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Atheism is not a "system of belief"

yes it is

This is a Red Herring.

I'm not not all clear what aspect is the 'red herring'!   I don't believe in gods or 'meaning' and 'purpose'; I am trying to second-guess the mindset of people like PGA who do.   I'd guess they suppose life gets meaning by virtue of our being part of a universe that has god-given meaning and purpose.

My own view is that we create our own meaning and purpose.  We can choose to flourish and spread peace and harmony across the galaxy or we can choose to smother ourselves and die under a poisonous and polluted sky - the universe doesn't care either way.  Of course i don't mean we choose our destiny in a referendum even consciously - we decide our future implicitly as the consequence of our actions and activiies today.   

Since you deny God you must start with some other explanation and funnel everything through that system of belief.

Your limited subject reasoning becomes the key. Instead of focusing on the overall picture you divide the picture up into tiny pieces and focus on one aspect of the picture. Thus we have a conflicting theory of reason and evidence between atheism and Christianity.

You hold a non-theistic conception of reason and evidence, which assumes the ultimacy of your human mind. And you use as an excuse for holding your position of atheism that only the facts as you determine them are valid, that what you hold as fact does not act on faith, but solely on reason and proof. You fail to look at how you arrived at atheism because this is an uncomfortable subject that exposes what I would coin a foundation resting on thin air (no visible means of support). Until you look deeper at that system of thought and determine what makes it tick I claim it is you who is delusional for you have built your whole house of cards on a shaky beginning that you refuse to look at (the Emporer has no clothes). The foundation is cracked at the seems. 

You base your facts on the empirical, on what you see, what complies with your rules and your evidence (only the facts please, sir).

But your very system of belief, atheism, is an assumption.

And for many atheists that I have encountered, they make the assumption that their system of thought, how they look at the world and the universe is not a belief taken by faith.

It is precisely that, for their structure of thought is based on the materialistic, on what they see and how they understand what they see, devoid of God. (i.e., Show me what your epistemology rests upon.

I contend, and you have stated as much, that it rests on you. Why should I believe you? Who are you that you determine what is and what should be?) So you think you can make sense of your experience, yet you fail to look at the starting point of your worldview experience, what it all hangs upon without God, and with the denial of God - blind, indifferent, random, chance happenstance. Why is that reasonable? So you have declared your independence from God, a law unto yourself. Without God, you would have to assume that you are not created. You would look for means that verify this hidden presupposition.

Growing an extra finger is not quite,say, switching from egg-laying to live-birth.

I am an evolutionist - I believe in gradual change.  

But i admit I have no idea how to go from egg-lying to live-birth gradually.   

Obviously it did happen - just don't ask me about the details!

How do you get meaning from the quantitative as opposed to the qualitative?

A dog a fish and an ant have motives.  For example they seek out particular foods and consume them.  Their particular type of food is valuable to them.  Finding and consuming food and reproduction are valuable activities to them.  Social creatures also value interactions with fellow members of their pack, school, and colony.

Dogs and fishes don't compose symphonies or discover laws of nature. 

I value my community because humans cannot exist in isolation.  If you have an impulse to "kill all humans" you are basically suicidal.

More like genocidal.

A dog, a fish, and an ant can't manipulate the world to the same degree humans can. They do not have the same ability.

I'm not sure how a hypothetical Deistic Being adds any meaningfulness to human existence.  Please explain.

Why is He hypothetical? That is your assumption, not mine. 

How does meaning originate from inanimate, non-living matter? That again is your assumption, not mine.

I don't buy it. 

How can you get much more basic than either God or chance happenstance (that which lacks intent)

I'm not sure you should use a capital G, but I'd agree that the choice is between a 'mindful' and a 'mindless' cause of the universe.  

I favour a mindless cause, the details of which are yet unknown but are often referred to as a 'theory of everything'.   

You, no doubt, favour a mindful cause and go further, indentifying the Christian God as the cause.   Were I to accept the cause of the universe was mindful and intelligent I'd doubt it was necessariy the Christian God when there are so many other candidates!

The universe needs something to get things started.   Does that something have to resemble what is commonly thought of as a god?  My feeling is 'no', I presume your feeling is 'yes'.  But it is a matter of gut feelings, not cold rationality.

You seemed to move into some other direction I was going, did you do that on purpose? I'm talking about you being created by a God not produced in a lab by some aliens. If you were produced by God you are a part of God, like family...Deist God or whatever God exists.

