Which in turn implies it is not the case that you believe it rains in Johannesburg, right?
But then I could equally, and simultaneously, believe that it doesn’t rain in Johannesburg (or is not raining, whatever the right formulation is fit this example) which seems odd!
I have some difficulty using factual things as analogy for things that are a matter of belief. I realise that “believers” or “atheists” probably see things as facts that I would consider to be beliefs but I feel it’s fairly clear that something like rain in Johannesburg can be resolved one way or another with some evidence gathering, whereas beliefs cannot. Like I don’t expect it can ever be resolved that cats are better than dogs or vice versa. Those are beliefs rather than facts.
1 Like
So, then we could replace “rains in Johannesburg” with “snows in Fiji”.
I could reasonably believe it is not snowing in Fiji, because it never has snowed in Fiji before and I have no reason to believe that has suddenly changed. Yet, I do not know whether it is snowing in Fiji without some actual evidence gathering, so it is still a belief.
On the other hand, I cannot reasonably believe it is not raining in Johannesburg (or oppositely believe that it is raining), because it does rain in Johannesburg sometimes, and sometimes it does not. I cannot believe either without having any evidence, despite there being a factual truth. But in case of snow in Fiji, I can believe that it does not snow even without having knowledge of the factual truth.
2 Likes
I suppose that many beleivers would at some point revert to responses like “God works in mysterious ways”, or “asking endless questions means you’re not a true believer”. In other words, believers are expected to be prepared to make some “leaps of faith”. It’s just one of the challenges you need to face as a believer.
In that example, if someone would ask me if I believe it’s raining in Johannesburg, I would not respond by “yes” or “no”. I would say “I don’t know”.
If someone was asking if I believe it’s raining in the Sahara, I would say “probably not”.
If someone was asking if I believe it’s raining on the Sun or the Moon, I would say “no”.
3 Likes
But the “I don’t know” is exactly the point I’m making.
If you don’t know, then it is not the case that you believe one way or the other. So that is different from believing that it is not raining.
An atheist is like a person who believes it is not raining.
An agnost is like a person who answers “I don’t know”, that is, a person who does not believe one way and does not believe the other way either.
3 Likes
OK, but to me the question “do you believe god does not exist” (yes) vs “do you not believe god exists” (yes), is more like asking “do you believe it is not raining on the Moon” (yes) vs “do you not believe it is raining on the Moon” (yes), than asking “do you believe it is not raining in Johannesburg” (I don’t know) vs “do you not believe it is raining in Johannesburg” (I don’t know).
So, do you mean that you do not know whether you believe it is raining in Johannesburg?
I think you are answering a different question that the one that is technically asked, namely.
What if the conversation goes like this:
“Do you believe it is raining in Johannesburg?”
“I don’t know”
“Yes, I know that you do not know it, but do you believe that it is raining in Johannesburg?”
Then how would you answer?
3 Likes
“At the moment I hold no belief to one way or another.” I suppose you’d take that as a “no”. I think I’m getting where you’re coming from though.
2 Likes
Exactly. And that is what I consider an important distinction when defining atheism. It is not just the lack of a belief either way, but rather it is a rejection of the existence of a God.
6 Likes
Oh, that’s fine for normal people/believers, but when you are a “religion class teacher” (it is a class in middle and high school - so six years of that in formal education) or a “Sunday school teacher”, you cannot cop out like that. It is your job to, at least try, to answer. 
And I made sure I counted as a challenge for them, too hehe.
Seriously, the only reason they didn’t toss me out is that I am not trolling with all those questions and probings. I’ve genuingly given them a lot of thought and I really wanted to get to the bottom of that and they could tell.
Alas, for some things, there just don’t seem to be any reasonable answers because theology is, in a sense, like trying to apply a delicate nylon wrapping around and expanding ballon. Once you stretch it to cover one side, another one rips out. Almost every answer leads to more questions.
Here is my favorite example of that: “How do we get to Heaven?” That seems to be the “million dollar question” for most believers, especially as they grow older.
The Bible and the dogma says “by faith and works/deeds”. Fine. So I asked the teacher:
– God is fair, right?
– Yeeees. (she knew that something was coming)
– So, how are all those people that never heard the gospel or about Jesus going to get judged? They should get a chance to go to Heaven too, right? It is not their fault that they were born away from this part of the world and in times where there was no TV or world-wide communications. Hundreds of millions of people in various continents through millenia cannot automatically go to hell, because they were just “born elsewhere”.
– Well, those will get judged by the merit of their hearts alone, so by deeds. You are correct. You can’t expect God to demand faith from them since they couldn’t know about the Gospel. That wouldn’t be fair.
– If that is so, then that’s unfair, too. Unfair to us in this case! Now we are the unlucky ones that were born close to where Jesus lived, therefore instead of being blessed by His teachings, we are now burdened by God’s extra demands of fealty. If what you said is right, it can actually be argued that this class right now is impairing our chances to get to Heaven and the less we know about Jesus, then the more lenient God will be in His judgement!
Yeah, she did try to get out of that one.
However, it is impossible. 
Stretch one way, and the unfairness falls on one group. Stretch the other way and now the unfairness just goes elsewhere.
3 Likes
I’d say that mostly I lack a belief in a god or gods. But besides that I feel fairly certain that the god of the Bible or the Quran does not exist. So mostly atheist I think, but it doesn’t matter much to me if the “atheist” or “agnostic” label fits better. I’m not anti-theist.
