Thursday, April 29, 2021

We Say Believing When We Mean to Say Saying

The underlying bizarre quality of a supposed dialog between theism and atheism has been dealt with by many people before, so I suppose I am not adding much to the matter.  For my part, I would state that theism--baldly described--is the belief in something that cannot be defined and is therefore neither falsifiable nor (perhaps more importantly) attached by necessity to any particular description.  Atheism is the denial of belief in something that cannot be defined and is therefore neither falsifiable nor (perhaps more importantly) attached by necessity to any particular description.

Inescapably, any argument between theism and atheism is an argument about the existence of a conceptualized deity, not an argument about the existence of deity itself.

We can call each other's statements about the ultimate of deity "sentiments" (and therefore not amenable to rational analysis) or we can call each other's statements about the ultimate of deity statements that describe the deity (and therefore arguments about each other's conceptions of deity) not addressing the core matter itself.

Or, as I would suggest, we can conceive of statements about the bare issue of theism versus atheism not as statements of sentiment or of belief, but rather as prefatory statements--they can bear no other burden.  "I am a theist" or "I am an atheist" are not statements of belief, but rather introductions.  "I am a theist" or "I am an atheist" are prefatory statements, no more useful in an argument than name tags at a convention--that is to say, perhaps very useful, but only as they presage a real dialectic.

A theist is a person who says "I am a theist."  An atheist is a person who says "I am an atheist."  And then we can begin.

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