muso wrote on Dec 1^st, 2008 at 10:40am:

All of them, that are religions, have dogmas.

With Buddhism, there are the doctrines of reincarnation, Nirvana, the four noble truths and the eightfold path to name four.
Zen includes the doctrine of emptiness.

The dreamtime is a doctrine of faith.

muso wrote on Dec 1^st, 2008 at 10:21am:

Atheist in the contemporary vernacular means lack of belief in gods and non-adherence to a religion.

Note your use of the conjunction 'but' in the statement  - [I am] an atheist  "but I do believe in horoscopes". You tacitly accept that 'atheist' means more than just a non-belief in god(s).

NorthOfNorth wrote on Dec 1^st, 2008 at 11:43am:


You're getting off the track. I'm not talking about whether a belief is or is not justified. I'm just talking about the personal belief itself.

If we don't see an invisible pink elephant, we have no reason even to consider belief in it. When asked the question - Is there a pink elephant in the room? - that answer is no. Did that belief exist before the question was posed? Of course it did.

Tell me - Have you always believed that there was no rainbow serpent in your intestine?

NorthOfNorth wrote on Dec 1^st, 2008 at 11:19am:


It doesn't mean a disbelief. It means a lack of belief. There is a subtle difference.

Theism makes a positive belief claim in which existence of some sort of god or gods is asserted. An atheist is someone who does not accept or make this claim. Thus, atheism refers to the absence of theistic belief. That’s it. It doesn’t mean anything else. Atheism is not a religion, a philosophy, a worldview, or anything similar. It is not the conviction that there are no gods, ghosts, angels, etc. Rather, it is the absence of a belief that these things are real.

'Atheism' is nothing more than the lack of belief in a god or gods. Note that this is not the same thing as a positive claim that a god or gods do not or cannot exist. While some have described such a positive claim as “strong atheism,” it should not be taken as being synonymous with atheism.

Here is a better explanation that I can give:

http://www.atheistrev.com/2006/05/defining-atheism-advantage-of.html

Once you start using the word 'exist' for the indefinable 'supernatural', you get drawn into a quicksand of semantics.

- and by the way, I don't agree with everything on that site.

muso wrote on Dec 1^st, 2008 at 12:07pm:

No, it's a meaningless question. I neither knew nor didn't know as I had never thought about it before, so I cannot say I had an opinion on it either way. Now that the proposition has been raised, I do not believe there is a pink elephant in the room and in principle I'm sure I would have also held that opinion anytime in the past.

Is grebalianism true?

NorthOfNorth wrote on Dec 1^st, 2008 at 12:12pm:


Well I can only speak for myself. If I walk into an empty room,  I am aware that the room is empty. If at some later stage somebody asks me the question if I saw a pink elephant in the room, I would quick to  be able to reassure them that I did not. This innate ability is necessarily based on my latent belief that unless I see any aforesaid rose tinged members of the genus Elephantidae, then I am comfortable in the belief that they do not exist.  

I can only sympathise with your own condition in which you are continually confronted with the spectre of not knowing whether or not you were accompanied by a virtual rainbow like menagerie -  a myriad of fluorescent jungle dwellers gaudily stomping and thumping  around you and following your every move.

Perhaps by contrast, I lead a  dull monochrome existence. I always knew my life was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi.

- and here was I thinking it was God.  

muso wrote on Dec 1^st, 2008 at 12:00pm:

I think American atheists have a tougher time with the term than we in Australia do. Over there the term appears to include a rejection of religion (specifically Christianity) but in many parts of the US it appears also to be more complex in that it is synonymous with unpatriotic sentiments. To decouple 'atheist' from that kind of baggage would be hard going. I don't believe even the term non-theist would sweeten the American palette for what many would still see as a euphemism for rejection of core American values.