An Atheiest believes there is no God or sufficient proof to back up the belief for a God. Orginized religion is useless stories and fairytale people still believe in. Some are activists and want to convert.

A non-beiever doesn't believe in organized religion but could dabble with some form of spiritualism that meets their need or personal mystic way to understand surroundings.

If you don't really care if there is a God one way or the other and God is irrelevant to daily living and no strong evidence points to a reason to believe..

Which camp would they likely be associated with?

I'd say the indifferent group.

I'm passionatly indifferent.

I'm a definite agnostic.

That would be me.

Those people are in the "apatheist" camp.

See: "apatheism"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatheism

You can't be indifferent unless you want Taliban types of every religion to push their beliefs into laws.

My current stance is that the only real truth is that we just don't know. Many think they do, but they don't. They may be 100% convinced of a thing, but currently, we don't know.

I leave the religious people alone, as long as they leave me alone. When it comes to the laws of the land, they have to include everyone, which isn't always easy to do. Governing is complicated because you need to represent all people and not just the people you like the most, or who resonate with you the most.

I find your definition of "non-believer" as not believing in organized religion to be a bit odd. Non-follower perhaps. Organized religion is everywhere in a rampant way whether you choose to "believe" in it or not.

Most atheists will take issue with the term that "they believe there is no god". The definition of atheism is "lack of belief in god" and to some of us it does make a difference to use that definition. I personally know a lot of atheists and not one of them would say they believe there is no god.

And, "sufficient proof" seems to insinuate that there is *some* proof. I don't know an atheist who accepts that there is even an iota of proof. Other wise they would be agnostic more likely.

And I would guess agnostic is the word you are searching for. But the definitions of all these terms are tricky. So, in the end, I don't find value in cataloging and assigning
groups and would recommend, considering the world we live in currently, keeping ones belief's to oneself unless you know your audience.

    Can you have a belief in not believing, or just have faith in not believing?  Or do you have the moxie to declare that what you believe is totally the Truff, and nothing but the Truff?


    And please don't forget the ancient (at least 15 years old now!) practice of Laztheism!

    Here I'll quote a 2005 comment to a random blog post:

    "Laztheism teaches us that people will work on the things they make up until they get them right.  And then they'll work on them some more, to make them 'righter.'

    "If "coincidence" doesn't explain something, you need to expand your definition of coincidence."

    <citation supplied upon request>

Yes. I absolutely believe in not believing! What a concept! Changed my life.


And then then the coincidence concept you give forth. Holy Cow! The sagery of that. You should be a Dolly LLama or something, Che Pibe. At least un Alpaca Divino.

I’m a militant agnostic, I don’t know and neither do you!

I am atheist in belief and agnostic in knowledge. I do not believe there is a god, but I don't know whether or not there is a god.

That is how I would describe and define too.

I don't have belief in gods (a-theist) but I can't prove with 100% certainty with factual knowledge (a-gnostic).

All knowledge is always provisional. I don't know for sure that the sun didn't explode 2 minutes ago, and the wave front of the explosion hasn't reached earth yet, but it will in a few minutes.

After all, we know that stars do explode every now and then - we have seen it happen. Nevertheless, I operate on the "knowledge" that the sun is still there, and we will still be here for the foreseeable future, even though there is an infinitesimally small probability that I am wrong.

The difference between "atheist" and "nonbeliever" is where you are willing to draw the line between low probability events that you should still consider as possible, and low probability event that you consider so low as to be effectively impossible. I think the actual placement of that line is of very little consequence in the real world.

The line between believer and nonbeliever might be of more consequence, though I am not even sure of that.

    I bet Sun Explosion Insurance is fairly inexpensive...  Probably just cost pennies to get a Sun Explosion rider attached to your homeowner policy.  

The great thing, I am told by salesmen, about Sun Explosion Insurance is that for some reason after a star explodes very few people in the solar system bother to file claims.

Nicely put. If that isn't what I was trying to say before, than I wish it was.

However aren't we getting dangerously close to EOD's bell shaped curve?

It's the point I made the other day: all knowledge is probabilistic: we have an observed fact and implicitly attach to it a likelihood, knowing all the while that our understanding is imperfect and awaiting new data to refine our estimates and allow the assignment of a higher probability as we get closer to truth.

It's done implicitly, of course, but that's the way it should be. For it prevents us from ever reaching absolute confidence in our grasp of truth, which humans cannot attain, and keeps our minds open to new observations.

So yes, it is statistical but more complex than the EOD Curve, which is a static phenomenon. For those who are willing to live with uncertainty, the more honest course in my view, it's back-of-the-envelope Bayesian. You set up a hypothesis, run the experiment and receive new data, establish a refined hypothesis that better fits all the information, and then repeat the process infinitely in the expectation that you are approaching factual reality asymptotically.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/2021 02:23AM by Lot's Wife.

Exactly the point I was trying to reinforce. All knowledge is provisional. A lot of people would reject that point. They would be (provisionally) wrong. :)

Not only are we constantly updating our internal image of the world around us, it seems that simple activities like "seeing", involve not only the nerve impulses from the retinas to the brain, but also involve our memories of what the world is like to generate images from those nerve impulses. IOW, in some sense, we see what we expect to see, and if given an image that is deeply unexpected, our image generation system can get very disoriented.

People whose internal representation of the world and external inputs of the world (vision, sound, touch, etc) are badly out of synch with each other are labeled as delusional. There can be cultural delusions such as Kolob. There's one we all know and love. :P

One measure of intelligence is the ease with which one recognizes, evaluates, and incorporates discordant information into a new provisional paradigm.

In other words, how efficiently a person learns.

Or, "Wow. in other words, "There's more to this than I thought! Good to know. ", and, "Wow. I was wrong. Cool!"

Corollary: The older I get, the less I know.

To tie this in to a separate thread, I think it's not just a measure of intelligence, but a measure of how much one values integrity over their own ego.

Integrity is one of my favorite words. As you stated in your other post, it encompasses so much more than most people realize.

Yes, and yes.

You don't get to comment about Atheists until you can spell the word correctly. Now go to your room !

It's interesting how everything is always defined in terms of God or religion --

Atheist: Lacks a belief in a god or gods
Agnostic: Doesn't know if there is a god or gods
Non-believer: Doesn't believe in a god or gods, and/or doesn't accept the faith claims of a given church
Non-religious: Doesn't participate in organized religion, may or may not have personal spiritual beliefs

It would be nice if all of the above didn't have to identify themselves in terms of their relationship to religion. What if the default was, you are a person living your life? Why do religious people have any say in how someone else defines themselves?

What if we could read what famous scientists think/thought about ghawd?

Wouldn’t that be a wonderful guide and totally settle the issue!!

Wow! I’m getting chills just imagining it!

I know. Right? Then with them telling us about God we wouldn't need no prophets. Wait . . . they could be our prophets! Yay. Cuz we need *somebody* to speak for God. Right? Everybody says so. You can't go against that. "They" know. ooooh. I'm getting chills.

I guess I'm non-religious, with no current spiritual beliefs.

I'm definitely not religious and I'm pretty sure I never will be.

A high percentage of people who leave a high pressure and demanding religion tend to go agnostic or atheist. For me I love the freedom of not having to have an answer. What happens after we die? Hell if I know.