Tuomiopäivänkultteja. Vuosituhannen lopussa tekivät harva se päivä jotain kahjoa joka ylitti uutiskynnyksen, nykyisin ei tapahdu enää mitään!

In case you’re still amused to read this, let me explain my confusion.

1) From your first reply above, I gathered you consider it valid to call animals atheists.

2) From your first reply to me, I gathered you consider it technically valid to also call rocks atheists, but somewhat misusing the term (as it’s not what it ”is meant to describe”), like calling rocks blind.

3) Those two premises lead me to ask my question, to pinpoint where the difference between the two in your view stems from: why isn’t calling animals atheists equally wrong.

4) In your answer, I felt you said the two claims (”animals are atheists”, ”rocks are atheists/blind”) are equally valid, which obviously goes against my assumption in 2) and thus broke my chain of reasoning about yours.

From your comments in the other thread below, I see you write atheism ”is the simply the absence of the position that they do exist”. If I’m (finally) reading you correctly and put it another way, you don’t preclude a question (in the most abstract sense) of their position being posable for someone/-thing to be considered atheist; this would suggest that my mistake was at 2), assuming you consider ”rocks being atheist” somewhat less correct than ”animals being atheist”, when in reality you consider them just as valid: an object (in your view) does not have to be able to be theist to be rightly called atheist.

As I said, I have no strong inclination about this myself, but writing this I do seem to see at the back of my mind a tendency to presuppose at least a potential for theism for a creature/object being validly considered an atheist. It doesn’t mean they’ve been posed the question of supernatural beings, just that they have the potential to develop such ideas. This would obviously exclude rocks, as they lack even the remotest potential of developing any ideas at all (and equally, calling them blind would be wrong in the sense that they will never have any potential of seeing).

On the other hand, intelligent, adult animals (such as dolphins) might very well fall into this category of potential theists, and thus be correctly called atheist in this system. Not because they have developed theist views and then rejected them, but just because they have the potential to do so, and haven’t. Very small children (human babies, as well as non-human non-adult animals) would not, because they lack the required capability for the potential to emerge. (Obviously I have no evidence of either intelligent animals’ capability to develop ideas of supernatural, nor of babies’ lack thereof; these are just based on my gut feeling.)

I’m aware of Dawkins’ work (being an atheist myself), but not of his views about animals being atheists or allegories about blind rocks, and unfortunately couldn’t find anything about it on Youtube. (Youtube’s search is pretty bad though.)

I know you can’t, I’m just honestly confused by your previous comment. Sorry for boring you; I was genuinely interested in your reasoning (just as I am in /u/canyoufixmyspacebar’s for their viewpoint).

Now I’m confused. I thought you considered calling rocks ”blind” was misusing the term ”blindness” because that was not what it was intended to describe; now you say ”atheism” applied to animals is the same? Obviously I’m misunderstanding something.

So would it be accurate to say that you consider animals as atheists for 1) having belief systems & 2) their belief systems not containing anything we’d call ”gods”? If so, how do we know whether 2) is true?

What about rocks? They clearly aren’t theists either. I’m not being dickish here, I think this is interesting semantics and I have no strong inclination either way.

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Olen kahden vaiheilla tästä. Melkein kaikki Vartiotorni-seuran tuottama on enemmän dadaa kuin Lehti, joten koko aliredditin voisi hukuttaa juttuihin sieltä – jolloin vitsi lakkaisi hyvin pian huvittamasta.

From my few dealings with JWs some years back, what struck me as ingenious in the GB’s strategy was precisely how they hid themselves in the shadows, because that directly helped to support the illusion of their word (in magazines etc.) being the word of Jehovah. It blinded the congregation from seeing that they’re ”worshipping” (i.e. putting their effort to) not a god, but just an organization led by this bunch of elderly guys in the American headquarters. It’s interesting to hear that the GB have apparently now abandoned this strategy for whatever reason. I agree with you that this is a good thing; they exposing themselves like this should help to open the eyes of more Witnesses to the very worldly ways the organization actually works.