14 May 2002 (updated 23 May 2002 at 14:05 UTC)
»
kholmes (and other theists
who don't understand atheism), the
words "believe in" connote sloppy thinking. There are (at
least) two distinct
ideas that the words "believe in" mean, and when users of
those words find
themselves stuck in a contradiction, they flip meanings and
thoroughly confuse
themselves.
One meaning of "believe in Foo" means "to trust Foo to
behave in a certain (and
presumably expected) way." One might "believe in Johnny" to
score a winning
hit in a baseball game. It presumes Johnny exists, of course.
The other meaning of "believe in" means "to believe exists",
as in "I don't
believe in the Easter Bunny." It has nothing to with
whether one thinks
that the Easter Bunny's imaginary actions would be virtuous.
kholmes, expressing
discontent with the idea of how gods behave
does not an atheist make. You're not an atheist until you
say "I believe there
are no beings that fit the definition of gods". [And, I
believe the word
you're trying to use is "disillusionment" -- to be free of
enchantment --
instead of "disallutionation" (not a word).]
Now, if you think gods are irreconcilable with whatever's at
the end of your
reference to "pure evil", then you're on your way to
becoming atheist. I'm
just pointing out that unhappiness is not enough.
Hope has no
effect on Truth.
And, you're right that atheism isn't a full philosophy.
Theists may believe
that gods have absolute control over Universe, which means
that they can stub
off their philosophical growth while pointing to celestial
fiat. Being an
atheist is harder, because one must think about all areas of
philosophy and
come to conclusions regarding metaphysics, epistimology,
ethics, and politics.
I've done it, so I might
be able to help,
if you want it.
badvogato's drivel
about "God's eyes" and livestock are still
useless doubletalk. He seems to be saying that a god won't
care that
you're atheist, because you were born. I hope that helps
you more than it
helped me.
photography: I finally uploaded
some images from out of Mary Ellen's camera. ayan got a
negative scanner yesterday, so my stacks and stacks of
negatives and slides
are really taunting me, now. I did write a script to scale,
border, annotate,
and do comment-insertion into my JPEGs. ImageMagick is
pretty cool.