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Mikko Rantalainen
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Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Jordan Peterson's Most ABSURD Take Yet?!" video.
The problem most people do when arguing with Peterson is that they assume that some words like "god" mean something else but what Peterson claims. It seems that if pressed Peterson would define "god" as the root of value hierarchy you personally believe/feel. That is, if scientific method is the most important thing in your value hierarchy, then "god" is scientific method. I think Peterson intentionally uses the word "god" this way to mislead his fans. He has many theistic fans who want to believe that Peterson believes into existence of the same God they believe in.
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The problem with modern language usage is that "atheism" may refer to negative atheism which is basically agnostic behavior (there's no proof of existence of any theistic claims so we don't have a proof at all, as a result we don't know), or positive atheism which is a religion of its own. Positive atheism claims that there's a proof for lack of supernatural beings. That's not possible by definition because supernatural things cannot be proven either way by any measurements in natural world.
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@reefhog Do you have blind belief that no gods exist? Do you live your life according to that belief? If yes, I consider that a religion. If you live as if no gods did exist but you understand that cannot be proven one way or another (because you cannot prove supernatural things by scientific method because scientific method depends on natural sciences and cannot measure things outside nature) you're just agnostic calling yourself atheist for some reason. You really don't know but you have just decided to live one way or another. I belong to this school of thought. I would call myself metaphysical naturalist in case I have to put myself in some kind of box because that terminology isn't poorly understood.
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@chimp09 How do you argue positions if you cannot have a shared language because you don't agree what words actually mean? You can only argue about ideas once you have shared definitions for the words you're trying to use to express your argument, right?
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@chimp09 I'm telling that your belief is that "every atheist will tell X". In reality, there are multiple groups which all call themselves atheist but they have incompatible beliefs in reality. Why do you think the Wikipedia explicitly explains the difference between negative and positive atheism if there wasn't a difference? That's why I avoid calling myself any kind of atheist. The term is already so broken that I prefer to avoid it.
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