Posts by EdenOne

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Fear not, Viviane. I'm sitting at a chinese restaurant getting ready for some beijing duck, and will get back on track when I finish dinner.

Eden *chomping*

By the way, who is "we"?

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

Even in writing, people can show restraint even when they disagree. I can tolerate a cold tone, but I cannot let misrepresentation and distortion of what I write to be used to attack me. Like I said, I normally apreciate Cofty's participation on threads that don't deal with theism / atheism. He's a sharp thinker and usually his interventions are well thought out. But on this particular area, he feels entitled to make all sorts of derrogatory remarks about the people who hold ideas he doesn't agree with. Not about the ideas, but ridiculing the people who have them. That's unacceptable, and at some point it will trigger a violent response. More, he freely twists and cherry picks quotes from my posts to pass the impression that I said something I didn't say and then attack me for it. It's a relentless and sneaky resort to strawman fallacy that gets quickly tiring.

I apologize for some excessive language towards Cofty. Is he able to do the same or does he have nothing to apologize for?

Eden

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Cofty,

My intention was indeed to end my participation on this thread because it was getting ugly with personal attacks and no one really benefited from that. However, since the tone came down and others were still willing to keep on discussing in a civilized way, I changed my mind. Don't make a tantrum out of it.

As for the seriousness of the thread. I said it was a light subject steming from a word play, that I didn't intended to become an academic debate. While the 'nonsense' and 'arguments demolished' are your subjective opinion of the output of the debate, and I won't even argue with you on that, calling me a liar isn't taken lightly. Of course, knowing how you operate in this forum, I suspected that your participation on this thread would be an inevitability. I welcome your participation, but when the subject is theism / atheism, you manage to make your intervention extremely unpleasant, bordering the insult, and you hijack the thread to suit your proselitizing agenda. Many in this thread disagreed with me, and they were able to do so without becoming obnoxious as you did and keep doing. In return, they have my respect and no incensed ad hominem took place. It did with you because you don't hesitate in misrepresenting my words, ignore inconvenient arguments, and freely calling me a liar.

Ideas are like children. They may be imperfect, silly, impetuous, intelligent or bratty, but they are our ideas and we defend them because they represent a small portion of us. And I'm perfectly capable of defending and debating one idea that I had formulated. In this case, I formulated an idea around the notion of absentheism and thought it was worth it to bring it out for discussion. Nothing too serious, but I was interested in debating it to see how it would stand up upon scrutiny. Naturally, you cannot resist the subject, but this wasn't done to bait you. However, you're boringly predictable. Like a predator fish, you thrust yourself into the bare unbaited hook. And sometimes, you deserve to be taken on a fool's errand. For the simple reason that when it comes to this particular subject, you behave like an anti-theist bigot who thinks he's entitled to insult whomever doesn't agree with your ideas; are you surprised to get some tough love back? Because the troll in this thread turns out to be you. I'm not in this forum to win or lose debates, I'm here to get and offer support, learn but not be lectured. And certainly not to be ridiculed for whatever my thoughts are. And if this is as nonsensical and you feel offended in your dignity, why are you still here debating?

But hey - take it to the moderators of the forum and file a complaint. Then tell me the outcome please.

Eden

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Viviane:

Aten was the disc of the sun depicted as a falcon headed man. Unless you show me a falcon headed man, I fail to see the relevance.

I don't know where you got that idea from. Aten was depicted as a solar disc with rays emanating from it. And the sun exists, I see it mostly every day here.

You don't personally consider it a meaningful deity, you do so because of cultural bias. So what? To millions of people in the past the sun is indeed a valid deity. To me it's just a sphere of burning gas. Yet, even today, people who know the sun is an orb of burning gas still worship the son, such as Wiccans and Druids, Go figure, deities do exist!

Eden

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Viviane:

And I strongly disagree because apathy implies my attitude is "don't care" which is not true.

Again, please read carefully what I wrote. I didn't say you had the trait of an apatheist. I simply said that functional atheist and apatheist are domains of attitude towards life, whereas atheism, skepticism, agnosticism are theoretical stands.

