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ValiantDancer,

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Actually, the case could be made from Bible passages that God is not just. For instance, in the old testament the
punishment for disobedient children, rapist, and rape victims are all death by stoning. Rape victims? This is just?

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The Bible clearly describes God as loving and just, and just as clearly describes divine actions that are unloving and unjust, such as those you've mentioned above, or those I've mentioned above (damning people to eternal suffering). Either way we can formulate arguments against the existence of God from the formal contradictions thus entailed. It seems we are in vehement agreement on this matter.


"Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione."

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Actually, the case could be made from Bible passages that God is not just. For instance, in the old testament the
punishment for disobedient children, rapist, and rape victims are all death by stoning. Rape victims? This is just?

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The Bible clearly describes God as loving and just, and just as clearly describes divine actions that are unloving and unjust, such as those you've mentioned above, or those I've mentioned above (damning people to eternal suffering). Either way we can formulate arguments against the existence of God from the formal contradictions thus entailed. It seems we are in vehement agreement on this matter.

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Although in the New Testament, God is referred to a loving and just, the Old Testament has instances where unjust actions are prescribed as punishment. Your jump to "God does not exist" is hasty. It is the contention of some Biblical scholars and independent scholars that the God of the Old Testament was a different God (or different acting God) than that of the New Testament. The "Angry Hill God" of the Old Testament destroyed the towns of Sodom and Gomorra, claimed that stoning to death was an acceptable punishment for minor infractions, and otherwise was a fickle and moody God. In the New Testament, God seems to have taken a more "hands off" approach. These are the tenants of Christianity. I am not a Christian. I was at one time, but the differences I saw in the Bible versus what was preached on the pulpit turned me away from it. It didn't seem right to me or for me. I started searching for something a little more "right". What I found was a religion that was most right for me. Christianity is still most "right" for quite a few people. Making the jump from "God is loving and just" to the application of "His" laws to "God does not exist" from the writings of a heavily edited document is difficult. When looking at a religion, one must look at the dogmas that the practitioner of the religion subscribes to. Looking at the tenants of religion as absolutes is not entirely correct.

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Unfortunately, we continue to disagree on the proper use of terminology. ...which explains the usage of "positive" (aka "hard" or "strong") atheism and "negative" (aka "weak" or "soft" atheism) by some of the most prominent atheist writers alive today, citing several primary sources.

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ValiantDancer,

Hello again.

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Although in the New Testament, God is referred to a loving and just, the Old Testament has instances where unjust actions are prescribed as punishment. Your jump to "God does not exist" is hasty. It is the contention of some Biblical scholars and independent scholars that the God of the Old Testament was a different God (or different acting God) than that of the New Testament. The "Angry Hill God" of the Old Testament destroyed the towns of Sodom and Gomorra, claimed that stoning to death was an acceptable punishment for minor infractions, and otherwise was a fickle and moody God. In the New Testament, God seems to have taken a more "hands off" approach. These are the tenants of Christianity. I am not a Christian. I was at one time, but the differences I saw in the Bible versus what was preached on the pulpit turned me away from it. It didn't seem right to me or for me. I started searching for something a little more "right". What I found was a religion that was most right for me. Christianity is still most "right" for quite a few people. Making the jump from "God is loving and just" to the application of "His" laws to "God does not exist" from the writings of a heavily edited document is difficult. When looking at a religion, one must look at the dogmas that the practitioner of the religion subscribes to. Looking at the tenants of religion as absolutes is not entirely correct.

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I am not treating dogmas as absolutes, am I addressing only the God of the Bible, who is called loving and just but acts otherwise. That is the self-contradictory God that cannot exist. Does this make sense? Do you still think I am being hasty?

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The idea that God must be loving and just. The actions in the Bible prove only that the perception of God ranges from loving and just to indifferent and unjust. In very few places does God speak to mortals in the Bible. Those are usually without benefit of witnesses or verification. (Such is faith.) After God is cliamed to have said the it is loving and just, God reportedly stops interfering in the works of man directly. Believing that God must have thought that way before hand is post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. Since the reported actions of God change from the Old to New Testaments, unless one believes in a static, unchanging God then the idea of God can change how he operates is valid. The idea of God being absolute and unchangable tends to be the perview of Bible literalists.

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Unfortunately, we continue to disagree on the proper use of terminology. ...which explains the usage of "positive" (aka "hard" or "strong") atheism and "negative" (aka "weak" or "soft" atheism) by some of the most prominent atheist writers alive today, citing several primary sources.

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I'm not sure that I would go to Michael Martin if I were appealing to authority or infidels.org.

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Atheists do not always assert that God does not exist. There are two broad categories of atheism - "Positive" (or "strong" or "hard") atheism and "Negative" (or "weak" or "soft") atheism. A "Positive atheist" will say "God X does not exist", whereas a "Negative atheist" will say "I do not believe God X does exist" - there is a subtle but important difference.

