Ok, actually, taking a step back and gonna blame Arc for introducing a loaded term. ‘Lack’. Looks likes ‘absence’ but smells more like ‘deficiency’.
My point is/was “theists and atheists hold equally unfalsifiable beliefs” and that someone like me, who lives in box number three, agnosticism, thinks should both be ignored. Not that I expect atheists or theists to ever shut up. Both groups are usually horribly eager to spread the word - another trait they share.
Arc originally queried whether ‘not believing in something’ constituted a belief. I replied that yes, believing something doesn’t exist is - in terms of ‘is that a belief…?’ - just the same as believing something does exist. As long as both parties are aware of the object/non-object in contention, and there is no way to prove it’s existence/non-existence either way.
I then went on to try to provide an example of the transition from ‘no belief at all’ → ‘believing in something’s non-existence’ by introducing Tsathoggua - a character from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos which I was hoping she had no prior knowledge of, it being a bit of a teenage-nerdy cultural trope - to illustrate that only when someone has no inkling of a subject at all, can someone have no beliefs about it, and once they become aware of something’s proposed existence, they cannot help but form a belief about it.
Thanks, a lot clearer. Lol. Okay, so using a belief in logic to try and say anything about an innately paradoxical object - god - is foolish. I see what I did there.
But as I said, I’m not talking about god directly. Only that both a positive belief (god’s/Tsathoggua’s presence), and a negative belief (god’s/Tsathoggua’s absence) are both beliefs. And when both beliefs are unfalsifiable, both are equally worthless.
Might help I guess, if you tell me what you think ‘someone having a belief’ means to you. To me, it’s the state of holding an opinion concerning something about which you have insufficient knowledge/experience to prove or disprove empirically. Which I think is rational.