Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

[JWeinCom]

Zoombael said:

Pemalite said:

Amusing... But not exactly a constructive addition to the thread.

I could have probably phrased it a little better.
But with 1.5~ Billion Muslims, 2.10~ Billion Christians, 15~ millions Jewish today looking for an answer to whether their Middle-Eastern, Abrahamic God exists... And we have nothing. Nada. Nil. Zilch.

That's not to say that their God couldn't exist... It's just, how many more millennia are we going to allow them to find an answer whilst a large portion of Theists deny basic scientific facts like Evolution, Big Bang, Natural Selection and so on?

Now you are almost catching on.
However... Atheism isn't a belief, it is the default position.

It's neither a belief nor disbelief in God.

Science doesn't include God either.
Whether there is life on other planets neither proves or disproves that a God exists.

To the first quote: Atheism in the widest (and seldomly used) sense, but that isnt the position the atheists participating in this debate are representing, or is it? You want it to be looked at as the natural, unaltered, untainted state of mind, therefore superior to any kind of god-belief. That is why wrote: everything is "indoctrinated", and this does include your kind of atheism.

 

Nevertheless, even in the widest sence i dont deem Atheism the same as a "blank slate".

 

Secondly: You completely missed the point. Exclude in the sense of having eliminated the possibility of existence of "divine power". Followed by an example of how incapable we actually still are... not being to figure out if there is life on the other side of Milkyway... or the moon Europa... 

Most atheists I know, and pretty much all that I've seen in this topic, take atheist to simply mean not believing in a god. I would actually describe it as anyone who is not a theist.  I would personally not consider babies, because I think for one to count they need to be capable of evaluating the idea.  Otherwise we get to silly positions like a pig is an atheist.

But the second point shows that you are misrepresenting (I'm assuming unintentionally) what people here mean by atheist.

I would consider someone who says "I don't know" as an atheist.  Because anyone who does not believe that god exists, whether they are certain or not, is not a theist.  And would therefore have to be an atheist, as those two categories form a true dichotomy.  

To sum it up, everyone capable of understanding the concept of god has to be a theist or an atheist. If they're not a theist, they're an atheist.