is actually in front of us, humans and quantum mechanics. I've never seen Santa, yet I've seen humans and studied some QM.

Edit: oh hey, I almost forgot. http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprova... "The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com