Comments on: Can a Dog be an Atheist?

By: pyramus

pyramus — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:09:23 +0000

That line about food and shelter and godhood and whatnot is something that we like to call a “joke”. You might want to look into it sometime. It doesn’t require evidence, because it’s a joke.

By: Tao Jones

Tao Jones — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:25:13 +0000

If you give a dog food and shelter and love, it will come to believe that you are god. If you give a cat food and shelter and love, it will come to believe that it is god.

Evidence please?

Devotion and love are not the same as worshipping or believing in something supernatural.

Until we have evidence that non-human animals have a god-concept, it is safe to assume that the idea of god is something our human minds came up with.

By: Ian Andreas Miller

Ian Andreas Miller — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:16:27 +0000

Is a dog an atheist?

I have heard variants of that before: “So, is a tree or a rock an atheist?”

Well, I think that if we could cite instances in which dogs, trees, and rocks have shown to have the capacity to become theists, and also cite instances in which individuals of the aforementioned groups became theists, I suppose that the ones that are not theists could be atheists.

Argument from bestiality?

Argumentum ad Bestialitatem!

By: Mark C.

Mark C. — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:34:26 +0000

The Church of Cat is icanhascheezburger.com.

By: Brooks

Brooks — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:24:03 +0000

“If you give a cat food and shelter and love, it will come to believe that it is god.”

The cats are gods and we have evidence cats exists! We must worship the cats and start a church of Cat!

By: stogoe

stogoe — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:38:45 +0000

I don’t think dogs have the capacity to think about gods in the way we do, but I’m sure that they share our capacity to assign agency to random events. A dog barks at the wind for blowing; we burn offerings to the sky god to bring the rains/quell the storms.

By: pyramus

pyramus — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:51:49 +0000

If you give a dog food and shelter and love, it will come to believe that you are god. If you give a cat food and shelter and love, it will come to believe that it is god.

You can’t really say whether a dog is an atheist until you define “god”, which is a tricky thing: but anyone who’s ever owned a particularly adoring dog knows very well that that dog exhibits the same slavish devotion to its master that the religious offer to their deity. Other dogs are considerably more independent-minded. I’d have to say that, for some definitions of “god”, there are theist-dogs and atheist-dogs.

By: Lexi

Lexi — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:33:51 +0000

Maybe the dog is ignostic. with an i.

By: Auryn

Auryn — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:07:43 +0000

Can an atheist dog look in the mirror?

By: efrique

efrique — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:52:35 +0000

If you define “atheist” (as many of us tend to) as absence of god-belief, then a dog is probably an atheist, and a rock, definitely so.

This is not problematic, to my mind. I believe in god very much the way a rock believes in god.

I’m not atheist in in the way a puddle is, though, because they puddlomorphize everything, thinking their own little world is perfectly suited to their shape, thus implying design.

Damn muddle-brained, addle-pated, puddle-theists.