Having followed this thread for a while I’ll throw in a couple of observations.

Many Christians are not theists. (Let’s not call them “atheists” because the word carries too many connotations.) They believe in God but assert that God is not a being and is not supernatural. This view, which I myself hold, is becoming increasingly common.

“Atheists” – as they usually present themselves here and in the wider global debate in recent years – seem to believe a priori that logical empiricism is the only way to establish the truth of something. In other words, to test the hypothesis one must make deductions from it, gather publicly verifiable data (preferably quantifiable) to test the deductions, and then deduce conclusions from it. The reasoning, data and process must be readily accessible to other people. The results need to be repeatedly replicated and similar conclusions drawn.

As I understand it, this is the scientific approach. Since it is based upon a priori beliefs (faith) is it not then a “belief system”?

It is a mistake to use the scientific approach to test the reality of God. Non-empirical perception (e.g. awareness of one’s own unpublicised feelings, images, thoughts and intuitions) is central to this task. Feeling-judgements (not emotional decisions) can be just as helpful in their own way.

When communicating publicly about one’s findings in all of this, I suppose coherence demands logic and empirical awareness. I do my best.:)

Crabsy,

One could argue that you’re still a Theist. Either way, an Atheist can simply be someone who has no belief one way or the other, or never even thinks about religion or Gods. This is often confused with “Agnosticism", which is actually to do with knowledge, not belief.

<<“Atheists” – as they usually present themselves here and in the wider global debate in recent years – seem to believe a priori that logical empiricism is the only way to establish the truth of something.>>

The more outspoken Atheists are the only ones who talk of empiricism as a means of explaining their lack of belief. So it still doesn’t mean that Atheism is a “belief system” as there are many Atheists who do not fit your above description.

But if that did make Atheism a belief system, then it’s a pretty good and rational belief system that I’d be proud of adhering to considering empiricism is the only way we’ve ever actually known to be able to find the truth (i.e. a verifiable fact).

I appreciate that you are (or at least sound like you are) trying to be somewhat of a mediator here, and you sound like a nice person, but unfortunately, when most Theists use the term “belief system” and apply it to Atheists, they do it in a “Ha ha, you’re just as stupid and dogmatic as we are” kind of way.

And that’s what I think has been is going on here.

I think there is someone somewhere giving out gold stars if you can catch me out making an error. How else to explain the vigilante behaviour of a group of OLO posters? I checked out my first post on this subject - it was a suggestion that you could test the assertion of the article by a natural experiment. This is what I wrote:

"I agree it doesn't make much sense to look for atheistic charities in an essentially Christian country. You may find some, but there won't be a lot of them.

However, China, Russia, Cuba and a number of other countries have in recent times been ideologically atheistic, so it should be possible to do a comparison between them and Christian countries of the activities and existence of civil society organisations at those times. And we should also look at Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. In fact, there would probably be some interesting variances between the religious as well as potentially with atheists.

It would also be interesting to do a study to see whether atheists were any less represented in charitable work than Christians,Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus."

Nothing inflammatory here, just a suggestion that we could find some empirical evidence.

We had a couple of responses on point but the rest of the responses have been intimidatory blasts designed to "prove" that Marxists aren't atheists, or to define atheism so it can't include Marxism, or that I think all Atheists are Marxist. I am interested in this site because I hope it might encourage rational debate, but all I see is illogical restatement of previously held positions.

This is particularly illuminating given that Atheism clams to be empirical. It may be, but that is not the practice of Atheists on this forum.

bushbasher,
I offered my personal experience with Communist atheism, as atheism was understood then (i.e. explicitly anti-theist, anti-religion, anti “belief in God”, not the present meaning often fused with what used to be called agnosticism). Your experience must be different if you are so sure to know better what was “primarily” true about the system I lived in for over 20 years.

I respect and believe the negative personal experiences of some people with their religious education in Australian schools (as often recorded on this OLO), without calling their stories red herrings or trying to explain them away by claiming to know better than they what was true.

>>plenty of people … claim they suffer from the world banking system as primarily jewish … we don't treat such belief as anything but disgusting, antisemitic paranoia <<
I would not thus offend people (if such existed) who were prosecuted by a secret police in the service of “Jewish bankers”, sentenced by a Jewish judge to years of hard labour, their only crime given as “being an anti-Jewish spy”. For instance, my uncle was sentenced for nine years at the age of 25 as a Vatican spy only because he was caught translating from French, (and trying to distribute), a “modern” prayer book. He was certainly not the only one prosecuted for his/her religious, not political, affiliation and beliefs.

Communism was unthinkable without atheism (or anti-theism, if you like) the same as Inquisition without Christianity or Mccarthyism without anti-Communism. Of course, it does not follow that every atheist, or Christian or anti-Communist is morally on the same level as Communists, Inquisitors or Mccarthyists respectively.

If one understands atheism as a synonym of materialism (like the Communists did) then it can indeed be expressed as based on one belief, the Carl Sagan maxim, spelled out by Graham.

Though atheism (however you define it) is probably not a faith (again whatever one understands by it) many defend it with religious fervor.

I do not understand what those who attack Graham are after. After all, there were many societies built on religion - organised or not - that survived for centuries. The Communist experiment was so far the only one trying to built and organise a society without religion. The experiment failed in a couple of decades. We shall probably not live to see if other attempts to build a society based on atheist values only will be more successful, but I doubt it if anti-religion atheists cannot accept that in that failed experiment attrocities were commited IN THEIR NAME: not to admit guilt but to learn.

AJ Philips,
I certainly did not make that implication, neither do I believe Graham did.

>>an Atheist isn’t necessarily a Materialist<<
>>Atheist can simply be someone who has no belief one way or the other, or never even thinks about religion or Gods<<
I can understand what materialism or scientism (c.f. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10176&page=0#165070) is. I can understand that somebody “never even thinks” about something, though that would hardly make him/her able to make informed statements about that something. On the other hand, I do not understand what having no belief “one way or the other” means, unless one spells out what is here the “one way” and what the “other”, and describes the third way that is neither the one nor the other. There were no such ambiguities with the classical definition of atheism and agnosticism.

Shadow Minister,
I don’t know how old you are, but you should have told that “religion was entirely a side issue” to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people (I personally knew many of them), who could not care less about Marx, but were sacked, transferred to menial jobs, or even jailed, just because their religion was not deemed “private” enough.

A general remark:
Graham facilitates the discussions/disputes on this OLO for which I think he deserves some appreciation, if not respect, also from those who do not share his world-view. I certainly learned here a lot about contemporary Atheism and Atheists, what makes them tick, and I am grateful for that.