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1. No you don't. A quick look at your profile page shows the inaccuracy of this claim. Just on the first page, listing the 10 most recent debates, you started seven debates, each one using the term "atheist" or "atheists." In another debate, you accepted the debate about a god communicating via text, and your second argument in that debate used "atheist." The other two seemed to be about politics and I didn't look at them. So in at least 8/10 of your most recent debates, you showed that you do not reject the category.
2. This is an apt demonstration of your epistemic limitations. You want to deny being in the same boat as atheists, yet you've demonstrated either an extremely faulty memory or very defective cognitive functions in claiming you reject terms you use very frequently. (This isn't necessarily true. It's also possible you're simply lying, which I guess would not be a demonstration of epistemic limitations.)
So do you hear voices? Do ideas just pop into your brain? How do you differentiate between a message from God and a hallucination? How do you differentiate between a message from God and a conclusion reached via your own coginitive faculties?
Since you say you know "all" things because God says so, did God tell you that you reject the term "atheist"? Why did God make you use the term in at least seven debates you started, then make you say you reject the term?
How do you know God is not misleading when He communicates with you?
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Especially in the context of this presupp game, "know" can have two meanings.
1. We can "know" something provisionally. We might have varying degrees of confidence in something we "know," and we're often pretty confident, but we accept that we could be wrong so we accept it provisionally (until given a compelling reason to think otherwise).
For example, I "know" I had a salad for lunch yesterday. But my wife might say, "No, yesterday you had a hamburger. Remember? You said it was the best burger you'd ever eaten. The salad was two days ago." That might jog my memory and I would realize that I was wrong when I thought I "knew" what I had for lunch yesterday. I knew it provisionally, but changed my acceptance of that knowledge when better information came along.
2. We can also use "Know" as in absolute knowledge. (Note the use of the capital K to connote absolute knowledge.)
For example, I might say I "Know" my name, but do I really? It's what my parents and siblings always called me growing up, but can I be 100% certain, with absolutely zero doubt, that it's the name I was given at birth? I'm an identical twin (let's say our names are Bob and Fred). My mother tells a story of when we were newborns and she used different colored diaper pins to tell us apart. One day she forgot to change us separately, and took both diapers off at the same time. She says she's certain she put the correct diaper pins on the correct baby, but if she's wrong about that, then my name is actually Fred, and my brother's name is actually Bob. Or if you're not a twin, you could have been switched at birth at the hospital. So any of us could have gone through life thinking we had one name when we were actually given a different name at birth.
This only comes up in the issue of epistimology (the study of what we know and can know). Philosophers long ago realized that if we only experience the outside world through our senses, and if we rely on our memories and cognitive faculties to make sense of the world, and if those faculties are not absolutely perfect, then we can't claim to have absolute Knowledge. We must admit that we only have provisional knowledge. We could be a brain in a vat, with electrodes from a supercomputer sending signals to the appropriate parts of our brains mimicking sight and hearing and touch and memory, etc.. (This is the premise of the Matrix movies.)
This is known as the problem of solipsism. It is something first-year philosophy students are introduced to, then it's pretty much ignored because it's a rather useless philosophical position that nobody actually holds. Theists don't hold it, either, though some of them pretend to when they think it's a 'gotcha' they can use.
So with that foundation, this is the game: Guide the atheist down the path of admitting they can't Know anything (a la solipsism), then do a switcheroo and for anything they say after that, ask "How do you 'know' that?" The switch is from absolute knowledge to provisional knowledge.
Thus, notice how in my initial response I said "In the strictest sense," but his response is in the broadest sense. That tells you everything you need to know about how this game works. I did not say I can't know fact from fiction. For any single fact, I cannot Know it with absolute certainty, but there are many facts I can know, provisionally, and that seems to work just fine for me and the other hundred billion or so humans who've ever lived.
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Are these claims true? How do you know?
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1. No you don't. @missmedic posted a link to your profile an debate.org in which on just the first page, you started seven debates with the word "atheist" or "atheists." And in another debate where you were the challenger, you used "atheist" in your second round. Obviously you don't actually reject the category.
2. This is an example of how you have the same epistemic limitations as everybody else. You think you reject a category, but because of either a faulty memory or wildly faulty reasoning faculties, you are obviously incorrect. In the very post you claim not to be in the same boat, you demonstrate that you are.
3. I don't care what you reject or hold, and I doubt anyone else does, either. I am using terms which are well-understood by everybody else and are more appropriate than your terms. If you are unable to comprehend the terms, you can sit out of the conversation and everyone else who understands can participate.
Interesting. So do you hear voices? Do ideas just pop into your head and you attribute them to God?
How do you know these ideas come from God? How do you know they're not from some other powerful being, like Satan?
How do you know you're not in a coma, hallucinating, when you hear the voice or the idea pops in your head?
Even if you could know an idea was from God, how do you know God isn't deceiving you?
Since you think you know "all" things because God magicks them into your brain, why did God tell you that you reject terms that you don't reject? Did God make you forget how often you use the terms, or did God make you claim to reject them when you don't?
