All hail His Noodly Appendages.

Nonsense, it still requires proof, otherwise the word you're looking for is "delusion." Placeholder beliefs to fill in the blanks are inevitable, but over the long term they do still require evidence and support. Beliefs of this sort are the sign of a lazy intellect.

I've got better things to do with my time here. It's your own business if you want to ignore the neurosciences and stick to vague and self serving tautological arguments. But, you're dead wrong when you suggest that being a believer isn't more intellectually lazy than disbelieving in it. Same goes for fearful.

1) Neurosciences have absolutely nothing to do with this. Except maybe in providing exemples of neurologists who are good at their work regardless of their various beliefs.

2) You're the self-serving tautologist here, constructing a worldview that gives you-as-an-atheist a special intellectual status over a category of blatantly unknown people. I'm the one debunking an assumption that should theorically valorise me.

3) I'll let you grow up, and maybe, in the course of your life, encounter believers and atheists -either personally or through their works- that you'll judge without knowing their beliefs in advance. I'll let you then re-evaluate either your judgement on them ("ooh I thought he was clever/dumb and he turns out religious/atheist so he's dumb/clever") or on your assumptions ("ooh this clever/dumb guy turns out religious/atheist so maybe it's not as related as I thought"). Depending on your own intellectual courage.

I really appreciate you.

Having grown up with as much resistance from people of any belief, people of any nationality, people of any race, eventually you get tired of arguing - Most of all you get tired of arguing online where the person you're arguing with can realise they're wrong/being irrational and then just disappear - so I have to thank you for having the strength that I'm far too old (That's definitely the only word that I can use to describe how I feel) to have. I hope He who sent down that which I've embraced makes easy for you that which benefits you, friend.

I can agree that a burden of proof is irrelevant if it's just a belief. Except that in almost every debate I've seen and been a part of, those on the religious side will claim absolute knowledge. To many of them it isn't just a belief.

Not addressing anyone specifically, but I would like to address a couple of misconceptions that always seem to come up in debates on this topic. Namely, definitions of terms. Honestly hardly any debates I see (and they're usually such a waste of time that I don't involve myself with them) ever get down to any sort of "evidence" one way or another.

Definition of "atheism"-

For rhetorical purposes, its easy to see why this is such a sticky point. If atheists can make themselves out to be making no claim whatsoever (atheism defined as simply lacking belief in a god or gods), then they don't have to deal with any burden of proof. If a theist could establish equal burden of proof, well I only know of two or three half-decent positive arguments for atheism.

I DO favor the definition of atheism as "the belief that there is no god or gods", and so I think most atheists would probably be better identified as agnostics. With that said, I still have to side with the atheists overall on this point. Unless you're more interested in scoring debate points than you are in the truth, the point of these terms is to make it clear what a person's position actually is. If a person says he simply lacks belief in god, its just good manners to assume that he is accurately describing his own position.

Definition of "faith"-

This one drives me crazy. The definition of faith is not "blind belief in the absence of evidence", no matter how many times a guy like Dawkins says that it is. Faith is simply assent to (or reliance upon) a proposition. Blind faith is called fideism, and its actually considered a heresy by the Catholic church. Theology used to be called "the queen of the sciences", and for most of its history philosophers/theologians attempted to establish the veracity of Christianity (and Islam, for that matter, and others) through rational argument. Theists who aren't as aware of their rich intellectual tradition or who encounter arguments that aren't easy to counter may fall back on the "faith is a leap in the dark" card, that's true. But by the traditional definition of faith, faith is something that we all have in any number of things. Some faith is justified, some isn't, but the term itself doesn't imply one way or the other.

As far as theism being intellectually lazy. It can be, but remarkably little that we believe in actually comes from examining the evidence and coming to a totally rational conclusion as a result of that examination. But anyone who thinks that theism hasn't had its fair share of very intelligent, rational defenders... well it probably isn't worth starting a conversation with that person.

