SAY WHAT ONE MORE TIME!  I DARE YOU.

You seem confused about how weighted decisions are made. People don't arbitrarily flip a coin in a weighted decision. They use some level of reason to determine the weight - elementary. This at its heart is a probabilistic choice. As I pointed out,  you may have won the lotto or found the diamond. These are possibilities, but the decision maker knows these are unlikely cases. The reason we can consider uncertain evidence is because of probability. Otherwise I could arbitrarily flip back and forth.
 

Your confusion seems to lie in your inability to distinguish between evidence by fiat (and its equivalence to faith based belief) and evidence used in plausible reasoning. Testimonial evidence, as in a jury system, is based on faith in the testifier nothing more. The court system by fiat has allowed us to accept as evidence a faith based belief in the testimony. The faith is that a person is telling the truth. Nothing more.

It is extraordinary how shallow your argument has become. He said it to be so, so yay verily it is so.
 

I've come to notice that your contributions never seem to address my arguments. I have a feeling that we both know why.
 

You are kidding right? This whole "atheism is nothing" meme is stunning. I responded to this in this thread. Find it and quote and we can go from there.
 

haha, you win! now since every human has faith you look less like an irrational dumbass. YOU WIN!!!

wow that is such a huge jump. Some base there decision to be atheist on faith yes. 'My favourite pop satr is an atheist so I will be an atheist to.' like that type of thing. But it is not faith if you have reason to beleve what you are being told is true. really I have know clue how you jumped to what you did. read those questions I posted.  that stupid atheist doesn't have to take it on faith. those are the logical questions to ask yourself if you havent looked at the evidance yourself.

No need to be a dick about it. You're the one who asked a question so easily answered. If you want answers that aren't readily apparent don't ask stupid questions.

Atheism is based on lack of evidence and that's it. If you can provide evidence for your god go ahead already. Until then, I will continue to be an atheist as it is the default logical position.

OC if any of my posts contain ridicule it's because I find the post I'm responding to ridiculous.  This time, however, I wasn't involved in any sort of ridicule of your idea.  Excusing my casual language I was trying to make a serious point.  I even threw you a bone by refusing to comment on the false idea of "shared atheism".

What I wanted to know is why you're going with this hypothetical, and I made a variety of assumptions based on the fact you're a theist.  If that came across as ridicule then I'll take a couple of steps back and we can work through this, even though most of my arguments have been covered already.

So.  We have two atheists in vacuum.  Atheist Steve is smarter than atheist Bubba.  Steve has explained something to Bubba but Bubba doesn't have the mental faculties to properly understand the implications.  He knows Steve sure is bright.  Thus, does Bubba have to take what Steve said on faith?

I assumed given you're a theist that there would be two possible reasons for you creating this scenario:  you want to show that atheism is a faith or, as I spelled out in my original post, that you would want to make some correlation between lack of mental capability and our understanding of god.

I'll play you're game.  Yes, Bubba has to take some faith* in Steve and what he said.  What are you suggesting the implications are to my answer of "yes"?

*ignoring any argument of what that "faith" is, as it's been well covered by everyone else.

M

I read them. You are making the same argument as a host of other people in this thread, to which I provided answers. Read this for starters ...
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/17624#comment-244760
 

   I think most of us, Atheists, are intelligent enough to know the difference between right and wrong.  I am not about to give credit to any religion for anything that I do within the law, just as I would not give credit to any gawd for the successful kidney transplant that my older brother just went through.  Good science and medicine is where this credit goes to.

Even if he is, it's not the same as religious faith, which is trust placed in something for which no evidence exists that it has any foundation in fact. All the dumber guy has to do is ask the cleverer guy for help in comprehending the data. But at least the data is available.

Or are you saying that all definitions of "faith" amount to the same thing, in which case all theists are thick? If you are I congratulate you on your honesty but pity you for your rather basic word-blindness, the cure of which would make your life a whole lot simpler and your contributions on this site a whole lot less tedious and stupid.

We already had this discussion ...

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/17624#comment-244760

Before you go and say it, there is a subtle but important difference between "not believing it does" and "believing it does not".

No we didn't. A discussion is when two people exchange sentences. You will notice that I did not until my last post.

So this is the discussion, now.

I'll begin with a lesson in basic English and in particular the word "faith". This has two distinct meanings, an original meaning based on its Latin root and a later one which acquired vernacular application in English mainly thanks to religion's insistence that the word be validly applied to what is also called blind belief. One meaning, as just inferred, is to believe in something which has no basis in fact. The other meaning is to trust in something with a degree of consistency, normally because there is a proven, or at least a provable, reason to do so. These are not the same thing.

In your so-called "scenario" you have done what religionists tend to do with a frequency depressingly often enough to suggest that they perceive an advantage in doing so, namely they hope that by conflating these meanings or at least obscuring the differences between them they will somehow magically become the same thing. The "advantage" in this would appear to be that it then equates in the religionist's mind the act of "blindly believing" in the impossible with trusting in the veracity of something without fully comprehending the proof, and (as is often the case with religionists) this assertion they hope will then prevail, even over logic.

This is dishonest or stupid, and in your case I suspect both.

The "less intelligent" person in your scenario is placing faith in something which only his inferior intellect or education restrains him from comprehending. The rationality behind that which he is trusting as true is there to be comprehended.

