belief is theism

Beliefs are not necessarily false What you’re saying is that a statement can only be true if you know it to be true. You need to clarify what you mean by ‘knowledge’ here. If you mean absolute knowledge, or 100% certainty, then virtually nothing is true in your view, since absolute knowledge is rarely possible in most serious epistemologies. It is false that only things that can be known are true. If I had said, “you were not holding a rock”, before you had told me you weren’t, that statement would still have been true, even though it was just a belief. I just wouldn’t have known it was true yet. Or are you saying that because it was just a belief at the time, the very act of taking on that belief would have made it false in reality? Would my believing that you didn’t have a rock in your hand magically put a rock in your hand? Furthermore, if something is only true if it is known to be true, we have a strange paradox. We only say we know something once we know it is true, and not the other way around. Under the system you are describing, it would be impossible for any piece of information or for any statement to become knowledge (because it would be impossible to determine that something is true if you didn’t already know it was true), and therefore the only things that would be true are those which you knew were true from birth. This makes learning impossible. Nothing can become known because your system requires you to know it before you know it in order to know it. Responses Pro: “so if your belief that i wasnt holding a rock in my hand was true but you didnt know it, i dont know was true until the point you know i wasnt holding a rock in my hand, and thats when it ceases to be a belief, when its true” Yes, but the belief that you weren’t holding a rock was also still true, even though it wasn’t known factually. Pro: “cause and effect is absolute, if they can not exist without each other, they are the same” You could say they are part of the same system, but you cannot say they are the same. You cause words to appear on a screen with your hands (presumably). The words and your hands are not the same thing. Would you like to argue otherwise? Or did you mean that the abstracted notions of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are the same. Again, they are part of the same system. But given that we rarely find effects that caused themselves, it’s difficult to see in what sense your unsupported assertion that cause and effect could be true. Pro: “information=seperation=god=religion=supernature=false” I think what you’re trying to say is essentially that god is an imaginary mental construct build to hide the separation one feels from the rest of nature and even parts of themselves. Is that somewhat correct? Pro: “atheism is disbelief, there are just 3 positions on any imaginary claim, you can beleive it, disbelieve it , or accept you dont know, negative positive and balance, what are the other options?” The mistake you made in the last round was in thinking that disbelief implies believe in some alternative claim. Disbelief in a god does not imply belief that there is no god any more than your disbelief that I am 9 feet tall implies that you believe I am 6 feet tall. Not knowing, or not forming a belief or opinion, is also a form of disbelief. The negative position with respect to a belief in a god is the lack of belief in a god, not the belief that there is no god. That is a separate proposition. Pro: “disbelief=negative position on my claim=doubt=false belief=positive position on my claim=doubt=false i dont know=balance=certain=true” Again, equating doubt with being ‘false’ is clearly nonsensical. As explained above, this precludes any possibility of gaining knowledge, ever, because anything that you do not know for certain, is wrong, according to this definition. I doubt you actually believe this. This is just one example of how your imprecise and inaccurate usage of language invalidates your own statements. Pro: “as i said positive is anti neagative, and disbelief is the opposite of belief, and the anti theist would be the person that disbelieves the claim that i am holding a rock in my hand, is the one who would argue with the theist that says i am holding a rock in my hand” In this analogy, yes, those would be the positions of the anti-theist and the theist respectively. Both of them have a belief about the state of reality concerning the hypothetical rock in your hand. In Round 2 you said “antitheism=atheism”, suggesting that you believe the atheist takes the same position as the antitheist. Just to reiterate, since you didn’t respond to this point at all, antitheism is a subset of atheism. Atheism also includes many of the people who take the position of “I don’t know”. Pro: “disBelief is belief, how can you believe i am not holding a rock in my hand if you dont have the ability to believe i am holding a rock in my hand” Again, disbelief is not the same as believing that you are holding a rock in your hand. The set of all of those who disbelieve that you have a rock in your hand are those who believe you don’t have a rock in your hand, and those who don’t know (they don’t believe that you do, of course). The set of people who are disbelievers with respect to either statement (you have a rock, or you don’t have a rock), are only the people who take the position that they do not know. Disbelief does not require an alternative belief. So disbelief in the statement that you are holding a rock cannot be equated with belief that you are not holding a rock. And what you state above implies that disbelieving is a form of belief because you have the mere ability to believe in the opposite claim. Do you really believe this? You’ve invalidated your own statements again, since what you say above makes “I don’t know” and invalid and impossible position. Concluding statements Pro leaves us mainly with a host of unsupported assertions and assumptions, incoherent statements without discernible meaning in the English language, and imprecisely phrased statements that almost surely communicate something other than what was intended. The example I picked out in Round 2 illustrates how trivial and meaningless these obfuscations are: Pro acknowledged that when he said, “belief=false, as i have to imagine it know=true i dont know=i have to imagine it=true, unless i know”, what he really meant was, “beliefs are false because they are not knowledge”. Why wasn’t it simply stated in this simple and easy-to-understand form? Pro doesn’t suggest that there is any meaning that is lost in this form; he responds with an enthusiastic confirmation of this interpretation. Put in this simple form, the statement belays no intriguing quality to it. It is simply a naïve and silly statement to make. Perhaps obfuscating the meaning of these simple statements is a way make the statements seem less linear, more multifaceted, and more profound than they really are. But making the statements easily misinterpret able in many ways does not make it non-linear or multifaceted, nor does it make it profound. It just makes for poor communication. Those with something real and important to say generally choose the simplest and most accessible way to say that is available to them. It is common for people to intentionally obfuscate the simple meaning behind their words in order to hide the fact that they have nothing interesting, useful, or intelligent to say. I hope that is not the case here. It may just be a lack of clear thinking and precise communication.