Some agnostics may also be considered "negative atheists", as they are not theists (there is an overlap between agnosticism and weak atheism). Agnostics (it means "without knowledge") consider the question of God to be unanswerable - there may be a God, or there may not, but we have no way of ever determining the truth of the matter. Occasionally atheists will refer to themselves as agnostics - the term is often more socially acceptable in a strongly religious region, as some theists have an extremely negative view of atheism.
Depending on the definition of the God in question, the atheist may be either "positive" or "negative". Many theists will also have the same reaction towards the deities of other religions. For example, if you give a self-contradictory definition of your God, I will say that it certainly does not exist (like a square circle), but if some group on the other side of the world has a God that I have never even heard of, I am still atheistic towards it as I simply have no belief in it. In that sense, many Christians are also atheists - they just believe in one more God than I do.

In the strictest sense, atheism is simply the absence of belief in a being described in the above terms. An atheist does not necessarily claim that the statement "God exists" is false, only that there is no reason to accept it as true - to actually believe it. In popular usage, a person who holds such a position is often referred to as an agnostic or negative atheist. Those atheists who assert that "God exists" is a false statement are positive atheists, or in more common usage, just atheists. Of course, one can be absent belief in God for rational or irrational reasons. Individuals absent belief for any reason are technically atheists, which raises an important point: since atheism is not a body of beliefs, but the absence of particular beliefs, atheists (in this most general definition) shouldn't be expected to have anything more in common with each other than, say, people who don't believe in little green elves. The editors of this magazine, unless otherwise noted, use "atheism" to refer only to reason-based atheism, or so-called critical atheism (whether positive atheism or negative atheism).

Many (if not most) contemporary defenders of atheism as a philosophical position define it as non-belief in gods. Antony Flew...George H. Smith, ...Gordon Stein. The organization of American Atheists also accepts this definition (in the pamphlets "American Atheists: An Introduction" and "American Atheists: A History").

Further, the Internet Infidels (the largest self-identified atheistic organization on the 'net) and all of the atheism newsgroups use this definition of atheism. There are over a thousand atheists on the alt.atheism atheist list, the vast majority of which will testify to this definition. If we are having a discussion on Usenet about atheism, then this definition should be used unless otherwise stated.

The explicit distinction between "weak atheism" and "strong atheism" is of relatively recent origin, mostly in response to the popular assumption that those who call themselves atheists must believe that there are no gods. The particular terminology to make the distinction may vary, perhaps because the tags sound a little corny, perhaps because the distinction is not that important. But the broad definition of atheism as one who doesn't believe in any god is a well-grounded usage.

The theologian Paul Edwards recognizes the distinction (without the titles): "First, there is the familiar sense in which a person is an atheist if he maintains that there is no God, where this is taken to mean that 'God exists' expresses a *false* proposition. Secondly, there is a broader sense in which a person is an atheist if he *rejects* belief in God, regardless of whether his rejection is based on the view that belief in God is *false*." (_Religious Experience and Truth_, pp. 241-242)

Michael Martin describes the difference as follows (_Atheism: A Philosophical Justification_): "Still there is a popular meaning of 'atheism' according to which an atheist not simply holds no belief in the existence of a god or gods but believes that there is no god or gods. This use of the term should not be overlooked. To avoid confusion, let us call this *positive atheism*, and the type of atheism derived from the Greek root and held by the atheistic thinkers surveyed above let us call *negative atheism*. Clearly, positive atheism is a special case of negative atheism: Someone who is a positive atheist is by necessity a negative atheist, but not
conversely."

Similarly, the alt.atheism FAQ uses the terminology of "weak atheism" and "strong atheism." This has become part of the jargon of Usenet, although I am not certain of its specific origin. Because this is the terminology that is in currency (instead of "negative" and "positive" or whatever), it is wise to simply accept this as the way words are used here.

Just understand that when you are reading anything from American Atheists, or United States Atheists the meaning that they ascribe to the terms are the ones I have parroted. They are what are in common usage.

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I am not treating dogmas as absolutes, am I addressing only the God of the Bible, who is called loving and just but acts otherwise. That is the self-contradictory God that cannot exist. Does this make sense? Do you still think I am being hasty?

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In this case, when referring to the Bible, one must be mindful that it is actually two documents jammed together and heavily edited. Therefore, the source has been compromised through conflicts within itself. There have been no recorded, non-anecdotal, verifiable events to say whether God is just or not. There are accounts by people (some of which are recorded in the Bible) of ideas of what God does and says.

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Evidently the Microsoft(r) Encarta(r) Encyclopedia had no such doubts about Martin:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/index.shtml

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Some philosophers, when describing the strong definition, use the term positive atheism. [21] This is not the same sense in which Positive Atheism Magazine uses the term (rather, the same letter sequence, as that is the only similarity between the two). Therefore, in order to avoid confusion in this respect, we stick to using the terms weak definition and strong definition when discussing atheism itself. We use the terms weak position and strong position when describing an individual's position.

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Evidently the Microsoft(r) Encarta(r) Encyclopedia had no such doubts about Martin:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/martin.htm

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Positive Atheism is not the web site that you would want to use to make your point.

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