Hi All, Just got back from Lunacon (a NY Sci-Fi Convention) and here’s what happened:1) I met up with Charles Pellegrino, who helped find the “Jesus Family Tomb”. He seems intelligent and quite sane — and has a bone fragment which really appears to have belonged to a Jesus, brother of James, Son of Joseph, and husband to Mary Magdalene. Interesting stuff. Perhaps an historical Jesus didn’t ascend bodily into Heaven, huh?2) A fact came out that Some chimpanzees are actually shaping sticks and rocks to get more food — ushering them into their own “stone age”3) ALL the atheist literature I put out was slowly but completely taken by the client?le.4) We use 10% of our brains, and 93.7% of our asses.5) I am officially too old to stay out partying until 3am. Sure, I’ll do it again next weekend at the American Atheists convention — just don’t look to me for brilliance at the early events.
I’m saying that all issues (except for possibly the existence question), the default atheist position would be null. For non-computer geeks, null is the equivalent of “no answer”.
So, for example, the default atheist position on secularism vs. theocracy would be nothing. You could have atheists who believes in a secular government. You could have a few who believe were still better off with a theocracy. Or perhaps one believes that all religions should be suppressed. Again, the default position is “no position”.
Phreedm incorrectly states that because atheists don’t believe human rights come from a creator, atheists must therefore believe the rights comes from the state.
Alatham offers up society as the source. I could offer up “man”, in the sense that “man” itself is the creator of human rights. These people have collectively dictated to our state what those rights should be.
Or whatever.
Don’t get too tied up in that rambling. The point I was simply trying to make is that atheists don’t have default positions on anything.
Except the FSM question, perhaps. All atheists agree on that one, right?
I’ve noticed he has a habit of telling us what we believe.
We all believe in creation. So say we all!
AOL,
I agree with you here. But I did qualify my statement by saying that atheists who agree with the principals of democracy believe that Rights come from society.
That said, I now believe I was wrong to say that because I can imagine someone who agrees with democracy and still thinks that rights come from some other place (perhaps they’re currently hard-wired into the average person’s DNA, for instance).
I could have left the word “atheists” out of my statement and it would still be just as wrong because I think I was wrong about the nature of democracy, not because my statement had anything to do with atheism (as you and I agree).
AOL
OK. Thanks for the clarification.
Ramen
On the question of the origin of rights I would say this. Define “origin” and “rights”.
Comment from: Angel_Of_Light
I’m saying that all issues (except for possibly the existence question), the default atheist position would be null. For non-computer geeks, null is the equivalent of “no answer”.
Maybe that’s why this comes so easily for me – as a computer geek, I have had to correct code that treated null (no answer) and zero (answer : nothing) as the same, and then blew up when it received null instead of zero.
New (to me!) hypothesis:
Christians have not coded their internal software to notice the difference – because both zero and null create the same errors in their systems (the only acceptable answers to christians do not include ‘atheism’ and ‘agnosticism’). This might also help explain why they are so resistant to any software upgrades in this area.
Tom
Interesting hypothesis. Maybe its a hardware rather than software problem.
So Dave goes to Sci-FICTION convention, to hang out with people who love FICTION stories about technology beyond our own and then wants to tell us what he learned at a FICTION convention.
You might as well boast about what you learned while playing Dungeons and Dragons. D&D, that ties right in to the Aims & Purposes of American Atheists just like Science FICTION conventions. Please dedicate a blog entry about what you learned at the restroom at a NJ Turnpike rest stop area – it will be just as relevant.
And does Dave dress up like Spock, ears and all when he goes to these conventions?
SecularMan,
Here’s a video from the convention. Wow, Dave looks like John Lovitz!
http://www.123video.nl/playvideos.asp?MovieID=139313
Hehe.