[ExI] Belief in maths (was mind body dualism)

Ben Zaiboc bbenzai at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 18 14:24:33 UTC 2010


Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> declared:
 
> Face to a fundamentalist, the most one can do is to argue
> that if he
> is entitled to faith in the existence of God, others are
> equally
> entitled to have a symmetrical "faith" that He does not
> exist, or at
> least that he should definitely not for our existence to
> have meaning.

I think this is pandering to the myth that atheism is just another religion.  Atheists /don't/ 'believe there are no gods'. They just don't believe there are any gods.  This is an essential distinction, and depressingly, it seems that it needs to be repeated ad nauseam.  The central point is belief vs. non-belief, rather than belief x vs. belief y.

I often wonder whether most of the people who repeat this misrepresentation actually don't understand the difference between these two ideas, or whether they are deliberately conflating them.

Ben Zaiboc




      





More information about the extropy-chat mailing list