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Comment by std_throwawayay | Hacker News Reader

Atheism also seems to wrongly be a catch-all for things like Agnosticism which is nothing like Atheism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

"Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable. An agnostic can also be one who holds neither of two opposing positions on a topic."

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Atheism is the "lack of a belief in God". It's not the belief that there is no God, it's the lack of a belief that there is one. All agnostics are also atheists.

It seems to depend on the definition you use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

"Atheism is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which, in its most general form, is the belief that at least one deity exists."

You're conflating belief and knowledge. Agnosticism has to do with epistemic access to God – that is, knowability. One can deny knowability while having a belief in God, and therefore being a theist. It just requires acknowledging that one's belief is and always will be unfounded – a matter of faith.

Just so. If you're give a postulate with no evidence for or against it - do you believe it?

(Implying that you meant to write "given" instead of "give".)

Of course not. Absence of belief is not belief in absence. If "not believing in something" were an active task, I'd be busy all day not-believing in trillions of bizarre things.

I basically assume that when someone makes a statement about atheism, they're actually talking about agnosticism. Those who claim to be atheists are hostile to being told their beliefs actually represent agnosticism, and when providing them a link to this article[1], they have claimed the author is wrong. That is an indicator that most participants in discussions of atheism have not spent a lot of time studying the subject formally (which is probably the rational choice).

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/

I'm not sure what kind of agenda that author has, but that's a pretty bogus argument.

Using his argument, the two very different words "amoral" and "immoral" would mean the same thing.

The majority of self-described athiests that I know are global athiests under some variation of the Ockham's Razor argument of section 5 of that.

The particular example of intelligent life in another galaxy is rather odd, since we actually do have reasons to believe such life exists inasmuch as we have pretty good ideas about how life came about on earth and a lot of evidence that similar conditions should exist elsewhere.

I would get annoyed because of all the labeling. It is unnecessary.

There is no name for lack of belief in invisible aliens in my garage.

"hostile" - Again, with the attempt to paint atheists as ignorant and violent simply by insisting that they themselves know their own beliefs or lack of belief in a higher power.

You can call it whatever you want if it makes you feel better. It won't change that person's belief (or lack thereof) though.

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