1 Like
My primary and secondary education during the 70s and 80s was in protestant schools. I have also attended Sunday school for a few years in the mid-70s (because my mother was fed up with me and my brother fighting during church service).
In Sunday school we were mostly kept occupied with crafting shoe-box dioramas of biblical events.
But in secondary education (prep school) I had some interesting encounters with some of my physics and biology teachers, who were steadfast young-earth creationists. They were actual academics in those topics, and cosmology and evolution were obligatory topics in prep school, so they would teach about it, but they would also say that’s all nonsense and spend a lot of time on how young-earth creationists explain (away) scientific findings like dinosaur fossils and cosmological redshift. This triggered me to go to the public library regularly and find out more about actual science.
I remember us taking advantage of their zeal by at the start of a class asking about topics like homosexuality, racism or abortion, so the whole lesson would get wasted by them talking about that tangent.
3 Likes
I think the confusion ultimately comes down to how language is often informally used, and how this sort of conversation would almost never occur in natural situations.
Most people would interpret the first question as simply “Is it raining in Johannesburg?” and answer accordingly, using something like “I don’t know” to express uncertainty, and using “yes” or “no” to indicate (with certainty) about the status of rain.
However, @Vsotvep is intending for the question to be interpreted as “Do you hold a firm belief about whether or not it is raining in Johannesburg?”, which is really a different question about one’s state of mind, in terms of one’s certainty about the status of rain. This formal interpretation of the question feels unnatural, since it goes against our normal expectations about conversations relating to the weather.
Consider, for example, what is really being asked, implied, and left unsaid, when one asks “How about that weather?”
Further, an agnostic person might simply say “I’m unsure about the existence of God” rather than the more awkward (though formally precise) “I do not firmly believe in the existence of God and I do not firmly believe in the non-existence of God”.
On the other hand, a politician, when asked a tricky, direct question, might instead answer with calculated misdirection, like “I do not believe that any [impropriety] existed…”
4 Likes
Speaking for myself, I hate small talk, so I personally only utter that phrase when carefully embarking upon a probing inquisition to interrogate whether or not someone holds any devout beliefs about the status of precipitation in a particular South African city.
3 Likes
I was a lot like this in high school (12-18), as I was transitioning from atheist to agnostic.
I became a little less argumentative after I met Jesus and Holy Spirit as my priorities shifted, but I still enjoy a deep debate with people arguing in good faith, when I have the energy for it these days trying to answer just my own kids’ questions is draining enough haha
6 Likes
Only if you want it to be. If you are settled in your mind that there is no answer, then you will always find a counter.
There is an objective truth, even if it is hard to find. It may also not always be the same for everyone. When you have multiple children, or if you prefer students, you love them all uniquely based on their needs and interests. If God treated everyone exactly the same, this would not be loving.
2 Likes
Again it is not settling that precludes an answer, but actually digging deeper. 
The discussion didn’t end there, it took us more than 30+ minutes and a couple of others chipped in too (just like @gennan mentioned we were very keen to take advantage of the teacher’s zest to make the formal part of the lesson go away. We 3-4 people that liked to discuss such things got a nice discussion and the other 20+ students got a nice 45 minutes off 
).
The next step was that she tried to counter saying that “we might have the extra requirement of faith, but it is a minor inconvenience compared to receiving the gospel, learning about the divinity of Jesus and getting to know what God wants.”
Then we are back to being unfair to other people since we are modeling our ethics and our societies based - even loosely - on the religious ethics and edicts of Christianity, while other people were born in societies that had no such changes? What are the chances that God would consider “good” someone that was born an Aztec and their religion told them that they must capture and sacrifice people to Coetzalcoatl every X months/years or else the sun would go dark? (I used to know the exact times when I was a kid, I don’t remember any more). Why would God not inform every people on the planet about the gospel and give everyone the knowledge of what God, well, wants?
Then she had to swift to something along the lines of what you said, that God loves everyone and that whatever judgement will be adjusted relative to the ethics of that society and provisions will be made for people that had to grow up in societies with different ethics.
Then we are back to the unfairness towards us, since the other people get to actually skew God’s judgement, by imposing the filter of their own self-made ethics, which would have to at least partially supercede the divine ethics of God’s judgement.
and so on and so on and so on… 
I know many such cases and I totally agree that not only it happens, but this is actually the norm…
In which case I wouldn’t mind the church saying that we believe in a loving God, but skipping the fair one. They can’t have everything
The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.
I didn’t look it up yet, but does the bible actually claim God is “fair”? Just, certainly, but how are you defining “fair”?
4 Likes
I agree with many religious teachings about morals and ethics, but I question the proposed reason.
Should people avoid hurting other people because they believe it’s the will of a godly being? I’d answer with “No, people should avoid hurting other people because it’s a necessary principle for a happy society (just to name one of many reasons).”
If we accept that, then the question of morals and the belief of existence of god(s) are rather independent.
4 Likes
For myself, I’d say this is true. If I would believe in the divine existence of Jezus, Jahweh and the Holy Spirit, it would not change my life stance or ethics/morals much. You might then call it religious humanism rather than secular humanism, but I don’t think there is all that much difference in practice.
I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t suddenly turn into a young-earth creationist and/or a fundamentalist evangelical Christian. That sort of change would have required a completely different upbringing.
4 Likes