So browsing through Twitter today I came across a posting of this article from December about why atheists need to disprove the existence of god before we are believed. If you haven’t yet read it, you should do so, then go punch something inanimate, and come back and we will go over just how mind-bogglingly unintelligent this whole piece is.
Are you back? You should really go get that hand looked at. I think it may be broken.
Are you back? You should really go get that hand looked at. I think it may be broken.
OK, first claim: Atheism is a claim. Bullshit. I am not claiming anything. Theists love to try and equate atheism with some sort of belief system so that they can call us a religion and somehow diminish the weight of evidence against their sky-monster. But any honest atheist will tell you that they don’t claim that god doesn’t exist, just that they don’t believe that it does. See there…lack of belief, not belief. I can’t claim god doesn’t exist, because there is a non-zero probability that such a being does exist. And contrary to what the author says, this is not agnosticism. Agnosticism deals with our ability to know something. It deals with knowledge. Atheism deals with belief, or in this case a lack of belief. An atheist is usually, by definition, an agnostic, and none of them would deny that. He also claims that we try to redefine atheism so that this argument can’t be made against us, and he even has a fun little picture with the definition of atheism. Holy shit! I guess he is right. Except I don’t know where he got that crap from. It says “Oxford University Press,” and that may be one definition. Here are a few more from dictionary.com: “disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings,” “rejection of belief in gods,” and here is one from oxforddictionaries.com, “disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.” So we haven’t revised the definition of anything, you selective jackass.
Claim 2: Atheism contradicts what we can plainly see. This is some sort of claim that people who believe have had some sort of personal interaction with god. Let me be clear…I don’t think people who claim to have had interactions with god are hallucinating. I think maybe they are having an internal dialogue with themselves and are bombarded on all sides by other people who claim to have experienced god that they misinterpret what is actually going on. Or they just want to believe so badly that they actually trick themselves into thinking they are communicating with god. After all, if everyone else is talking to god, why wouldn’t god be talking to them? Atheists ask the same damn question. I am a decent person, and in my youth I did pray earnestly to god, but the fucker never responded, and I felt no presence no matter how many different avenues of belief I pursued. I am not sure how people get to the point of convincing themselves that something happened when nothing, in fact, did happen. But again, the author’s theme comes through and we are supposed to provide evidence that what theists think they are experiencing isn’t real rather than them having to convince us that it is. I think this guy needs to look up “burden of proof,” but seeing as how his whole thesis ignores that fundamental concept, I will move on with no expectations.
Claim 3: Atheists are so passionate about evidence. This one is just lazy. I think he wanted there to be 5 things so he shoved this one in here. Apparently there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for the existence of god, and we are just ignoring it because we are evil or something. If there was some evidence for god that would lead me to believe that I might one day get to see my mother again, I would jump all over that shit. And now I am just going to state this explicitly….the burden of proof is on the person who posits that something exists or that an event happened. It’s like our justice system…innocent until proven guilty. If you say I did something, you have to prove I did it, I don’t have to prove I didn’t. I will refute your evidence, which is precisely what atheists do. We refute the “evidence” theists throw at us because it just doesn’t pass muster.
Claim 4: It is possible to prove a negative: This is the fucking reason I felt it necessary to write this entry. This is the most asinine, illogical, child-like misunderstanding of, well, anything, I’ve read in a while. You can not prove things don’t exist, you fuckweed. “You can’t prove a negative” is not an atheist slogan; It is a scientific imperative. Here’s something few people take away from science. When a scientist suggests a hypothesis, they don’t try and prove that hypothesis, they try and disprove it. Example: My hypothesis is that this author is the dumbest person in the world. Experiement: I will try to find someone dumber and prove the author is not the dumbest person in the world. If I am unable to do so, my conclusion is not “the author is the dumbest person in the world,” it is, “I failed to prove that they author is not the dumbest person in the world.” Science, bitch. Then I will go off and design more experiments trying to refute my claim that the author is the dumbest person in the world. However, if it was possible to prove that the author actually was the dumbest person in the world, it would have to come in the form of his inability to use logic and his statement, “It is easy to prove a universal negative. For instance, we know that there are no square circles. The idea of a square circle is logically absurd, and therefore it could not exist.” Excuse me while I go kick a puppy. You can’t define something one way and then say is doesn’t exist if you change the definition to negate the original definition. A square is a four-sided figure in which all four sides are equal. A circle is defined as every point that is the same distance, r, from another fixed point. The definitions are in direct contradiction, so the logical absurdity would be saying the words square circle, as no one would ever posit such a figure to exist. Saying that there are no square circles isn’t proving that there are no square circles because no proof is needed. God is not a logical absurdity, as you put it, so he doesn’t fall under your “I can prove that one thing is not another because we defined them as different things” idiocy. God is an unfalsifiable claim. You are positing the existence of something that is not impossible but for which there is no evidence (real evidence, not your silly book). Therefore it falls under the realm of cannot be disproven. Read a science book, you twit.
Claim 5: Negating the evidence in favor of God’s existence. This is basically a way to get you to read his other article, 5 Reasons Atheism is Stupid. If the evidence for god was so overwhelming, theists would not be so afraid of the evidence against him. I know the author is no intellectual, obviously, but he’s really just exercising mental gymnastics to try to minimize arguments that make his existence on this planet just as meaningless as mine, which is to say as meaningful as we make it. Seriously, screw this guy.
RSS Feed