Allan Hacker wrote:
> I don't hold with all the
linguistic verbiage that tries to
>
set off some kinds of belief from others to avoid the taint of
> religion.
Ignoring a distinction won't make it go
away. There are people in the world
who believe that unquestionable truth can be had from the right
book/priest/dream, and there are people who don't. The word 'faith' is
commonly used to capture this distinction. If you ignore this distinction when
it's mentioned by those of us to whom it's important, and in response use
'faith' to mean something else, you risk confusing your audience -- and perhaps yourself. I think I demonstrated this latter confusion when I
said your usage
makes your
original assertion uninteresting: "Atheism and Objectivism are
[belief-systems] too". (Didn't we already know that?) And it makes
your subsequent statement a red herring: "You can't define all
[belief-systems] in terms of just one or just one type". (He wasn't trying to
define all belief-systems; he was pointing to religion as a proper subset of
them.)
You continue:
> no matter the preponderance of
what one may
> consider evidence, a
thing is either proven or it's not
Can you give an example of an empirical
theory that you consider "proven"? I can't even prove I exist, so your
repeated invocation of the proven/unproven dichotomy seems like a red
herring.
> And if it's not, it's probably either
theory or superstition.
> Brian's atheists hold to theories,
knowing they are not proven
> but that they work damn well in the
> absence of anything better,
When somebody characterizes the
truth-confidence of something by calling it a "theory", it's often the case that they're equivocating
about standards of proof. Theories can vary widely in how (un)justified they
are, and too often people lump
them all together to try to taint the well-justified ones with the tenuous
ones.
> but any atheist is free to think
and speak of
> such things as
indisputable fact (proven) and
> thus make a fool of himself
> even while ridiculing the superstition of
others.
It is indeed inadvisable for a person
to act as though his beliefs are more justified than they actually are. But it's
similarly inadvisable for a person to act as though all unproven beliefs are
equally (un)justified.
> Brian is speaking of
the
> idealized atheist (possibly
himself),
I'm speaking of atheism, not of particular
atheists.
> and I am speaking of
most of the other atheists, the ones who
> have in fact created for
themselves a
> non-theistic religion
out of the popular theories of the
> day by ceasing to question them, if they ever did.
There's an immense difference between 1) you
judging that a person has not adequately questioned/justified some of his
beliefs, and 2) that person explicitly saying he believes that there exist
infallible sources of truth. No matter how annoyed you may be by situation (1),
you can't correctly diagnose him with a case of religion/faith unless situation
(2) obtains. From where I sit, it looks like you're calling such people
names to annoy them in revenge for annoying you -- and then preaching that we
should all try to tolerate and understand each other more. :-) So how
about trying to understand the very distinction that we atheists use to define
ourselves, instead of close-mindedly
dismissing it as "verbiage" that you "don't hold to"?
> there's no way you can
ridicule
> someone's belief system
without imputing to him a
> certain lack of inquiry or intelligence.
[...]
> to ridicule is to insult
Accusing an atheist of "faith" or
"religion" might be perceived as attempted ridicule, so perhaps
the pot is calling the kettle black?
> The initial comment that got me
started was one about how effectively
>
someone debunks Christianity.
> most of the so-called debunking
of Christianity involves countering
>
old-testament assertions rather than anything Christ actually said.
I agree that the Torah is just too, well,
ridiculous to merit more than perfunctory debunking. Of the eight
insurmountable problems I identify for Christianity, seven stem directly
from the New Testament and none from the Old. (The eighth is Jesus' failure
to be appropriately noticed by contemporary extra-biblical sources, primarily
Josephus. See http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/Christianity.html for
details.)
> Christ did not adhere to the old testament himself, and he told
people
> flat out that if they got what he was saying they'd be free of it
too.
I wonder what verse(s) you have in mind
here. The gospel evidence of his position on this question is
inconsistent. (It's similarly ambiguous on central issues
like salvation, hell, divorce, circumcision, and diet -- not the sort of
revelation a competent deity could be expected to effect.) Jesus indeed
taught several deviations from OT doctrine, but in Jn 10:35 he says the OT Law "cannot be broken"
and in Mt 5:17-18 he affirms the Law down to "the smallest letter, the
least stroke of a pen". But by far the worst statements of Jesus
in the gospels are his explicit endorsement of 1) the genocidal Flood
[Mt 24:38, Lk 17:27] and 2) eternal torture by hellfire [Mk 9:43, Mt 18:8,
25:41, 25:46]. Even leaving these aside, the ethics of Jesus fall far short of
what one would expect from a benevolent deity. For a critique of Jesus' ethics,
see chapter 6 of Michael Martin's _The Case Against Christianity_.