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Just saw the the following quote: "We're all atheists to some degree; the (absolute) atheist just believes in one fewer gods than the monotheists."

Wallace 7 Feb 18
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0

Many may muse there's no difference between monogamy and bigamy in that they both imply one too many and the same applies to atheism and theism.

Such a fine apotheosis, if you give me the wool I'll knit one for you too.

And other jokes older than anyone here.

2

I’m not any part of an atheist. I believe all the gods exist, in the way that gods do exist - as personifications of abstract ideals.

skado Level 9 Feb 19, 2022

Interesting connection you make to biblical text.

Personification - the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

Abstract ideas refers to the ideas which are not concerned with worldly things. They are the things that you cannot touch but you can feel them.Jun 14, 2016
[socratic.org] › questions › wh...
What is an abstract idea? | Socratic

A meme (/miːm/ MEEM)[1][2][3] is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[5]

The meme organism of an abstract entity was personified and purported to have become a person.

John 1:14 ...the logos become flesh.

I don't think we want pasta in the sky with meatballs to ....

Whitehead says (something like): "Everything exists; to say something doesn't exist is simply to say it doesn't belong to the mode of being in question."

@Matias
When choosing which definition of a word to use, of course we must consider context. But I don’t see how any reasonable person could deny that abstract values do exist, or that they have had enormous impact on the material history of our species and the entire biosphere.

Not sure where you’re getting your impressions regarding “90%” but the statistics I read paint a very different picture.

The God of Abraham is worshipped by (a growing) 55% of the Homo sapiens population worldwide.

Christians alone make up nearly a third of the human population. This is no conspiracy theory. It’s the single largest block of mainstream human spiritual orientation on the planet.

Less than one half of one percent of the world population is Canadian (0.48%). If Canada exists, certainly the God of Abraham exists. Canada represents nowhere near the 55% of the human population who regard the Abrahamic God as real, let alone the 84% that are religious in general.

[richleebruce.com]

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@Matias
In the Christian Bible, The Gospel According To St.John starts with the sentence "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

In the original Greek, the word used for "Word" was Λόγος or Logos, meaning word, discourse, or reason. You will recognize the common root in the English word logic, or the suffix -ology, as in biology, or psychology - the study of.

Verse 14 goes on to say “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Coming from a people who lived some sixteen hundred years before science was invented, I can hardly imagine a more direct way of saying that God was the personification of discourse, reason, study, and truth.

@Matias Whitehead has one book entitled “Modes of Being” and in his “Process and Reality” he lists seven (8?) categories of existence. Although I think this was essential to his worldview, perhaps he also needed to put it this way for his (& Russell’s) logic to be generally applicable. That is, for the logic to apply in different “domains of discourse” those domains would have to be populated with their own existents. So in the domain of mythology there exist unicorns, fairies, and the like, and in a domain of, say, proposed counter examples there exist—among innumerable others—"the unicorn on the others side of the moon,” “the global Jewish conspiracy,” etc. Of course, these do not exist in the “domain of actuality.” So, perhaps what he is saying is that the logic will not apply to the “domain of nonexistent things” because it is empty.

@K9Kohle789
Of course “worldwide” includes India. But India isn’t the whole world. It’s not my estimate. The survey was done by Pew Research.

@Matias Oh no, not at all. Sorry if I’m not making the point clear. Let me put it this way: there are dreams, hallucination, KellyAnne narratives, etc., and items EXIST in these “domains” that do not exist in the actual world. So it seems to me the difference is that you want to limit the denotation “exist” to what Whitehead would call “exist in the actual world.”

@Matias
The fact that everything exists in some domain doesn’t lessen the responsibility of the speaker to specify the domain, as I did in my original comment above. Context matters. I would have no quarrel with KAC if every time she spoke she notified the audience that she was just delivering political spin and propaganda. Knowing that your audience is assuming a domain different from the one you intend but not informing them otherwise is just regular old garden variety lying.

@K9Kohle789
It’s a funny name, but they didn’t ‘come up with it’ - they inherited it. Lucky them! 😃
[pewresearch.org]

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I can accept that all homo sapiens are gods because homo sapiens are the top of the class for intelligence capabilities creatures on Earth. So, I guess I can believe there is over 7 billion gods in existence on Earth today.

Word Level 8 Feb 19, 2022
2

This sounds like a not-very-good re-hash of the Richard Dawkins quote.

Oh. Bet that's where it came from.

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