gwiz665: Click here for about 24 or so such arguments. Ironically enough, your own argument is fallacious.

"That is incorrect. Strictly speaking, atheism is the non-belief in any deity. This is a critical distinction, as anyone who has studied logic immediately recognizes that it is logically impossible to prove a negative. (And of course the burden of proof rests with the one making the claim.)"

What precisely is incorrect? Are you quibbling about my use of the term 'God'? Do you think that I mean to refer exclusively to the Judeo-Christian deity?

Second, "anyone" who has studied logic carefully should be able to see that your claim above, that it is "logically impossible to prove a negative" is clearly false as it is worded. If we were to take your claim at face value, then its falsity can be simply demonstrated by a basic rule of inference, like Modus Tollens.

If p then q.
Not q.
Therefore, NOT p.

I've just logically proved a negative.

It must be the case, then, that you mean something else by the claim above. So what precisely is it?

gluonium: If you are implying that this video, which is part of a series called "The Question of God", is indicative of a bias towards religious programming on PBS, then you are mistaken. The series is born out of a seminar taught by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi and examines the lives of both C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, the latter being a committed atheist.

nibiyabi: Technically speaking, atheism is a position that posits the non-existence of God. Claiming that something absolutely does not exist is difficult to defend, since it supposes that we have complete knowledge of everything that exists. The de facto atheism, instead, is a position that claims the existence of God is unworthy of belief, either due to a lack of any convincing evidence or to the seemingly intractable problems that supposedly entail from a commitment to the belief in God's existence.

Such a position is not inconsistent with an attitude of anger towards God, since it may just be the idea of God that the atheist might find repulsive.

Y'know. It's seems rather apparent how "open-minded" some people here are when videos with Richard Dawkins and Penn & Teller bashing Christianity, and videos that are posted with the implicit purpose of caricaturizing Christian cultue appear regularly on the front page, while attempts made by myself and possibly others to post videos that provide a more substantive case for Christian belief get discarded due to lack of votes.

I have come accross some folks here who seem open to such discussion, but many others seem more interested in taking pot shots and tackling straw men than actually engaging in what might resemble thoughtful discourse.

I think the dude is just pointing out how many pop songs use the same harmonic pattern. In this case, the pattern is I-V-vi-IV. In the key of C, that would be C-G-Am-F. Most pop songs employ basic diatonic harmony, which only gives you six different chords to work with (I don't think anyone uses the seventh, which is a half-diminished). One can only be so creative given such a limited tonal palatte and other constraints in song structure. Hence the similarity in many of these songs.

Can anyone name all the songs he goes through?

southbblvd: That one's called "Visionaries". It totally kicked ass. 100 nerd points to anyone who can recite the any of the rhymes used to get the power out of their staffs.

LadyBug: It may be helpful to clarify what we mean by "irrational". Strictly speaking, to be irrational would be to hold a set of a logically inconsistent beliefs. For example, believing that God both exists and does not exist would be irrational. However, it seems that what you mean by "irrational" is to hold a belief without having any good reason to support that belief.

I would agree that it is not very rational to hold a belief simply because your parents, or society large holds it, but I think it would be unfair to assume that most, if not all of the adult religious population hold their beliefs simply because their parents do. This seems to be what you're suggesting in your comment above.

There are many independent thinking individuals who have good reasons for their religious adherence. Disagreement with said reasons does not necessarily mean that any one particular party is irrational. Professional philosophers disagree over numerous issues, but no one would say that anyone from opposing sides is irrational.

For examples of rational people who are religious, see Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, William Alston, et al.

It seems that the majority of the more visible members of this community are atheists. Would that be fair to say?

If so, for those of you who are atheists, would you say that it is irrational to believe in a god of some sort?

As far as Dawkins goes, while he is obviously a good biologist/zoologist, a philosopher of religion he is not, and his book, The God Delusion, fails in so far as it attempts to do philosophy/theology. See here, here, and here for reviews.

For some good atheistic philosophy of religion, see William Rowe, J.L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin, et al.