I'm not sure what sort of "divinity" you're talking about here, but just about every divine being (i.e. "God") people actually believe in is claimed to have "entered reality" and is not confined to some transcendental realm.

Be it Christianity, Islam, Judism, Hindu-ism, or good ol' Hellenistic poly-theism, every "god" is envisionaged as being able to "enter" (or at least to affect) the physical world. Yet none of them seem to think that disqualifies that being from being (a) "god" and thus "divine".

Absolutely. The mind can certainly imagine anything at all. However, in the context of Rotten's post, i.e. man's ability to explore the existence of divine beings, we can't be able to explore it with anything but, as you also point out, the mind.

This is some of the most bizarre stuff I've EVER read. You've really flipped it on its head. How can you say, with a straight face, that an atheist has no conviction? The way I see it, an atheist has conviction that there is no god. A strong atheist may be the person with the most conviction on the planet. He has nothing to prove or disprove, for he feels nothing is there. It's akin to proving or disproving the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (the true creator of the universe, by the way). None of us have ever seen the FSM, but we can be assured that He is there because we are here. We were touched with his noodly appendage & given life.

Seriously though, all a theist has is a belief that may or may not be worth a damn. Believing in something that may or not be there does not give one conviction. It just gives one faith.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Mark Twain, I said "if any". Yes, there are atheists with very strong convictions and there are atheists who live up to what I take it is the meaning of the word, 'no theism' (well knowing that some take it as meaning 'anti theism').

Whichever different meanings are attributed to atheism, there is only a single meaning to agnosticism in that it necessarily reflects the position that one cannot know. That's not really a religious conviction but it's a state of being convinced, nonetheless, a.k.a. a conviction.

So, if anyone lacks conviction of the three ism's that Dilettante referred to, it's the atheist who simply lacks religious belief. Atheists who display much the same kind of belief as the religious, except with 'reversed sign', are of course those who put the "if" in "if any". It would be bizarre to claim an overall lack of atheist conviction, I agree.

I belong to those who lack religious belief (in my case completely so) so I quite intimately know that such atheists exist (in lack of a better term than atheist!). Along with that I must declare myself an agnostic by necessity. That's of course disjoint from any religious conviction (I have none such). Call it a rational conviction. I do. But it's a conviction nonetheless.

In your third paragraph, it seems that you are inferring that atheism is akin to religious belief. If so, it is (of course) a rather absurd inference. If someone asked you about unicorns, would you say "I believe there are no unicorns," or would it be more honest to say "I do not believe in unicorns?" These are two different answers. Nobody disbelieves in unicorns purely as a matter of personal faith. Apply the same reasoning to the Gods of other religions. If you are a Christian, do you believe the Hindu God Ganesh does not exist? Or do you not believe in Ganesh?

There is a subtle but important difference between "believing there is no God," and "not believing there is a God." The first is a belief, the second is a lack of that belief. I don't know any atheists who "believe" God (take your pick, there are plenty) does not exist. All the atheists I know simply do not believe God does exist.

I do know (whether you're doing it or not) that many theists attack atheists for having their own "religion." It seems odd for a follower of a faith to try to attack atheism by saying it is also a faith. I think the reasoning is that if atheism is a faith or religion, then atheists have no cause to criticise other faiths or religions. One flaw in this argument is that if atheism were indeed a religion, then theists would have no reason to criticize atheism being taught in schools as part of religious education, or even the setting up of atheist-run schools alongside Baptist, Catholic and Muslim schools.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

I think the sentiment theists are trying to make with this comment is that some athiests seem more occupied with religion then the theists are. I know i have met atheists that are more preoccupied with religion then I am. Some atheists seem to just want to put themselves in the way of the religious (and religious in the way of atheists). The feeling i often get from this comment is religious people want to say "if you really don't believe why are you bothering us so much"

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"A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent."
-John Calvin

That's not the topic here, but imagine all the laws atheists (and other) have to follow purely because of christian dogmas. That's like blaming people for being interested in voting.

I'll get back to the other posts later, gotta get to work now...

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To fill a world with ... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. - Richard Dawkins

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned

MY CAPSLOCK KEY IS BROKEN LOL - Will be stumbled upon several times on the web.

Clash

To mirror Rotten's comments, this is why I spend as much time fighting back the overly religious as I do. I do not believe in their dogma & do not wish to see it legislated. Nor did our nation's founders. I am principally a Jeffersonian Democrat and have a great respect for the foundation of our nation. I do not like to see its intent perverted. As George Washington himself said, "The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

But I digress. This is not the point of this thread.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Why must divinity be supernatural/trancendental? How can you know that divinity can not be proven? Divinity might not be in the abrahamic sense of the word, the ancient greeks had a much lower bar for 'divinity'.

