Sam Harris

It’s very depressing that after all this time and all these books and all these fora most people still don’t appear to know what atheism is. I use the word depressing advisedly because the problem isn’t that the concept is difficult to understand but rather that people don’t WANT to understand it because they actually prefer ignorance.
Which is ironic, really,when you bear in mind that preferring ignorance is precisely why religion continues to exist and why forums like these had to be created in the first place. Ho hum.

The difference between theism/a-theism and gnosticism/a-gnosticism is worth mentioning.  One is about believing, the other about knowing.  So you can get four different kinds of people (seven, if you use Richard Dawkins’ sliding scale): the gnostic theist who both knows and believes in one or more gods; the agnostic theist who acknowledges that while the existence of one or more gods is unknowable, he or she still believes; the gnostic atheist who knows for sure that gods don’t exist, which is frankly, also an untenable position; and the agnostic atheist, who acknowledges that while you can’t logically prove a negative, you still need evidence of a positive to make an assertion worthwhile. 

If the Bible is evidence of anything, it is evidence of what 7th century BCE Hebrews and early Christians believed about god, not evidence OF god.  Big difference.  We also have evidence of what the ancient greeks believed about Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, but we don’t take that as evidence OF Zeus, Apollo, and Athena.  We have evidence of what the Hindus, Norse, Australian Aboriginees, Native Americans, African tribes, Shintoists, Wiccans, Ancient Romans, and dozens of other extinct and extant groups of people believe about the supernatural.  But that isn’t evidence OF the supernatural.

I always wondered about that why express ones belief as a lack of something? Doesn’t atheism mean without god, or without gods? isn’t there a positive form to express this idea?