Daniel M. Upton <75442.1331@compuserve.com> asks:
> PS - Remember after the episodes about the soul hunter and the
> one where the Minbari's belief that their souls were
> transmigrating to Humans was revealed how all the rabid atheists
> jumped down Joe's throat and said that if there was any room for
> the objective existence of a "soul" in his story that it stopped
> being science fiction and became fantasy and that he would lose
> them as viewers?

"The atheist is also denying the existence of God on faith since the
statement that there is no God anywhere in the universe is equally
impossible to prove (all universal statements are impossible to prove
and therefore inherently unscientific)."

That's a well phrased analysis of the situation...the only problem
with it is that it ain't so.

By your reasoning, if you say that there are green penguins at the
north pole, and I refuse to believe it until you prove it, then I am a
believer in non-green-penguinism. I am, therefore, a believer in the
negative concept of everything in the universe that has not yet been
conclusively proven. At which point the very notion of belief becomes
utterly meaningless.

If someone comes up to you and offers you a job if you move cross
country, wouldn't you want a contract, some proof that the offer is
real? Until it's provided, are you believing in non-contractosity?

Bottom line, Daniel...if you or anyone else makes a statement, the
burden of proof is not on me to *disprove* it, it's on you to *prove*
it. Until that point, the question of belief doesn't enter into it.
Is it or is it not provable? If not, then it isn't recognized as a
real thing. Belief is irrelevant. Once you've shown me my new car,
and I've driven in it, it doesn't require faith or belief to know it
exists. For my money, no one has yet proven the existence of a supreme
or minor deity...so for me, it simply doesn't exist. Again, belief has
nothing to do with it.

(I used the phrase belief system only because I didn't want to get
into a prolonged discussion of it, and that seemed the simplest way of
stating it. That'll teach me not to go for the precise terms, even if
it means another few paragraphs of explanation.)

jms