Athyeism, Illiteracy, and Intellectual Dishonesty.

Bluegrass Skeptic decries the frustration of dealing withy open minded atheists who say: ”You are being intellectually dishonest by saying deities absolutely do not exist." You cannot know 100%..." She asserts that one can state with confidence that, ”Gods does not exist! 100% if you lay the appropriate foundation for understanding in your conversation."[1] Before doing that you want to lay a fou8ndation for grammar. if God doesn't exist he doesn't exist just 75%. Be that as it may, she is mistaken. Intellectual dishonesty is not belief in God, it is not disbelief, nor is it being open minded and admitting you don't know everything. Intellectual dishonesty is when you refuse to even consider counter evidence. I am confident that there is God the basis of reality but I would never try to say that disbelief is dishonesty.

The height of intellectual dishonesty is pretending that you know all about something when you have never studied it. Like most atheists BGS is basing her view of Christian doctrine of God upon Christians with whom she has clashed on the net, or in her personal church going or acquaintances in real life. Example:

First things first, there is an equivocation problem with the concept of god in the religious and atheist communities. The concept that there are mysterious beings/forces/entities in the Universe we have not yet discovered that might possess amazing powers of healing, immortality, and psychic afterlives, is not far fetched. In fact, it is impossible to say with 100% certainty that they do not exist. But the statement “Gods do not exist! 100%” has absolutely nothing to do with fantastically powered beings that watch you masturbate, and cry for your wasted semen in that kleenex.Godliness has to do with worship, dogma, reverence, and sovereignty. We are not going to automatically worship the wonderfully different creature that just made that amputee’s leg grow back. It’s still just an alien of sorts. When this thing crosses the threshold of awe and brings the euphoria of worship, then you have a god. But how does it cross that threshold of importance? Well, it is an individual decision that one embraces after a certain level of criteria has been met emotionally, as well as intellectually.

A sure sign she not studied anything misuse of the term "godliness." The term she is looking for is "deity," or "divinity." That refers to God's divine nature. Godliness refers to our attempt to exhibit live lives that reflect righteousness. That's a telling error because even casual familiarity with any Biblical literature should tell one that, not to mention a dictionary. As for the bit about the Kleenex that tells us more about her than it does about God, but more than I care to know as well. BGS says: "As you can see, there is a very obvious difference between god and an all powerful being somewhere in the Universe. Yet the religious, and many atheists, tend to equivocate the two as one and the same..." She means equate, if they equivocate they are saying different things. She seems to thi9ng that religious people th9in God is like a powerful space alien just a magnification or humanity. That is not what Christianity teaches. At this point she says that the equivocation (now morphed from saying the3 same as agnostic atheists a--see above--to the sameness between Christian idea of God and space alien. When she first misused the term it meant Christians and atheists thin he same thing, wrongly, now it means thinking God and aliens are the same. Actually I don't know any Christians who don't understand the difference. After a couple of unintelligible paragraphs that mean nothing she says:

“I am not 100% sure there isn’t something in the Universe I wouldn’t consider worshiping.” This sentence is what the discussion should really be about. It’s about personal accountability instead of shifting choices on to other manifestations and ideologies. This sentence doesn’t say “Yes, deities might exist.” It says one is willing to consider giving that reverence to something in the Universe if the appropriate amount of personal standards are met. Too often, many people, even famous writers and historians, have a tendency to round up their belief system to the next qualifier, misunderstanding that what they perceive as a small leap in reasoning is actually a very large one.

This is actually a contradiction. I understand the first sentence said "I am sure God does not exist." (Passover the 100%vmuddle). This says I'm not 100% there isn't something I would worship. That is a contradiction. God is the only valid thing to worship. The concept of God is that of the ultimate concern, the basis of all things. What if the proper thing to worship is God, the is the concept of God:object of ultimate concern. The statement:I am not 100% sure there isn’t something in the Universe I wouldn’t consider worshiping means there is something you would worship. If you are not sure there is not how can you be sure there is no God? Only if you refuse to ever worship God, but then what would you worship? See this is a contradiction? Thyen she says we like to round thinfs off, "Some possible being out there who we don’t understand, and who may have powers we don’t understand – if we ever found one of these beings, a lot of us would also say “eh, close enough”, and round “mysterious powerful being” up to “god”, and then start worshiping it." Then she says:"And why would all these mainstream intellects like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitches, or Sam Harris just “round” things up? Maybe because they haven’t taken the time to learn the difference." Mainstream intellectuals? Not a word how she can be sure there's no God. not a argument not a hint. Is your irony met4er running? She chides people on both sides for intellectu8al laziness!. The comment section: [1] Bluegrass Skeptic, "Intellectual Dishonesty And Being Certain Gods Do Not Exist," Atheist Nexus August 1, 2014 at 6:11am >, blog, URL:http://atheistnexus.org/profiles/blogs/intellectual-dishonesty-and-being-certain-gods-do-not-exist