Evo said:
brainstom, you really need to stop imposing your personal beliefs upon others. You can say "I feel this way", but please stop guessing what other people think, ok? Let others say what they think.
People can say whatever they want, and it is impossible to ultimately PROVE that they are being dishonest, if in fact they are. I can, however, hypothesize that someone who is claiming to simply not to believe, i.e. in contrast to actively rejecting, is choosing to frame their rejection in that way to avoid admitting rejection for whatever reason. The reason I hypothesize this is not because I have some personal desire to prove people are theist. It is because I think it obfuscates fully understanding atheism to deny the strong role of religious exposure and knowledge of theism in a-theism or anti-theism. In other words, if people hadn't been exposed to theist ideas and religion in some form, directly or indirectly, how could they even comprehend the idea of a-theism or anti-theism? You have to have some meaning for an idea to reject its existence. If I asked if you believed in flunstles, you would have to ask what they are before answering. If I told you they were subatomic particles 300 levels smaller than quarks, you would begin to have an idea of what they mean in order to accept or reject the possibility of their existence based on whatever reasoning you chose to apply.
Similarly, if you look at God as a physical being, you can reason that S/He/It doesn't exist in terms of physical plausibility. If someone tells you that God doesn't have to exist physically to exist spiritually, you could reason that spiritual things don't exist relative to physical materiality, and only physical existence counts as existence, therefore God doesn't exist. If someone then said that God exists as a subjective belief in the psyche of people who have been exposed to the notion of God, would you still be able to deny God's existence as a facet of human subjectivity? I can't, but it depends on your reasoning process and how you define "existence" and "non-existence."
Nevertheless, my point is that people who deny the existence of subjective experiences of things without any physical referent are fixated on physical/material existence and deny that knowledge of subjective experience is also a form of knowledge. I can know that unicorns don't exist the same way that horses do, physically, but I also know that I have more subjective knowledge of unicorns than I do of flunstles, because I just made up that word two minutes ago. Physically, it may be more likely that particles 300 orders smaller than quarks exist than that unicorns do. Yet it is easier for me to deny the existence of flunstles as a subjective artifact because I have never seen any representation of them beyond this post, whereas I have seen countless depictions and accounts about unicorns throughout my life. Therefore, I conclude that unicorns exist more substantially in human subjectivity than flunstles, and the same is true of God. So unless someone has heard less about God and religion than I have about unicorns, I have a very hard time believing that their atheism or anti-theism doesn't involve a significant amount renunciation of subjective knowledge they have indeed been exposed to, either directly or indirectly.