I haven't been following the discussion but this caught my eye.  I keep seeing this claim but I have yet to hear a valid reason for it. For whatever reason people equate a "Deist" God with one not existing, how does that follow? If ANY God were to exist, whether that be Deist or any Creator it means you have a specific origin and purpose for your individual self/soul. It would be like saying your entire history, family, experiences, knowledge all have no meaningfulness to you. Why would you think that? If any God exists don't you want to know about that? how would it NOT be relevant to you would be my question?  I'm aware the definition of Deist God says "is not directly involved" and so lets say that might be true, how does that change what I wrote above? do you really think a Creator would do all of this and just ball out though?? you can believe in a Deist God and still have meaning, in other words God created you for some reason and expression obviously because you are here.  Even if we erase all the God names religions put forth all this is still intact. If your soul comes from God then you are a apart of that, there is no way around it and in that alone should be meaningful to you at least on some level no? what if its true that God doesn't "directly interfere" but does so through you? in other words what if your connection to God was your core conscious awareness and not the external world? none of this has meaning to you?

Sample bias? The point is that to date there is no EVIDENCE of life on other planets. To date, this planet seems as if it is the only one in a vast universe capable of sustaining life. To date, that is all you have to work with. Everything else is speculation. To date, which argument makes sense?

Quanta is quantifiable and empirically and scientifically verifiable and real and extant (and emotionally meaningless).

What does it have to do with meaning?

I'm not arguing for a dog or fish since they do not have the same reasoning power that we do. They can't meditate on meaning as we do. They can't reason with each other as we can, with abstract thoughts that we put into practice in subduing our world. 

If there is no intrinsic value to being human then is it justifiable to eliminate all humans (you first)?   

You have a sense of value and meaningfulness for the exact same reasons the dog and the fish and the ant have a sense of value and meaningfulness.

First, establish that a fish thinks of itself as valuable. Show me how it contemplates its meaning. 

Your emotional queues and motives and desires are integral aspects of your survival instinct.

Or my emotional queries and motives are from a meaningful mindful Being that has created us in His image and likeness. Like produces like. Thus, we are meaningful beings who can investigate our meaning. Show me how a rock dissolving and creating minerals that produce intelligent being over vast amounts of time, that leads to meaningful thought. It is YOUR presupposition that it does, not mine.

You can identify and maintain your emotional mechanisms with science - http://www.robertlustig.com/4cs/

What does this link signify? It has nothing to do with the discussion. 

You are portraying epigenetics as some alternate evolutionary theory, when really it is just a refinement of current  theory. Epigenetics does not preclude natural selection. Just as Einstein's theory does not mean Newton's theory was wrong, epigenetics does not mean Darwinism is wrong.

Nevertheless, to date, this is the only planet we know of that sustains life to my knowledge. Through the vastness of the universe, this planet seems unique. I have a reasonable explanation for that, do you? If so, then please state it. I'm willing to learn.

And meaning - why do we derive meaning from the meaningless and what difference does it make in the big picture? It means nothing in the big picture, yet to some degree are you acting like it does by thinking meaningfully? 

Fine-tuning attempts to prove the existence of an intelligent creator, in any case, and not necessarily a God of a particular religion.

How does that make sense of a chance universe sustaining itself? How can something that is not 'about' anything do this or anything?

Matt Dillahunty, host of "The Atheist Experience", said that the fine-tunedness of the universe was evidence of God but was not "sufficient" evidence of God.

If there's no evidence against God, but there is evidence for God, the claim "God exists" is more likely true than not. How is that not sufficient to warrant belief that the claim is true?

And so we now have a covenent not of the letter, but of the spirit.

A heresy is a choice. A choice to depart from the truth.

Heretics are united only in their opposition to orthodoxy, nothing else.

You say heresy doesn't exist. You say evil doesn't exist. It seems to me that you are playing a disruptive game here because you aren't really taking our discussion seriously.

Well, you can walk away triumphant in your delusions if you so wish. You can argue for the heretics you yourself don't even believe all you want. If you really knew the subject matter as well as you'd like to think based on your half hearted googling, you would realize that [your own arbitrary] authority overwhelmingly rules in favor of Orthodoxy, and as every single protestant who converts comes to find out, they have always had an incomplete religion.

It would definitely play in the favor of the secularist to defend a more protestant Christianity, as Protestantism quite naturally leads to deism, which quite naturally leads to outright secularism, even atheism.

Your logical fallacy is the "fallacy fallacy".

Back to your sophistry again I see.

There are no “wing” genes in ANY  genome. There are hox genes - and regulation sequences that can regulate or unregulate gene expression that encourages or inhibits cell specialization, growth and division at particular times in the development of the organism. All of those are broadly common to all animals, and very close in all terrestrial vertebrates. 

In that respect the genes from an arm and a wing are inherently the same genes and the same things, just with modified regulation and expression of those same genes.

Your position is very typical for someone who has a lot of pride.

Sounds arbitrary.

If you are going to have evil suspicions, by all means, believe what the heretics say.

I think you forgot the analogy I was making.

I was comparing God directing your steps to a parent keeping their kid from drinking the dish soap.

