Belief - repost

[andrewducker]

Question three was borked. Rewritten to actually cover all the bases, and not be internally contradictory. Apologies to the 7 people who already filled it in!

[Poll #1427776]

Comments

[cdave]

See my last blog entry :P

the underpants gnomes: Culturally understood to be responsible for theft of underwear. Large scale inexplicable underwear theft not reported. I'm happy to believe in non-existence.

The tooth fairy, Santa Claus: Culturally understood to be responsible swapping teeth placed under pillow for rewards, and providing stockings full of presents. Others have since made plausible claims for personal responsibility. I'm happy to believe in non-existence.

God: Culturally understood to be outside the universe as is and laws of physics . Responsible for many things such as maintenance of an afterlife, creation of the universe, and possibly small scale tinkering with the day to day running of the universe. There is no real argument that can be made using my day to day experiences that contradicts these. I'm not happy to believe in non-existence.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You appear to have a very, very different "cultural understanding" of God than most people who assert its existence. You've gone as far as the most competent Christians have, by redefining God to be an undetectable, irrelevant, meaningless construct, but you fail in two respects:

1) "lack of belief" is not a positive statement. Attempting to mischaracterise "a lack of belief" as a positive assertion in nonexistence is, in and of itself, either intellectually incompetent or intellectually dishonest. Bald is not a hair colour. "Not collecting stamps" is not a hobby. Lacking assertive belief is not assertive belief.

2) You, like them, have forgotten about the gravity gremlins, the flying spaghetti monster, the invisible pink unicorn, the tooth fairy, and an infinite number of other, evidenceless, undetectable, meaningless, purporseless constructs, who have identical support to your assertion of God. As long as you're going to alter the culturally postulated God into a meaningless, irrelevant, untestable state, you have to accept that belief in it is a utterly irrational as belief in *anything else anyone can make up that's equally as untestable*.