Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ

Last year I had a not-really-friend of mine who wants to be a missionary attempt to convert me to Christianity.

Her opening argument was an attempt to prove to me that God existed by telling me that I haven't yet seen God because he isn't everywhere at once.

It was all downhill from there.

It really doesn't matter what's atheism and what's agnosticism and what's what. What matters is that when a person says, "I'm an atheist," you should be aware that they probably mean, "I don't believe in God but acknowledge the remote possibility he (or any of the various other gods mankind has thought up) could theoretically exist." As long as the meaning is adequately communicated, it doesn't matter what words are used.

Although I have to disagree that agnosticism can't be a meaningful term as an "unsure" sort of thing; I wouldn't call a person an atheist unless they're comfortable assuming in their daily lives that God probably doesn't exist, while the various people who insist on sitting on the fence entirely and treating it as if there's an equal chance of either would not do so and therefore I wouldn't call them atheists. :/

Leafpool said:

Last year I had a not-really-friend of mine who wants to be a missionary attempt to convert me to Christianity.

Her opening argument was an attempt to prove to me that God existed by telling me that I haven't yet seen God because he isn't everywhere at once.

It was all downhill from there.

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I lol'd.

Zeta Reticuli said:

yeah the majority of americans are in the middle and a depressing amount of people seem to believe in that one fallacy (fallacy of compromise or something) where people believe that the answer always lies in the middle of two extremes.

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I'm not sure what you're saying at all, here, Zeta. What are you talking about? It is often said that the truth tends to lie between two extremes, but I wouldn't so much move to discredit this as a fallacy as an overgeneralization. Bell curves are, in fact, a common occurrence in statistics, and it can be a useful thing to remember that.
Really, though what are you trying to say? Because all I see are words, and all I get is a sense of discontent.

nah it's a fallacy, but i forget the name. i'll go look it up later and if i find a nice link. i'll edit this post.

anyway what i'm saying is that i hear all the time stuff like "people are too polarized, either you're a democrat or a republican, conservative or liberal, while really, people just need to compromise and find the truth in the middle ground and everything will be great".

my response to that would be to tell that person to think back to 150 years ago, where the radical left-wing view on the issue of slavery in America would be something like "not only should slavery be illegal, but African-Americans should be granted full rights as citizens and be allowed to marry white people". the radical right-wing view would be to keep slavery around or something (i'm not really a historian). now looking back we can say that the "left-wing" view was absolutely, 100% correct and that they definitely should not have compromised with the other side.

The fallacy is assuming that the middle ground between two extremes is the most favourable option.

EDIT:

wikipedia said:

Argument to moderation (Latin: argumentum ad temperantiam, also known as middle ground, false compromise, gray fallacy and the golden mean fallacy) is a logical fallacy which asserts that any given compromise between two positions must be correct.

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Hilariously, I'm a gay liberal atheist and I'm fucking stupid. My grades currently suck.

Low grades doesn't necessarily mean low intelligence.

I always viewed agnosticism and atheism and two entirely separate things where you could be one, both, or neither. I always thought of agnosticism as saying that we have no way of knowing if god exists and atheism as the lack of belief in a god. So strong atheists (as you've been talking about) would be only atheists, and weak atheists would be both agnostic and atheist. I'm struggling to come up with an example of someone that's purely agnostic my this system. Maybe when you believe there's a better possibility of a god (like opal's second scale in her essay), you start to fade into agnosticism? I'm really not sure.

Also, what would you be called if you believed in some higher power but didn't know what it was? I've had a few friends follow that and identify as agnostic, but I don't think that's really correct.