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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[Grimlocke]

Heh, its that silly discussion about what an atheist is again that crops up in every single religious discussion ever.

Atheism = Not believing there is a god.
Which is not the same as 'Believing there is no god'.

That last one is semantic bunk made up by religious fundamentalist crackpots to try and put atheism on their own level.

And none of the semantics and silly mis-definitions even matter. Fact is that no part of reality points to any kind of deity existing, and believing there is one anyway is a matter of faith.

Trying to win silly online discussions with an endless stream of fallacies and wordplay really doesn't do anyone any favors.

[Rolan7]

Also there are anti-theists, who claim there are no gods.  Most atheists don't claim that, instead acknowledging that it's technically possible for gods to exist.

Though not necessarily that any specific god is possible.  Many definitions of god are self-contradictory.

Atheism doesn't involve any claim, though.  It's simply not making a claim about gods.  A lack of religion.

[TD1]

Give Rolan a cookie.

An atheistic cookie.

I'm fairly certain it doesn't exist, but if it does, Rolan is gonna be a happy camper

[Rolan7]

Any cookie is atheist, as cookies have no belief.  Ironic, since they actually do have intelligent (well, sentient) creators!
Or it's a frustratingly paradoxical cookie.  If I believe I have it, I don't...  If I don't believe in it, there it is.  Oscillating in and out of existence at the speed of thought has got to be harnessable as an energy source, somehow.  Maybe the cookie is magnetic?

[TD1]

....
That cookie just got very complicated. The power of philosophy!

As for it being harnessable as an energy source, that depends on whether oscillating in and out of existence creates energy. You could rig it up to a pressure plate, I suppose, in that if you had enough cookies oscillating at once, the weight would press the plates like pistons.

Need a lot of cookies though.

[Grimlocke]

One could potentially make a hand grenade of uncertain holiness!

[TheBiggerFish]

Is there a word for someone who simply doesn't care about religion?

[wobbly]

Atheism = Not believing there is a god.
Which is not the same as 'Believing there is no god'.

That last one is semantic bunk made up by religious fundamentalist crackpots to try and put atheism on their own level.

On this I'm going to have to disagree. Trouble is I meet a lot of atheists who claim to be the 1st sentence, yet have an attitude to the topic of religion that is a closer match to the 2nd sentence. Once you start mocking the religious as stupid, gullible or ignorant you're more in line with the second (in my own opinion) & a lot of atheists do behave that way.

[Arx]

Is there a word for someone who simply doesn't care about religion?

Apatheist gets thrown around a bit.

[TheBiggerFish]

Apatheist.  I like that name.

[TD1]

You're just one ap away from an atheist. Download today!

Atheism = Not believing there is a god.
Which is not the same as 'Believing there is no god'.

That last one is semantic bunk made up by religious fundamentalist crackpots to try and put atheism on their own level.

On this I'm going to have to disagree. Trouble is I meet a lot of atheists who claim to be the 1st sentence, yet have an attitude to the topic of religion that is a closer match to the 2nd sentence. Once you start mocking the religious as stupid, gullible or ignorant you're more in line with the second (in my own opinion) & a lot of atheists do behave that way.

Urgh, not really. I do think belief in a god is rather silly, but that's not because I'm certain there is no god. Again, it comes down to the probabilities involved, and the internal problems of the religion when it tries to conform to reality (and where it doesn't.)

Thinking something is silly doesn't mean you don't think they may on a veeeeery long shot be right, is what I'm trying to say.

[wierd]

Did somebody say "probabilities"?

Did you know that it is actually more probable that the universe is a simulation, than real?  It's true!

http://web.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/BostromReview.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnl6nY8YKHs


And some other fun things..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chfoo9NBEow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp4NkItgf0E

[TD1]

But given we define "real," roughly, as what is there, and what is there is simulation, then the simulation is real and you can't say that it's more likely a simulation than real.

[wierd]

That does not explain the existence of the error correcting block codes being detected.

I refer you to my prior (admittedly wall o text sized) shpeel about "machine god".

Creator god does not need to be sentient to satisfy all of the criteria normally ascribed to creator god. Machine god satisfies just fine, and would be true in a simulation universe.

Also, the simulation argument goes like this:

There are three possible outcomes of technological advancement of a civilization.

1) For some reason, it is unable to progress to a point where ancestor simulations are possible. (See Fermi's paradox, and various others.)
2) If we assume that it is possible that they can achieve the technology to run ancestor simulations, then it is possible that universally, all civilizations with this theoretical capacity decide that it is without merit to do so, and so don't do so.
3) If we reject those two, then each real civilization is able to spawn many orders of magnitude more simulated civilizations, making the probability that any given civilization will be a simulated one highly likely.  (EG, one out of every hundred billion civilizations will be a simulation, if we assume that each real civilization is able to run one hundred billion other civilizations as simulations.)

When you throw in curious things like the error correcting block codes being found, and other curious hints that lean toward our being inside a simulation, with the simulation hypothesis, it looks pretty intriguing.

Is it still a sensible idea to pray to machine god? No. Machine god does not give a flying white pony ride about your worship.

[Antioch]

The "who is atheist and who is agnostic" debate is always a bit tiring.

My position:

1. It is wrong to believe that for which there is insufficient evidence.
2. There is insufficient evidence for the existence of a god.