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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is getting way too repetitive. I think I'm done after this, so please try to read this one, since you apparently haven't read the others.

Bottom line - Dawkins creates his own categories to describe himself, so I used his own categories. How is that not fair? But I'm not going to shoe-horn Christians into Dawkins' categories because they make no sense for Christians -- Dawkins' categories make Tea Partiers into the only real Christians and we all know that's wrong.

Have a good night![/quote]

In his own words, he is an atheist, specifically a de facto atheist. That's his category.

I know why this bothers so many people. Theists take a leap of faith to reach our truth. It would be comforting to think the atheist is guilty of an equally unscientific leap, namely to commit the error of inferring the negative conclusion on Gods existence. But they don't.

If there is a smugness to atheists, it is that our belief requires faith, and they reject anything other than reason. Why get defensive about it?  It's true!  You know it, your priest or minister tells you that, and its in the Bible.  If that bothers you then I think you are insecure in your faith.

Lastly you can try to twist Dawkins' words into a redefinition of atheism if you like. But then what is left of the term is meaningless. You will find no atheists to debate, because only a smattering of mentally unbalanced or illiterate people will remain.  And then you will have to pick up where you left off, except with RantingAgnostic, and Agnostic Hitchens, and an Agnostic Dawkins. But you will be debating the same people with the same ideas. And they will not in the least feel thwarted by the idea that you have somehow extracted an admission that they were never 100% certain. Because they never said it to begin with. [/quote]

You've totally missed the big picture, so you're taking yourself and this debate way too seriously. 
(1) This is a minor quibble about *definitions* and how to apply Dawkins' own definitions to himself, and how he applies his own definitions to himself
(2) This is NOT, [size=18]NOT[/size] a debate about the validity of belief or non-belief. I think most of us have no problem with atheists/agnostics per se, or with debating with agnostics/atheists, or with feeling insecure in our faith because of the mere existence of atheists/agnostics. You're making an unfair charge because you're mischaracterizing the discussion which is about mere definitions.
(3) This whole argument started as a silly tussle between several of us and the Ranting Atheist, concerning her smug certainty that she's right about her entitlement to insult believers on the basis of her certainty she's 100% right about everything.  Somebody (not me) challenged her 100% certainty that God does not exist. In other words, it's personal, and it's about taking on a smug bully. You're taking yourself way too seriously, if you think this is all about you and self-righteous defense of peoples' ability to be atheists, because you fail to see that the rest of us are fine with atheists per se, our problem is with the Ranting Atheist as an individual. Yes, some of us like to poke at her, so shoot me and the others. This is and always has been a silly internet spat between several of us and an internet bully who calls herself Ranting Atheist.

But I'll try once again, because I don't get why this is so hard to understand, and I don't think you or the RA are reading Dawkins closely. The whole point is, a de facto atheist is NOT the same as a complete atheist, according to Dawkins' own definition. A de facto atheist acts like there is no god, as opposed to a full atheist who believes 100% that there is no God. Dawkins himself says that the category of "full atheists" is very small. What I don't understand is (a) why you don't want us to use Dawkins' own definition of himself (which you clearly haven't fully absorbed), and (b) why Dawkins seems so afraid to own his own apparent agnosticism. Clearly Dawkins is afraid of the standard, long-standing definition of "agnostic," so instead he leads us through this tortuous semantics game involving de facto and strict atheists, and then he further divides it all up into temporary and permanent agnostics (TAP and PAP) where a temporary agnostic is apparently the same thing as a de facto atheist. It clearly confuses the heck out of the Ranting Atheist and others like you, which is why I end up repeating it so much. And the complexity of Dawkins' definitions gives internet bullies like you and the Ranting Atheist a leg to stand on if they don't read it closely.  Dawkins should just own his agnosticism, and Ranting Atheist should accept that she goes further than Dawkins does.[/quote]

And you are not getting the fact that you do not get to define atheism, any more than I can tell you whether you are really Christian, based on your statistical confidence in your belief.  It's not yours to do.  And in fact, there is one inventor of the word "agnosticism", TH Huxley, and he did not invent the term to lack of 100% certitude, but to deal with the larger question of whether God is knowable at all.

So while it is great that you are interested in understanding how atheists think, it is wrong to define the meaning of a term on behalf of the group that uses it.  You probably would not feel comfortable telling Mormons that they are not Christians, and you shouldn't do it here.[/quote]

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