The obviously religious ones like Abigail and Richard aren’t really worth responding to except with general disdain.
To the ones complaining atheism is religious, if you want to see religous atheism read “In Defense of Secular Humanism” by Paul Kurtz, especially “Secular Humanist Manifesto”. I had read it because I liked Kurtz’s skeptical stuff, but it was awful. The Manifesto writers basically just changed their faith from God to faith in the Government. I have seen similar things since, mainly from academics.
The argument about probability 1 and so forth—I use the words certain and impossible regularly to mean the likelihood of something not being true or of being true to be so low as not being worth consideration. I will repeat what I’ve said before, putting arbitrary (spurious) numbers to likelihoods is more likely to result in contradictions than not.
Eliezer, I really liked your prayer.
The obviously religious ones like Abigail and Richard aren’t really worth responding to except with general disdain.
To the ones complaining atheism is religious, if you want to see religous atheism read “In Defense of Secular Humanism” by Paul Kurtz, especially “Secular Humanist Manifesto”. I had read it because I liked Kurtz’s skeptical stuff, but it was awful. The Manifesto writers basically just changed their faith from God to faith in the Government. I have seen similar things since, mainly from academics.
The argument about probability 1 and so forth—I use the words certain and impossible regularly to mean the likelihood of something not being true or of being true to be so low as not being worth consideration. I will repeat what I’ve said before, putting arbitrary (spurious) numbers to likelihoods is more likely to result in contradictions than not.