There comes a point when, you being the child, will have to have faith in your parent in order to learn from them with intent. Otherwise, you are going to grow and make a whole bunch of mistakes that you could have avoided by having faith in your parents.

Paul would have had to be recognized and ordained by the church to have been sent out from the church of Antioch on his missionary journies.

I would recommend going to an Orthodox Church and looking at their library to find more info, we have a lot of really good books. But Church Tradition is that which has been passed down by the church. There is a lot about the church that is not contained in scripture. The canon are writings that we can use during church services. There is no one book callled "church tradition", but it can be found in the writings of the church fathers and in things like our liturgy, iconography, and even the bible, which is a part of church tradition.

That isn't really true, but I would like to point out that The Orthodox Church compiled the canon of scripture and that we knew what we believed before this was done. Sola scriptura is a protestant thing because they don't have church tradition. The church didn't wait around for 300 years for the bible to be canonized. There is a lot that isn't in the new testament. 

Unitarians deny the Trinity, so they are not really Christian.

It wasn't even a 100 years before bishop and priest came to be seperate offices.

All of this is explained very clear in Church tradition actually.

It wasn't even a 100 years before bishop and priest came to be seperate offices. A deacon was never the same thing as a priest.

It is important to note that while we are indeed a nation of priests, there is a difference in office between someone who is an elder and leader of congregation and someone who is a layman. This is very clear even in The New Testament.  And I used to buy into this anarchistic interpretation you seem to have until I actually did some studying. The earliest church certainly had bishops. My Church's first bishop was Saint Ignatius, and his writings which date back to the first century make it very clear that there is a distinction. The church has always had leaders.

Sure anyone can start their own church, but we wouldn't call it the church because it isn't the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, which is The Orthodox Church, and we have Holy Orders. They came from us, but they aren't of us. They are schismatics and heretics. The nice word is heterodox, but I personally think that is giving these "churches" too much credit.

And fyi, you in your haste neglected to read anything beyond the question in your first link. Your second link is YAHOO ANSWERS.

But what you expressing is a very protestant attitude, even though most protestant churches still aren't quite as anarchistic as what you are describing.

According to this article, birds already have in their genes the code of their ancestors, namely that new genetic information is not added to their genome. They're not creating new functionality nor an organ or member, but it's just a change, or a replacement.

I was referring to new genetic information like, for example, the iris of an eye, or an organ with a new functionality. Netiher gradualism nor natural selection can explain that properly, completely and acurretely. You cannot get new information just turning on or off genes, for that you need to add new genetic information.

And I am certainly not trying to do way with governments, who were put in place to deal with such people.

I am not a politician or a statesmen. The people of that world can debate about laws. I don't like the idea of the law being enforced hy robots because I don't think it would leave room for mercy. I think there should be room for mercy.

Not that it matters what I think.

Not everyone is going to purify their heart of defilements for the sake of God, so it would not be reasonable to expect that everyone is going to be a hesychast.

The church has priests and bishops. Not only can this be seen in the new testament, but the earliest writings of the church make it very clear that this was always the case.

"the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient"

What are you trying to show us? Speak.

Either way, God is still directing your steps.

No, you are going to pay taxes, and in all likelihood, die.

I am referring to your language, and your preacher, since you refuse to acknowledge a teacher, might end up giving you a paddle on the rump.

So you think it's ok to indoctrinate kids that it's wrong to play on a busy road?  you may not play on roads yourself, but you have no right to impose your anti-roadplayism on kids.  It's child abuse to impose anti-roadplayism or roadplayism on kids.   I gave my 3 yr old the facts and statistics on road deaths and allowed him to make his own fully informed decision.   I don't know if it worked becuse he died after sticking his finger in a wall socket despite having had the possibly damaging effects of electricity explained to him at length.  As I told my  wife, if he couldn't grasp the basics of  electrical engineering at 2 and a half, it was probable he wasn't meant to survive.

Indoctrinating kids is wrong.  

It's hard to believe you could be taught if you aren't willing to learn.

I mean new genetic information should be created because an arm is totally different to a wing.

Either way, God is still directing your steps.

He's not saying gods are driving you to drink dish soap.  He's making an equivalency to living according to your limited perspective irrespective of the higher truth.  This is obvious, because the parent naturally wants their child to be safe, to grow and prosper.

A hesychast has no need for laws since they by nature fulfill what it is the law is made for.

Ah, ok.  You're an anarchist.  A holy mystical anarchist.

Not at all. 

That's obviously not what he is saying.

A hesychast has no need for laws since they by nature fulfill what it is the law is made for.

If you want to be like the child who is magnetically attracted towards drinking dish soap, sure.

That is why you must make your axioms explicit and verify their efficacy and internal coherence

I would call that a naive point of view.