Quote:
Originally Posted by SATCHMO
There's really no way around it. The lack of belief in God is the belief that God does not exist. That's atheism, pure and simple.
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Well, Janszoon has already replied on this part.
Actually, I suspected that that would come up since the whole issue seems to revolve around this misunderstanding. If you look at what you've written above, you'll notice how you state that "
The lack of belief[...]
is the belief[...]" which obviously is a contradiction.
This in turn, makes all of your following arguments invalid, since you base them all on the assumption that I carry a belief (in the absence of a divinity) and this is exactly the type of argument I implied in my original post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by SATCHMO
It's not so much the point that you're believing in something, but that every human being has a mythology with which they orient themselves to existence, and simply because your mythology is grounded strictly in what can be empirically proven,[...]
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Thus not a mythology.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SATCHMO
[...]does not mean you do not have a belief system regarding absolute reality. I would not go so far as to call atheism a religion. Religion is a sociological construct, but science, and subsequently atheism, is not the antithesis of spirituality, it's simply a more physical, materialistic way of explaining and orienting oneself toward the phenomenon of existence.
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Not so much a more physical as
a physical way of explaining (if we allow ourselves to use the word 'physical' in its broadest sense). You're right in that science doesn't exclude spirituality (depending on what you mean by 'spirituality', that is) as a subjective experience, but only so because science doesn't set out for explain phenomena that are allegedly spiritual.
To crank the nitpicking up one notch: I'd claim that science as a method, is about understanding the nature of phenomena in and around us through concepts, whose significance to our experience we as humans must acknowledge in order to gain knowledge about them.