You don’t really believe that. You don’t. I could come up with examples to prove my point, but so could you if you’d think about it.

Barry
http://penitentatheist.blogspot.com

It is fun to play with words. What you quickly realize is that a lot of very common words don’t really make much sense if you think about it too strictly.

Yeah, the argument from etymology. Damned frustrating isn’t it? What is even more frustrating is that the faithful, some of them anyway, will accuse me of playing with words. I speak from experience. Its happened before.

Gotta love Chaucer. He’s a big backhanded slap in the face of every English teacher I’ve ever known (well, except the English teacher who was technically a linguist).

Christian means “little Christ.” This means that Jesus Christ must have been a person taller (or maybe maybe obese) than average. Since the average physical size of human beings has increased over the last few centuries (millennia) this means that there are very few, if any Christians living today.

See today’s posting on my blog for some differences between “disbelief in God” and “lack of belief in God.”

Chaucer (at least) once even used a quadruple negative (he described the Knight as “a very parfait gentil Knight, who never yet no villanie ne said unto no manner wight”)! Whenever anyone tells me “double negatives” cancel out, I ask them if that means they accept triple negatives, which don’t. Language isn’t logic (or logical, for that matter).

Which both contribute to the problem with the word “believe”. We commonly use it to mean “acknowledge the existence of but reject the utility or benefit of”, as in “I don’t believe in pre-marital sex” or “I don’t believe in teenage drinking” or, as reporters said with straight faces during the Amish school shooting incident, “The Amish don’t believe in cell phones or helicopters.” Cripes, of course we, and they, do, if “not believing in” means “thinking it doesn’t exist”. But we have no trouble understanding what “the Amish don’t believe in cell phones” MEANS. But the religious - like Kennedy - seem to interpret “I don’t believe in God” as having only the one meaning (I accept that God exists but deny its benefit or usefulness).

I haven’t seen it, but this bit of reasoning is so amateurish that I’m not surprised.

Thanks for dropping by.

It is funny how many times I’ve heard an unbeliever ask for evidence. Most of my own conversations with the faithful begin with that simple question. I too always get nonsense as an answer.

Atheism isn’t the grand universal negative he claims it to be. It is a statement about evidence.

Yes, and a statement about the absence of evidence for a proposition and therefore not even a statement about belief and not even a negative statement. We’re simply saying, “hey, you say there’s a god? Show me.”

The bluff we get in the form of “no, god is self-evident and your doubt is incoherent” may be one of the most obvious tells in the game.

The reader can take it from here, as deconstructions of the concept of intangible presence, agency, unbounded fields of action, infinite knowledge, etc., would take up a good few pages…