The Atheist Blogger

Recent debunkings of Creationist flaws leads me to ponder how many people believe in Evolution and what relation these results have with belief in gods. Thus I have constructed the following poll. It only covers atheism / theism and unless I have complaints it will stay that way. If you are a deist I would say to go with the theist grouping since deism is a vague subset of theism. Likewise with agnosticism, if you are an agnostic atheist put yourself in the atheist groupings, and agnostic theists go in the theist group. Very simple!

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It would be interesting to see what the results turn out to be. Obviously I have some predictions about atheist / Evolution but there may be some people who doubt it. Likewise I suspect the majority of theists believe in Evolution, but then it is usually Creationists who come to this blog so perhaps not.

I should also point out that I’ve added the Poll widget to the sidebar so the latest poll is always shown at the side nomatter which page you are browsing.

A couple of days ago, DisComforting Ignorance started a 7 part debunk of the Living Waters “Atheist Test“. The test is a rather silly way of converting atheists into theists. It uses quite a few irrational arguments, including the “buildings have a builder” argument, and of course the standard “banana argument“. It was this banana argument that DisComforting Ignorance addressed in the first part.

The article did the standard debunk of the banana, and added what he supposed was the “theists nightmare”

The coconut — the theist’s nightmare.

Although the meat and water is pleasing to our taste buds, note that the coconut:

1. Is not shaped for human hand
2. When it has ripened, it doesn’t detach for a few months, at which point the coconut water has become bitter. If you want coconut water, you have to get it while it’s still unripened.
3. When it detaches, it falls from tall palms, injuring people.
4. Has no tab for removal of wrapper
5. Has no perforation on wrapper.
6. You have to whack it many times about its circumference with a tool.
7. It is not shaped for human mouth
8. Has no point at top for ease of entry
9. Removing the meat from the shell is a laborious process, even with a tool.
10. Is not curved towards the face to make eating process easy

I posted a comment saying that the coconut does fit nicely in the human hand, and that atheist author Nick Gisburne had already suggested the Pineapple as the theists nightmare. The full video is below:

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To think that blog carnivals are meant to bring people of similar beliefs together. Such philosophies seem to have been completely lost when I hosted the Carnival of the Godless two days ago. SocraticGadfly had an article on the Pew Survey which claimed that 1 in 5 atheists believed in God. As he pointed out, 50% of “agnostics” made the same claim.

The quote which started the debacle was this:

Hey, idiots. If you believe something, you can’t agnostic about it!

As many people probably know, this isn’t true at all. Agnosticism is defined as “an intellectual doctrine or attitude affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge”. Simply put, the position on whether certain things can be claimed as absolute truth or knowledge.

Ergo, if you believe in God, you can be agnostic about it if you don’t claim absolute knowledge of God. These types of people are referred to as agnostic theists or agnostic deists. I’ve covered them before in my article about agnosticism.

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I’ve recently installed a poll plugin for wordpress seeing as it may come in handy for the future. I may even start having weekly polls on various topics if it gets popular. Anyway, this post is really to test the feature out so I know how it works, and more importantly, if it works!

So, the simple question: Are you atheist, theist, or agnostic?

I get quite a few visitors to the blog, and some people leave comments suggesting they belong to certain religious groups, some not. This is an anonymous poll to see what percentages of people read the blog, that’s all.

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In the comments section to my article “Atheism is not a religion“, a reader named “ed” asked me to answer three questions surrounding atheism:

Who is the quintessential atheist, in your opinion? Who has (if anyone) fully represented Atheism both in beliefs and actions?

Well, as “The Atheist Jew” pointed out already, an atheist is simply someone who has no belief in God. There are no “beliefs” in atheism, and I had already explained how atheism is not a religion since it has no belief system. Yesterday I was watching the “Atheist Experience” show on the internet, and they had a caller who talked for about 10 minutes on the subject of belief, before insulting the hosts and being cut off. He did however, start a discussion on whether it takes the same amount of faith the disbelieve in a God than it does to believe in him. Of course, the atheist hosts answered the question with a well explained “no”. They mentioned believing in “pixies”, and the fact that nobody would seriously argue that you need to take a leap of faith to say you didn’t believe in pixies. The evidence is overwhelming that these creatures only exist in legends and stories, and that no accurate sighting have ever been made or verified. Nobody can know for sure whether God exists of course, and so there is a leap of “faith” in the same way that there is with any scientific theory, but the leap only comes through supporting evidence (or lack thereof). If anything, it requires less of a leap to disbelieve in God than it does to believe, certainly not more.

Now to the whole concept of “acting atheist” which I can’t really wrap my head around. If we have already come to the obvious conclusion that there are no beliefs structures in atheism, and therefore the only thing lumping atheists together in a group is the fact that they say “I don’t believe in God”, how can that define any possible actions? Christians and Muslims pray because their belief system supports it as an action, but the only actions supported by atheism are the ones that come naturally to humans anyway. So to answer the second part of your question rather simply, every single living (and indeed non-living) human “acts” like an atheist. Now, if you are talking about whether atheists should act in a different way then you are covering an entirely different subject, and one I would possibly like to save for an entire blog post. I personally don’t support the way Richard Dawkins is going about waging a war with theists, but that is his decision, not the decision of atheists in general.

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