I said it applies to everyone on the planet, not to every situation. Big difference. ^^

Sometimes you need to tell someone to f off. Sometimes you have to beat the living crap out of someone. That doesn't mean you can't try to be nice and resolve the situation before it reaches such points, or that these are immoral things to do should they be appropriate. :)

Well, I don't know about that. First because the discourses I've met reaffirm that the reason why the god doesn't reveal itself with a big huge in-your-face miracle is that he demands beliefs without this, it would be "too easy" to believe in him if there was a proof (and, it seems that believing in him is some sort of trial challenge by itself). I am not exaclty sure how it works in details, but it's a recurring themes in many cults (including french ufo cults giving similar arguments about why the aliens don't simply land in front of everybody, yet demand to be recognised enough for a de-nationalised territry to be granted to the cult, in order to build their ambassy first - but I digress).

Secondly, because if brought down to a level of rational proofs, then religion gets very much cornered, and forced to either back down to leaps of faith (easy ones when miracles and "mysteries" are no contradiction) or to recoil to levels of abstractions that empty their specific religious belief of all its specific identity, and fall back on vague lifeforces with very little godlike qualities left. There is a reason why modern philosophy has drifted away from theology, and that reason is not "to annoy believers yark yark". Theist constructions (finalism, etc) are philosophically quite weak.

I don't think that religion can exist on the rational plane, at the same level as scientism and modern analytical philosophy. It does coexist with it, but through the elasticity of people's mind, and their ability to hop back and forth between momentarily relevant universes. Most of the problems with mysticisms nowadays come from attempts to deal with one realm through the tools of the other. Even though, historically, much of mankind's progress has been made without this opposition. But it has eventually lead to it (and this is why we now have genetics, sociology, paleontology, and, yes, neurosciences)...

And that's why debates on gods are a violent deadend. Both realms are not fit for the same tools, they belong to two levels of (social) existence. Myths and history are both "true", but not the same way, not about the same things, and that's why they can be both endorsed despite of formal contradictions. But they cannot be fully ariculated, because it would require to translate one into the categories of the other, and, thus, to destroy it...

Intelligent maybe, but rational? Not at all. Just remember that any argument made in favor of theism can also apply to any gods you make up on the spot right now. To defend such a thing is irrational by default.

Just wondering though if you do have some sort of moral compass how you aspire to navigate such ebbs and flows?

I do tend to think that the matter of principles emerges there, or at least it should. Whether the results are for the good or the bad, this is especially the case when highly idealistic persons actually go and try to change, or even revolutionize a system, rather than go along what they think is wrong.

More's the pity OP was edited out, really. I think I browsed it at the time, but cannot recall it properly anymore.

But pray take heart, Telika - we could see this thread as a validation of the parable of Sodoma and Gomorra in the Old Testament, where God desired but six (or dozen?) righteous persons in the end - and even that after some intercession and compassion, at that - yet find them wanting.

Should I comb through all the posts for fairness and respect to the opinion / counter-argument they wished to convey; I hope we would arrive at the threshold of grace in the end. :-D And well, if not, most likely we will not have brimstone raining onto our heads today or tomorrow.

I do like what iippo posts, for example, and even what you post, minus maybe your defeatist and judgmental attitude of assuming that agitprop type of responses could or should not be countered, or that they even are representative of good Christians and good Atheists in the end.

But six righteous? Are we all lacking in this thread, really? :-D

So you're using this thread to justify "god's" genocide?

You're wrong in both directions. On the one hand, theism is only the belief in the existence of the supernatural entity (or entities) most would refer to as god. It doesn't follow that an argument is false just because it doesn't establish a specific god, most classical arguments only try to establish a God who possesses certain necessary attributes... and those attributes are not arbitrary.

On the other hand, arguments from specific scriptures or miracles only apply to the existence of certain gods.

So I'm afraid I'm not seeing the force of the argument here. I just think its a bad idea to assume someone is irrational just because they have a difference of opinion on an issue like this... particularly when people (as I said, very smart people) devote their lives to the subject.