A comment

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Ed
Theists like to play on the semantic range of the word "belief."  I believe
that I'll catch the matinee of the new Austin Powers flick today; I believe
that Mike Myers plays three separate roles in it; I believe that I'll save
a few bucks by catching the matinee rather than the prime-time showing; and
I believe that Joey and I will have some sort of delightful pesto pasta
afterwards.  None of these beliefs correspond to religious belief.

POOBAH
This is a fair comment, and an interesting one besides. I find that many
religious arguments play on the vagueness of certain words, they start with
one definition and end with another. Just on this list we had Jason Carter
with his "no morality without God argument" his premise as stated was that
non-Theists are absurd to have *any* morality whatsoever, but when backed
into a corner he said that non-Theists had no "metaphysical morality" which
of course resulted in a meaningless tautology.

As we just saw in another thread, another popular term for confusion has to
do with "exist" (which is probably another meaningless term, but I digress).
We often hear that since we think that a particular rock exists, or the sun
exists, that we think our brain exists and emotions exist, and we can't
prove any of this, so everything is a leap of faith, so we're no better than
the poor sots who believe in God (For anyone who believes the above, all I
can say is I'd love to play poker with you). There was a story posted hear
back in March about an old bony atheist professor who was silenced by a
faithful Christian boy which used exactly this sort of blurring of meaning.

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