And I can always fall back on the "How can you know that you can't disprove/prove God?" Isn't that being sure that you can't be sure?

If God (as in pantheism) is the universe, isn't that proof that divinity isn't supernatural? Although that might never be proven, divinity would still not be supernatural.



This is perhaps a vague post made by me, but I'm interested in getting this as clear as possible. I'm not trying to 'win' the discussion with these (perhaps) kinda rhetoric questions. To me 'victory' is achieved when clarity is made (and I agree with it). It might be all clear to you, but it ain't for me, that's why I brought up the subject.

Personally, I'm an atheist mainly (technically, only) because I just don't believe in a God. I don't use it as a label, thus if I technically agrees with agnosticism I wouldn't start to define myself one - as I'd been a weak agnostic, which does fall under the category atheist anyway. I don't believe in a God, that's it. Don't need/want to show any 'depth' in that lack of belief.

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To fill a world with ... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. - Richard Dawkins

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned

MY CAPSLOCK KEY IS BROKEN LOL - Will be stumbled upon several times on the web.

Clash

Mark Twain, I agree with the part about lack of belief. I should have said "who display their conviction with much the same vigor as the religious" instead of "kind of belief".

I disagree with most of you you write here on USPOL, but that was perfectly stated...

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Obama's New "57 State Patriotic Pin":

These posts got me thinking about God and "transcending the natural". I was going to comment on it here, but I figured that we were drifting away from a discussion of Agnosticism, so, for anyone who's interested, I put it in a new thread here: Must God be supernatural?

Sorry Rotten, I forgot to reply to this.

For the same reason that an officer transcends a private in terms of chain of command. If the private somehow manages to end in a place that transcends the officer, then neither the officer nor the private can maintain their former rank. Same with divinity; if it steps out of the supernatural world, it can no longer be divine.

Instead of proof, I'd rather answer it in terms of what I actually talked about, namely evidence.

As soon as we spot evidence of divinity, divinity would no longer be divinity. Again, as soon as you spot evidence of a private outranking an officer, the private looses the rank as private and the officer as officer. Unless of course the situation is reversed, in which case the evidence disappears.

Doesn't matter. Divinity still can no longer be divine if there's evidence that the ancient Greek encountered it outside the realm of supernaturality.

What you mean is that gods and halfgods in ancient Greece could reside on earth and mingle with people, right? Much the same as, say, the gallery in Norse mythology? If so then I'm not talking about what gods can or can't be conceived as but that if they are claimed to posses any kind of divinity then it must transcend the natural world. I bet such claims are really the reason they were claimed to be gods and halfgods instead of merely humans

Again, it only matters what you claim your god to be. If you claim it be divine then it's supernatural. If you claim your god to be the universe 'as is' then it's probably not divine and can perfectly well be natural.


Now, one way to annihilate all of this in a single swoop is by defining divinity in a way that doesn't necessitate any supernaturality. I would of course question how you'd make various godheads fit with such a definition of divinity but, before all that, allow me to define divinity as whatever powers are considered to be needed to constitute a first cause for any phenomenon.

It has been and always will be impossible to prove the existence of god to everyone. It is not a question of the means by which it is done, but a person's idea of God and her or his willingness to accept what is presented to her or him.

Many people assert that faith is a keystone of the concept of God -- for them it is necessary that it be a hidden deity. Also, not everyone will be willing to jump out and say "there's god!" with different ideas of what/who it is.

I, personally, find religion [in some ways] fascinating but ultimately to be completely cuckoo. Even if someone manages to find seemingly insurmountable evidence for either side, someone will look at it from the right angle and say, "No, you have it all wrong..."

You need to be careful when defining the terms atheismand agnosticism. The definition of agnosticism provided at the beginning of this thread is insufficient and blends with that of atheism. The common distinction between the two -- the atheist asserts there is no god, the agnostic does not know -- is misleading. T.H. Huxley, who coined the term, did not base his concept on complete ignorance. When you consider the definition (and variations thereof) commonly given to the term agnosticism, it actually falls under atheism. This is why many positivist and skeptical scholars at the time were accused of being atheists who hid under a more comfortable label. While it was not so true then, it is certainly more so now due to the increased misunderstanding and misuse of the terms.

T.H. Huxley's agnosticism was a secular idea, but he permitted it to encompass religious thought if one took atheist with a strictly negative or neutral denotation.