Heck, even theists can behave as apatheists or functional atheists, if they chose to behave as if their god wasn't looking.

Eden

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Nicolaou,

This is like beating a dead horse already. If you consider yourself an atheist and have the attitude of a functional atheist, who am I to change your views? However, I still think that a theoretical stand that keeps the question of the existence of deity/god open due to lack of evidence, can't correctly be called an atheist, because that is simply being skeptical. To me, it's a mischaracterization. But I concede, maybe it's nitpicking on my part.

Eden

3

"How many mistakes in one paragraph?"

by Doug Mason in

does the following paragraph on page 22 of the june 15, 2015 watchtower magazine provide an accurate assessment of charles taze russell?

does this paragraph contain mistakes and omissions?.

when the time approached for gods kingdom in the hands of jesus to start ruling from heaven, jehovah helped his people to understand the timing of events.

EdenOne

Thanks, Doug!

Eden

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Viviane: Apathy implies that I don't care. That's not my position at all.

I didn't say you were an apatheist. I only said that functional atheism and apatheism both belong to the domain of attitudes rather than theoretical positions. If I knew for sure that God existed, for sure I would care.

Eden

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Viviane,

I think I defined that more than a few times on this thread, but here is again: I take 'absent' in the simplest and most rational of its meanings: not present. It may include "exists, but not there", also "not paying attention/not caring", "existed in the past, now dead", or "non-existent". To say "absent" is to stop short of making any considerations about the existence of God, for the lack of evidence, while at the same time allowing for the possibility of any of them. If one day it would be possible to scan the entire universe in its entirety with all its dimensions and God could not be found, only then, beyond reasonable doubt, one could say "God/deities don't exist".

However, you have posed a question:

How do we know they are absent unless someone defines the specific properties of a deity so we know to look for it?

That's exactly the problem that absentheism attempts to address: Atheism assumes a certain kind of deity - invisible, all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent, entirely good and then debunks the notion that a deity like that may exist. But there are two problems with this, to wit:

What about deities that are known to have existed and have been worshiped as such - Caesar Augustus, Aten, the Sun-Disc, or the emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie I (the Jah/Messiah of the Rastafarian movement)?
What if a deity that exists leaves no physical footprint in the universe, doesn't communicate or interact directly with humans? What if said entity escapes any known definition that humans so far have come up with? How would we even collect evidence that it exists?

MASH

That axiom is also problematic for atheism, and is often used by theists.

Eden

284

I'm an ABSENTHEIST. Are you also?

by EdenOne in

it just dawned on me.

the existence of god can't be proved, neither is there evidence of god's inexistence.

so, i'm neither theist neither atheist.

EdenOne

Viviane: I can't know whether or not there is no deity, of course, but since I have no evidence that any exists, certainly not any that anyone has told me about, I live functionally as an atheist and indeed consider myself one.

This appears to be a sensible reasoning. But let me ask you this: A child of one year old who holds no belief that deities exist. Is that child atheist? Because according to the simplistic definition that "atheism is a disbelief in deities", a child is atheist. And so is a person who has a severe mental handicap from birth. They don't believe in deities, ergo, are they atheists? It's not so simple. There must be something more to atheism than simply disbelief in deities.

I posit that the overtly rejection of deities on the premise that they don't exist should be called atheism.
I posit that the disbelief in deities based on lack of objective evidence for their existence is skepticism.
I posit that the inability to believe or disbelieve in deities based on the premise that they are unknowable is agnosticism.

My proposition is that there is a fourth stand: That the only thing that can be said about deities is that they are absent, not present, from the known universe, thus leaving the questions of belief or disbelief, existence or non-existence, entirely open. This I coined absentheism but feel free to call it anything else if you come up with a more suitable term.

All of the above are theoretical positions.

However, you introduced another concept: functional atheist. That is, regardless of how your intellectual position towards deities is, your attitude in life is consistent with a belief that deities don't exist. This functional atheism is very much on the same domain of attitude of an apatheist, who "regards the question of the existence or non-existence of a god or gods to be essentially meaningless and irrelevant".

Eden