Celebrity Atheists
 

Atheism seems like... coloring your hair green, just to make your parents mad. A little overly dramatic.

Why is that?... most Buddhist are atheists.

On a purely logical level, weak agnosticism is the only intellectually honest position, and that's true for everything from gods to faeries.

However, on a practical level, you can't give the benefit of the doubt to something just because it is undisprovable, so you might as well be atheist.

The balance of evidence suggests there is no God. The balance of evidence suggests that life evolved (and is evolving) without an intelligent driver. Belief in God or creationism requires a leap of faith much greater than that which assumes 'if I throw this ball in the air, it will more than likely fall to the ground.'

Hence, I am an atheist; I don't dye my hair green. In the UK, saying your an atheist isn't a particularly brave or anti-establishment thing to do. From your initial post am I incorrect to surmise that in the USA, such a stance is an unusual one to take when one is in the public eye?

What is with the green hair thing?

It all depends simply on your definition of the word God. If you take the most ridiculous, contrived, dogmatic definition available, and point out that something described in exactly that way is likely not to exist, you've simply proven that it was a silly definition to begin with. >>>>>>> :2cents:

However, if you make the most general, vague, unverifiable and unfalsifiable definition possible, you might as well have never made the claim to begin with.

"Claim? I have no...claim..." Chauncey Gardiner

I was using the general "you".

I know.

Maybe I should clarify what my definition of God is.

It starts with my definition of intelligence, which is simply a high level of organization. Our cells are organized bits of stuff, that act and have an agenda. We are a chunk of these cells, that is capable of symbolic thought, etc. The earth is a mass of life forms, which ebbs and flows in an organization that we don't identify as intelligence simply because we can't understand it with our human brains any more than a bacteria can do algebra.

Keep going outward and outward, bigger and bigger, until you include everything that exists. That is also an organization, to which the same definition of intelligence applies (intelligence is organization). That is what I call God. God is the organization of everything that exists, and everything that exists has an organization that is exponentially more complex than we are able to comprehend. There is no fairy-tale aspect to this.

By trying to understand the parts of the universe that apply to us, we seek to catch a small glimpse of a small part of the organization of everything. This is what we are doing when we use the Scientific Method in an attempt to objectively analyze what we can observe. This is also what we are doing when we seek to find a spiritual path which puts us in harmony with the flow of nature. In both cases, we are blind to the actual truth, and use the best tools we have available for the context we are working within.

The fallacy of Atheism, to me, is that it only seeks to disprove God as is defined by an external source (correct me if I'm wrong). Hence, an apparent symbolic rebellion against the establishment, IE the green-hair comment.

Intelligence != organization. Crystals are not intelligent.

That's not a fallacy, it's a structural necessity. I could turn you into an Afooist just by creating an idea called Fooism with which you disagree. You being Afooist is completely dependant on my definition of Fooism. That's not a fallacy on your part. You didn't change any of your views, but suddenly you get this label! In fact, you are an Afooist right now; Fooism doesn't even exist yet, so you can't possibly be a Fooist.

And not everybody that has a moustache is Hitler. So?
So...do you mean that "Atheism" consists of: not believing in a diety as defined by organized religions? Isn't that just disagreeing with a definition?
Nobody should just "get the label" of Atheist, you should decide to call yourself that. And, I propose that holding other people's beliefs as the source of your personal identity is sort of...odd. Saying I don't believe in something, which I provide the definition for, is one thing. But saying I don't believe in something that is exactly as these other people describe...well... it's kind of like making a rebellious statement, isn't it? Your whole identity, in that case, is defined externally. It looks like that would take you out of the driver's seat of your own life. Am I misunderstanding what Atheist means?

That same logic could be applied to people who consider themselves 'Christians'. Accepted tenets of the Christian faith have generally been derived from christological debates between learned clerics and ecclesiastical figures across many centuries. Most Christians believe in a God, described to them in someone else's terms. Since they define themslves in terms of their faith, and their faith is derived from external definitions of previous generations' beliefs, how are they different from your description of atheists?