JWeinCom said:
It's strange that I'm asking you very clear and straightforward questions to clarify your position, and you refuse to answer. Which may be the reason why this is going nowhere. And, reductio ad absurdum is a well regarded form of argumentation. Essentially designed to attack positions that are overly broad or ill defined... like this one.
I thought my argument was quite clear, but if not, I'll restate it.
You've said that you believe pigs qualify as atheists. However you presented a definition that would exclude them.
So, what are your qualifiers for what should or should not be considered an atheist?
For my part I would say an atheist has to...
1. Be a person.
2. Have the capability to hold a position regarding the proposition "a god or gods exist".
3. Hold the position of atheism (holds the position that the proposition has not been shown to be true).
This is a clean cut criteria that includes everything I think we are really talking about when we talk about atheists, and excludes everything that we do not.
So, can you create a criteria that would include pigs and babies, while excluding ants? And if so, why should we use a definition of atheist that includes pigs, when we are really never considering pigs when we discuss atheists?
That depends on how we agree to define non-gamer.
We can definitely define the term non-gamer in such a way that would include cactus. However, the question I'm posing is does it make sense to use such a definition?
If we are using the term non-gamer, what are we really trying to convey? I'd imagine we are always trying to convey the idea of a person who does not play video video games. If this is what we mean when we say non-gamer, we should construct the definition in such a way that it includes people who don't play video games, and only includes that group. A definition that could apply to cacti would be too broad, and would include things in the category of non-gamer that we really don't mean to include
Let me put it this way. Me and you want to perform an academic study on atheists in the United States. In an academic paper we would have to define atheist in such a way that it would apply to every member of our population (everything that we want to consider an atheist in the US) and would not apply to anything outside of that population.
Would you want the 70 million or so pigs in the US to be counted as part of the population for our study? I would say no. So, we would need to define the term in such a way to exclude them.
Do we really want babies counted as part of our atheist population? That's more of a gray area, but I'd probably say no.
To sum it up, I'm trying to get at what we REALLY want to talk about when we use the term atheist. We should use a definition that clearly defines what we are really talking about. And when we use the term atheist I'm 100% sure we never really want to talk about pigs. And I'm pretty sure we almost never really want to talk about babies either. So we need a definition that recognizes that distinction.
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