Getting back to the OP, ...
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While we get back to the op, let's review some things Unknown Soldier has written since then on the question.
The op started with the question:
So are there any people who are "true" atheists?
Mathematically, that means is there at least 1 person out there in the Universe.
Later on, Unknown Soldier admitted a minimum of the following:
Some people may not be able to believe in God due to cognitive limitations like brain damage. (And I am tempted to offer some real-life examples!) Others may simply have never been exposed to the idea of a deity and therefore never seriously entertained the idea.
There are definitely people who exist who have brain damage. Sure, those people can believe many different kinds of things, including atheism, Christianity, Buddhism, Taosim, Magic Pink Ponyism. The ideas are not that related, but it's US's admission so I am going with it. Secondly, US said there are people who have never been exposed to the idea of a deity. This is certainly true. Indeed, early on, I gave US the example of babies. Babies are atheists. Babies exist. Q.E.D.
Now, of course, those things are trivial and not too much worth a discussion except for the fact that US had put forth such an absolutist kind of op post saying he wondered if any atheists at all (N>0) existed under the presumption that atheists may have a "wee" bit of theism inferred incorrectly from an assumption of exposure to the idea of theism. So, the trivial cases US was wrong were worth mentioning just to expose the assumptions and incorrect definitions.
Let's call the entire set of atheists
A.
Let's call the set of atheists who lack cognitive functioning to consider abstract notions such as a deity
B.
Let's call the set of atheists who were never exposed to the idea of a deity
C.
We call the remaining subset of atheists
D =
A -
B -
C.
US's new postings in context even if he does hyperbolically go back to talking about the entire set
A are about whether
D is a non-empty set.
BUT there is another nuance in what he had previously written....this section:
"...may simply have never been exposed to the idea of a deity and therefore never seriously entertained the idea"
to be discussed below...
to continue...
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... one way to interpret this strange talk of "thou shalt believe everything I prophesy" is that we have here a fanatical group of atheists running away from a truth they fear greatly. They may well fear "Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell." They might repress belief in that God because if He exists, then they are tragically wrong.
There are several atheists in the thread who have claimed membership in the set
D. Two off the top of my head are
bilby and
Rhea.
The claims and so-called evidence of a deity have been examined and concluded it is not to be taken seriously because it is laughable. They have both stated so. Contrast that to the later concession post: "Others may simply have never been exposed to the idea of a deity and therefore never seriously entertained the idea." The idea was never taken or believed because it was always contradictory, illogical, and counter-factual.
There is no alleged cognitive dissonance because there was never a belief. Consider that among the subset
D, there are such people who have never taken on the idea because it is illogical. They have said so. We can say the subset
D is non-empty and now we are done yet again with the question.
Unless...there is some reason to doubt Rhea, bilby, and others that somehow Christianity is so logical, non-contradictory, and factual that once one is exposed to it, some belief HAS to take hold.
The burden is on Unknown Soldier to prove this. It is an enormous burden because it's been discussed for decades and these things are proved. So he will have to show this in great detail over all the arguments.
What's left?
So if
E = the set of atheists such as bilby and Rhea who never believed in theism because they could not get past the illogical nature of it
then
F =
D -
E, is the remaining set of atheists exposed to theism and believing it at some time in their lives
What remains in question for Unknown Soldier, but not for his question, is people such as Unknown Soldier who allegedly have cognitive dissonance and cannot therefore consider themselves "true" atheists. Are there some subset within
F who were once exposed to Christianity so strongly that they have fears of Hell and cannot let go of an idea they may be wrong? Unknown says he is such a person. Let's take him at his word. He might or might not be a set of 1. No need to put this weirdness on anyone else.
So in the remaining putative set of
F, there is a subset of people who once had some belief in Christianity (or maybe some other Abrahamic religion). I should mention here that not every denomination of every variant of Abrahamic religion believes in a Hell. Some merely believe in a non-existence after death. So it appears this subset is even smaller than Unknown Soldier realizes.
That said, US hypothesizes this remaining subset of
F has a wee bit of belief due to fear of being wrong about an afterlife.
The problem with this claim is pretty much the same as the logical problem of Pascal's Wager. There are an infinite number of possible religions and when you consider how illogical they all are, there is no reason to pick one over the other and if you choose the wrong one, you either burn in Hell or you don't, depending on what other religions say. It's very silly.
Still, supposing that a person once took in a particular belief system such as a Christian denomination that believes in Hell. Supposing also that they find atheism to be far more logical but still harbor fears about the afterlife, they might as an alternative in their brain focus purely on what they learned from that denomination because they did not educate themselves on the myriad other wrong religions or the strength of the wrongness of that one. More likely than not, they'd not be claiming to be an atheist, but rather put themselves in a "Not Sure" category. BUT if for some weird reason they labeled themselves as an atheist, then they might also be in the same very small subset of people that Unknown Soldier is in.
Such very few people are a very different set of people than how Unknown Soldier made it out to be in his op...and there certainly are true atheists, quite a few different types.