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And I know because God says so.
And, I never said I know all things. Your being a pagan has made you delusional.
Finally, if you cannot justify your truth claims, don’t make any.
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How do you know these ideas come from God? How do you know they're not from some other powerful being, like Satan?
How do you know you're not in a coma, hallucinating, when you hear the voice or the idea pops in your head?
Even if you could know an idea was from God, how do you know God isn't deceiving you?
Since you think you know "all" things because God magicks them into your brain, why did God tell you that you reject terms that you don't reject? Did God make you forget how often you use the terms, or did God make you claim to reject them when you don't?
Additionally...
Your exact words were: "And I know they are not in the same boat the same way I know all things: because God says so." I even quoted you before I asked about it. The post is from 5:33 AM PST, 11/16/17
I'm not saying you claim to know all things that can be known, as in a claim of omniscience. But you are clearly claiming all things that you do know come directly from God, so I was asking about the mechanism of that communication.
Unfortunately, this is further proof that you're in the same epistemic boat as everyone else. Why did you misunderstand what I wrote, since God supposedly communicated it to you? Did God misunderstand me? Or did you misunderstand God?
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Did this deluded fool just say that I think I know all things? He knows what others think? Wow.
Is it true this is further proof? How do you know?
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I wonder if any other Christians would like to chime in and tell us what they think of this kind of behavior. Let's hear from Christians. Is this acceptable? Do you excuse it because he's "Lying for Jesus"? Will a single Christian stand up and tell us what they think?
Anyway...
How does a spirtual being speak to a physical being? How do you know it's not a hallucination?
How do you know these ideas come from God? How do you know they're not from some other powerful being, like Satan?
How do you know God--who admits in the Bible that he will and does deceive humans--is not lying to you?
How do you know you're not in a coma, hallucinating?
I already explained it this to you. I didn't say you think you know all things. But you did specifically say that "all" things you know, you know from God.
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When I say something to someone, I expel air through my lungs, over my vocal cords, and the air is shaped by my mouth and tongue in specific ways to make the air around my mouth vibrate in certain ways. These vibrations reach the ear of my listener, where they travel through the ear canal, through the ear drum, to aural receptors which produce electrochemical signals in the aural centers of the brain. These signals go to other parts of the brain, most notable for this discussion, to auditory processing areas where the signals are interpreted as specific sounds and processed further and the sounds are given meaning.
That's a really high-level, very vague summary of how I would communicate with another person. Feel free to be as vague in describing how God "says so" to you, either physically or "spiritually."
Then, once you've given the high-level mechanism, you can tell us how you know it's God.
How do you know these ideas come from God? How do you know they're not from some other powerful being, like Satan?
How do you know God--who admits in the Bible that he will and does deceive humans--is not lying to you?
How do you know you're not in a coma, hallucinating?
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But tell us how you know anything you claim is true is actually true? You keep running, which tells me you don’t.
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@ViceRegent hello my friend.
To be rational about answering your question, first we have to answer; how do we understand the word 'atheist'?
Google Dictionary -
atheist - a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.
synonym: nonbeliever, disbeliever, unbeliever, skeptic, doubter, doubting Thomas, agnostic;
theism. :belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically :belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of the human race and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world.
(Note: Many god/gods have been claimed as the "creative source" of the human race, one god I can think of that could fit this description is Zeus, then there are the Roman Catholic created non-Biblical "Christian gods" like the 'three-in-one Trinity-gods' , .. father-god, sun-god and spirit-god.)
First Known use: 1678
Wikipedia on the other hand, says this about the word 'theism':
Etymology. The term theism derives from the Greek theos meaning "god". The term theism was first used by Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688).
Which means that the words theist/atheist didn't exist in Biblical times, especially not in the O.T. times, and seeing that theos is a "Greek word for god", I find no reason to believe the Greeks were talking about Bible-God, who is not a 'being', but the Ground of Being', .. the; Infinite and Eternal Spirit/Mind Creator "I Am", the God of Abraham, Isaak and Jacob, .. the God of the Bible.
So theism/atheism has to do something with believing, or not believing in the existence of Greek god or gods, which were all 'fiction', .. or made up gods and creators and followed 'religiously' by millions of people, from all walks of life. So right off the bat, by rational basis that neither theists, or 'atheist' could ever know "truth from fiction". Just by 'claiming' to be theist/atheist proves this.
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In the end, you can never really know how schizoid you are. We are all trapped in our own delusions but to deny any objectivity altogether seems too insane for my liking.
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Fiction is a claim that cannot be verified experimentally, or that can be found to be incorrect - yet still accepted for other reasons.
I am not sure what this have to do with being or not being atheist, however. Truth is what it is, it does not depend on your personal system of views. Same goes for fiction. Lord of the Rings is fiction, and even if you are a Tolkienist, it still does not make the existence of orcs into truth. On the other hand, 2+2=4 is truth, and even if you follow the religion that says that 2+2=orange, it does not deny the fact that 2+2=4. Both statements can be experimentally tested, and only one of them will be found to be correct.
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