Letters to the Editor
-
@wilson ... uh, dude, you have it *exactly* backward. Which figures, by the way.
wilson wrote:
Also, I hate to break it to you, but Strong Atheism is no less a belief system than any other religion in the world - it is a fixed belief in something that can never be proven.
^^^^^^^^^^
You have this exactly backwards. You believe in something that cannot be proven. I, on the other hand, know for a fact there is no god. Can I prove it, as a logical matter? No. But my non-belief is not a matter of faith. It's a matter of fact. Or, if you prefer, a matter of theory whose chances of being wrong are so vanishingly small (based on current *scientific* evidence) that it might as well be fact.
Don't accuse atheists of a belief system of the kind you have. We don't have one. You indulge in cheap projection when you do that.
And, by the way, the other poster who pointed out that people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris would be far more protective of religious beliefs than any fundamentalist christian, was right. I feel the same. You want to collect souvenir plates? go ahead. You want to believe in the tooth fairy? Go ahead. You want to practice rituals and design rules for behavior in service to belief in a non-existent supreme being? Be my guest.
Atheists are the best friends the religious ever had. Just don't mix your beliefs in with politics. And don't tell me I have to conform to your weird ideas about the cosmos, human nature, and origins thereof.
(I must confess, I've always been deeply amused at the way religious people just won't address the problem of the tooth fairy. Or Zeus. Or Hera. Once, many people believed in these supernatural, non-existent beings. How is there *any* logical, practical difference between Zeus, Odin, and the Christian god? There is no difference. Christianity simply stole many of its fundamental precepts for older beliefs-in-gods-that-don't-exist. Some of Christianity's essentialy beliefs go all the way back to Egyptian polytheism. This is all a commonplace. What's not commonplace is the stubborness of irrationality. Wired in by the very evolution that irrationality dismisses. It is a lovely irony, really.)