Okay, i'm going to take one more swing at this, though i fear it will just be repetition of what i've written before.
People have believed in and talked about supernatural beings for thousands of years. It's one of the few cultural universals there are. But as far as anthropologists can tell, people have always been able to grasp that ancestor spirits and ghosts and zombies and dieities have a different sort of existence. The also appears to be a cultural universal.
So the ideas of supernatural existence, and the various sorts of supernatural beings that people talk about, have been talked about for a long time. And there have always been people who doubted their existence.
So modern-day atheists are not doing anything new. They are not imagining or constructing or proposing ideas and then forming a belief about them. They are expressing firm doubts about beings which other people have described, things which have long been a cultural fixture.
I know you want to believe that disbelief in God is just the flip side of a coin from belief in God, but that's not how it cashes out, philosophically, intellectually, or rationally. It's not "the same except for the minor detail of adding the word not in there." It does not take faith to disbelieve in something that you can't see, hear, smell, taste, or feel (in ANY sense of the word), something which so far as you can tell exists only in the minds of someone else.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-29 04:01 pm (UTC)People have believed in and talked about supernatural beings for thousands of years. It's one of the few cultural universals there are. But as far as anthropologists can tell, people have always been able to grasp that ancestor spirits and ghosts and zombies and dieities have a different sort of existence. The also appears to be a cultural universal.
So the ideas of supernatural existence, and the various sorts of supernatural beings that people talk about, have been talked about for a long time. And there have always been people who doubted their existence.
So modern-day atheists are not doing anything new. They are not imagining or constructing or proposing ideas and then forming a belief about them. They are expressing firm doubts about beings which other people have described, things which have long been a cultural fixture.
I know you want to believe that disbelief in God is just the flip side of a coin from belief in God, but that's not how it cashes out, philosophically, intellectually, or rationally. It's not "the same except for the minor detail of adding the word not in there." It does not take faith to disbelieve in something that you can't see, hear, smell, taste, or feel (in ANY sense of the word), something which so far as you can tell exists only in the minds of someone else.