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Pete Hegseth prays for violence ‘against those who deserve no mercy’ while hosting first Christian service
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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No it would not. You are atheist if you say you do not believe in god. I do not believe in god because there is no good reason to believe it exists so I am atheist. Not believing in something is not the same as believing something does not exists. My position is the default position and perfectly in line with science.
that is exactly the point. If there is no way to objectively interrogate something you should not believe in this. Believe in something you cannot interrogate is faith, and faith is bad. Religion requires by definition some level of faith. Science does not. Religion is not just a moral, societal or political position: you need to fundamentally believe something that cannot be investigated to be religious. The fact that religion seeks to answer question such as "why do we exists" is the problem. Because the answer can be used as justification for atrocities ("we are good chosen, we were given the land").
Fair enough, I was working with a narrower definition of atheism.
And there's an unfalsifiable faith-based assumption. I now have no way of objectively interrogating your statement (and therefore, your entire position). However, based on other subjective (moral and otherwise) assumptions we agree on, we can subjectively interrogate whether this statement makes sense. Do you see the difference? There is something such as non-objective interrogation, and frequently there's no other alternative (you can't objectively justify the scientific method, for example). Also for the sake of internal consistency, I hope you hold the same position regarding, say, philosophy.
I assume you're referring to Zionism in your example, in which case you should know that Zionism was a secular ethnonationalist project, and that its leaders were predominantly atheist. These guys did not give a shit what the Torah said. It'd be generations after Ben Gurion that religion would be an important part of Israeli politics. Besides, there's nothing that can't be used as a justification for atrocities; blaming religion in particular is naive when you have an event called the Football War.
Ultimately you are formally correct (the best kind of correct).
But I think it is reasonable to assume the demand of objective evidence as foundational assumption to explore knowledge. I think that "I need objective evidence to warrant belief" bring about less baggage then "I need an uncreated eternal, unobservable, personal creator of universes with personal agency to justify my existence".