This is not even closely related to the actions on the other hand of a religious person, who trusts in something implausible and will often use as justification for that trust the very fact that it is implausible. From a rational point of view in fact the allegedly "less intelligent" person is behaving with a huge degree more intelligence than the religious person in that he has instinctively opted to trust in the rational, having learnt at least that his "more intelligent" interlocutor can demonstrate proofs for his position, even if he himself has difficulty understanding them. He is, in other words, exhibiting the first rudimentary stages of educating himself towards comprehension, should he wish to pursue it. No such education is available to the religionist and his "faith", only more assertions designed to affirm that he is correct but with nothing tangible or rational to back them up.

If you can get it through your skull that the concepts behind use of the one word "faith" are exclusive to each other then you will begin to understand just how stupid you yourself are being, and maybe you too can also achieve that initial step towards basic comprehension yourself. The signs however are not very encouraging, which would indicate to me that you are doomed to repeat such idiocies ad nauseum. That you are already well on the way to proving me right reveals why I am justified in having such "faith" in your potential for stupidity. Unlike as with religious faith however, my own is predicated on evidence - just like as with its semantic application when its parent expression was coined in Latin.

You are really not as clever a person as you seem to think you are, which in itself would not be pathetic if it was not for the evident fact that you are not very clever at all. All the same, you seem to me to have a stark choice here of desisting from posting further in this thread except to acknowledge that you are - on several levels - wrong and thereby rescuing other people's assessment of your honesty, if not your intellect or, on the other hand, you can persist as you have been and thereby prove that which many atheists suspect about religionists, that they are dishonest enough to corrupt language itself in order to protect their delusions and are therefore not capable of dialogue.

It is a simple and logical choice, the kind you are seemingly least conditioned to make. But if I were you I would think long and hard before I dismiss it.

In the case of strong atheism, it's believing that no gods exist. You would be an atheist with respect to Zeus, for instance, despite the fact that the New Testament uses one of his hames to describe the god of Jesus (ὁ θεος ). I just happen to be a strong atheist with respect to all gods.

Your gyrations are unconvincing. As I have said multiple times, an atheist comes into a world full of theists. This means the atheist is faced with the fact that there are people all around that have beliefs that he does not have. At some point they evaluate these beliefs. It is inevitable. It is unavoidable. It is our social makeup. They do indeed reject theist clams as false.
 

Certain claims can be rejected as false, yes. But the rational person doesn't really have to get into every single one. An example:

If someone were to tell me, "A long time ago, there were only two human beings on the earth, and a snake came up to one of them and told her to eat fruit," then I'd be overwhelmed with the number of claims in that statement that were untested, and might not be testable at all.

So I would ask, "Do you have any evidence that any of this actually happened?"

The storyteller would present the book wherein she read it. Then I would laugh, because that's pretty weak as evidence. I'd assume it was a fictional story, and not bother her about it any more.

Now ... if she came on these boards and said that, we'd have words.

It is indeed hilarious how you can pretend how "atheism" and "not believing in god" are somehow different, and build sentences from that like "not believing in god is fundamental to atheism". Especially when all this time I've been asking you to demonstrate how they are different. You realize that's exactly like saying being white is required to be the opposite of black? Or 2+2 must be 4? It's not required TO, it IS the same thing, which I kinda stated already but you conveniently ignored all that.

Repetition and stupidity fare even worse, yet you seem to place great "faith" in it.

But thanks for confirming my prediction. You are incapable of recognising, let alone admitting, you are stupid.

If they consider themselves an atheist... they likely have concluded the extraordinary claims have inadequate evidence. Unless they are not aware of a specific theist belief, and only theism as a whole, then they are an atheist by the lack of belief.

There, I corrected that for you.

Well now I know that you'll probably leave this website soon because you're at the absolute end of your tether with the 'you can't prove that it's false' argument.

If you were talking about a case where the evidence is truly inconclusive then I might say you have a point because a person can honestly say that they do not know. This is a case where the claims being made were not even formed on the basis of evidence. No matter how many people believe it there's really nothing to evaluate or consider other than the fact that people are gullible sometimes.

Saying that by rejecting your baseless claim we are making an opposite and equally baseless claim is pretty weak considering that the reason you can make that accusation is because your claims are incoherent and they cannot be tested, and since you see no need to support your claims with evidence you can adjust your story as needed to ensure that no one can disprove it.  

But your accusation is not even true because rejecting a claim doesn't necessarily mean rejecting it as false. If you really want to play the who's doing something worse game consider that I'm only saying I think your incoherent ideas are unworthy of evaluation while you're saying that you have faith, which is not the idea that arbitrary premises should be evaluated but that arbitrary premises should be accepted without evaluation.

Oh, I'll drift in and out, no doubt, but trust me, it will have nothing to do with an atheist deciding I'm "incapable". <laughing> 

Until our little genius addresses why he chooses to arbitrarily conflate two disparate meanings in the case of the words "faith" and "belief", and until he likewise owns up to the fact that atheism, as an absence of belief in a particular notion, is not something which can be conveyed merely through assertion and therefore not something one atheist can convince another to accept on faith alone, however "stupid" his interlocutor, then his "scenario" has as much relevance to polemics as a genital wart has to the law of gravity.

He is simply talking through his arse, and is thick enough to be proud of the fact.

Just because you repeat fallacious assertions does not make them true.