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Originally Posted by tad10  So atheism doesn't require proof to be true but faith does. Mmm'kay. |
I skipped everything else, but I would like to point out that, yes, the maker of an existentially positive proposition bears the burden of proof. We don't say "prove every other possible proposition that isnt consistent with yours is false", we ask those who make propositions to prove their value. Workable knowledge would be impossible otherwise, reality itself absurd.
Lack of any belief at all is the base state, it is from that point that you introduce beliefs. Any introduced belief should be based on reason, therefore you need to start with a clean slate and introduce the notion of "god" through reason. If you can do that, you will win me over into your religion.
One more attack on your little statement there: it is correct that atheism doesnt require proof "to be true". None of these discussions are about what is true and what isnt. Personally, I think that it is impossible to know truths (the old Descartean dream world problem, coupled with a dose of pyrrhonian skepticism), so the point of reason isnt to know what is true, it is to develop a set of the most plausible propositions by which to live.
Atheism "requires no proof" as you have put it, because atheism is a lack of belief. A lack of belief does not require support, it is the base state from which we develop propositions. It doesn't mean atheism is definitely true, it means that with what we know, there is no reason to believe otherwise, and it is not probable, based on our understandings of reality, that the ideas found in religion are correct.
I don't need to prove to you everything that isnt in my backpack right now in order for you to know what it contains. But if I told you something was in it, you could ask me to prove it, and I couldn't rationally say "prove it isn't in my backpack" or "don't you just believe it? that would be the Right thing to do." I would need to open my backpack and show you what was in it.
Every religious person needs to understand that their beliefs that a man named Jesus is the son of an entity called God and did something nebulous like, for some reason, "die for our sins", where "sins" are "moral wrongs" as codified in the Bible are equivalent to a set of beliefs that a man named Ben is the son of an entity called Gorbash and did something amazing and odd like "ate a cupcake of tibbs", where "tibbs" are "moral wrongs" as codified in the book called the Voltron.
I just changed the names around, and if someone told you they earnestly believed that line of rubbish, you, as a christian (or other religious person), would say they were crazy, they believed insanity. There is no basis for their belief!
Well, your beliefs are the exact same as those beliefs and you don't see your own insanity. It is a psychotic delusion and it really needs to end.