Ah, but you do have evidence -- previous exerience -- on the reliability of your friends and family. Not on the almighty.

I am a life-long atheist; I really wanted to pick a fight about the damn pledge back when I was in school. But all my teachers said was "Fine, sit down." None of the other kids even mentioned it to me. Total non-issue. And here I was, spoiling for a good fight. :rar:

- Pie

no, it is not meaningless. it is very important and powerful, faith is what allows you to believe the unproveable.

i refuse to get into a discussion trying to prove the existance of god, but here is the scenario - You believe there is no god. you are placing faith in the fact that revelation is just a man-created book, that no second coming will occur and therefore no consequence to your choice not to believe in god.

but you have not ALWAYS been an atheist. at some point in your life you there was a moment that you stopped and said "is there a god?" for whatever reason, you decided that there is no god so you don't feel the need to participate in someone's ridiculous rituals. you made a choice not to believe and participate based on your faith in the absence of god. it cannot be proven so it is an action or decision based on faith.

I've got no faith in that. That's just the default position if I've got no faith that it's true.

OK, look. I presume we all agree that the universe, including the earth and the surrounding galaxy exists, right? Well, why SHOULD it exist? How come there's not just nothing? Wouldn't "nothing" be simpler, all around? Give me scientific proof of the reason for existence of energy and matter. If you can give me that scientific proof, then I'll allow that atheism isn't as much a "faith" as anything else. Atheists believe with absolutely no proof that no higher power exists. God can be neither proven nor disproven. A firm belief either way is an act of faith. The man who lacks faith is the agnostic, not the atheist.

mari, you and i rarely land on the same side of an issue... *sniff, wipe tear from eye* i just don't know what to say. i'm going to call it a night.

I love you, man! (staggers off in disbelief into the Colorado night).

I guess what we have here is a failure to communicate. I don't have any religious faith, so what I know of it is how other people describe it. From those descriptions, I assumed that it was more powerful and meaningful than my disbelief in, say, unicorns. But if you are telling me differently, I'll take your word for it. My disbelief in the various gods is equivalent to each other and to all other mythological creatures. If you consider that to be on the same level as your religious faith, so be it.

way to twist it HM. what i said is that anything that any belief that cannot be proven must be based on faith. you are reading way too much into it. don't get pissed just because you suddenly realize you have faith of a sort.
i believe you are talking about the strength of faith. that is an individual issue. how much do you actually care about the belief?
1) suddenly god appears before you with a newsreel from the beginning of time. he has proven his existence - that would probably shake you up pretty deeply, right?

2) peter jennings reports on the news that they found an island of unicorns. you shrug your shoulders and keep eating your pot pie. big deal.

the existence of unicorns doesn't consume much thought for the average person. at some point in life, most people spend some time contemplating the existence of god. both views have to be based on faith because they are not proveable. if one day both issues can be settled by hard proof, which issue will have a greater effect on you?

faith is the starting point, the basis for acceptance of an idea. disbelief in god and disbelief in unicorns are not equal.

Sure, HM, the thought of god leaves you indifferent, but what if you imagined yourself trying to believe in some sort of God? Do you feel a strong sense of rejection of the very thought? As a scientist, I can state that my disbelief in unicorns is based on sound factual evidence. No reliable source has ever reported sighting one, and there is no evidence that unicorns ever existed in the fossil record. That is not faith. No one has yet to prove to me that a disbelief in God can be shown to have a basis via scientific evidence. Science can come up with the big bang theory, but it has yet to come up with a theory for the existence of matter. So matter just exists with no reason? There's no logic to that.

As I said, if that's all it takes to have what you consider faith, then I'll concede it.

In terms of levels of faith, I have the same faith in the nonexistence of gods and unicorns. Debating God is more interesting because there are people who do believe in Him.

As for the relative importance of me being proven wrong, it wouldn't shake me up much at all if God showed up. I'd be more surprised by that than unicorns (God has more fantastic powers), but you can't really organize your life around the nonexistence of God, so I wouldn't have much in my life to rearrange.

You sound like more of an agnostic than an atheist to me, HM.:confused:

No reliable source has ever reported the existance of god; and there is no evidence to support the "supernatural".

No, it goes the other way. Existance needs to be proved, not non-existance. I can postulate the existance of a creature called the undingquat and provide you with its vital statistics; that doesn't mean that it does exist. Hard evidence is necessary.

Heard of the Higgs boson? It's the current frontrunner for the role of creating mass. But, you see, scientists won't state that conclusively till there is hard evidence... :)

- Pie

i once heard that scientifically that it is impossible to prove anything - it is only possible to disprove alternatives.

but anyway - pie, Can you conclusively prove there is no God?

No. I just consider it silly, the same as the power of crystals, homeopathy, astrology, and -of course - unicorns.
Well, you're disagreeing with lookout123 there. He's saying that both are faith. Regardless, no one will ever prove to you that disbelief in God can be shown to have a basis via scientific evidence - because it can't. No matter what science discovers, one could always say that God made it happen. Random particular details in interpretations of scripture can be disproven, but then the scripture can be reinterpreted. Don't wait for science to disprove God.First, I don't feel the need to fill holes in science with magic. I just consider them unknown information. Second, there's no theory for the creation of God, either. He is just assumed to have always existed, or to have spontaneously generated. That's no more logical than the universe having always existed or spontaneously generating.
Perhaps. The details of the differences between them fluctuate based on who's doing the defining. I'm on the border between them. I feel there's no way to tell for certain, but my opinion is on the atheist side. Some call that a weak atheist, some say it's a weak agnostic.

atheist = there was and is not supreme being, creator, etc.
agnost = there was a creator who has left us on our own with no further input.