Durian Fiend - Soft and Hard atheism. I don't see much difference in the two, other than the former sounds unmanly. 
While the two camps have other names like Weak vs Strong, and Negative vs Positive, I've tended to stick with Soft vs Hard when talking to bold atheists, as it does seem the atheist's Soft claim of "I think there are no gods" vs the Hard claim of "There are no gods" appears to lack a certain, ahem, vigor.
DF - Obviously no one can prove no god or gods exist.
You would think so right? And yet there are all sorts of Atheists going around trying to do exactly that. As MyManao kinda pointed out, there are fanatics on all sides of the claims about the existence of gods.
MyManao - how do you reconcile your new found beliefs in the Bible which posits that the Earth is only 6,000 years old with the courses you teach in geology where the Earth is billions of years old?' And he replied, with a straight face no less, 'God made old rocks.’
Ah, the good old Omphalos hypothesis or Last Thursdayism. I always like to think of this as God booting up a Universe Simulator in their mind, hitting Enter, and with a Big Bang things are off and running, with an expanding universe forming galaxies and stars with planets possessing geological processes, weather systems, and decaying nucleotides, all sorts of life emerging, evolving, dying off and being fossilized, asteroids impacting and glaciers retreating, until just before the start of human civilization, God cuts and pastes all this from their mind into reality fully formed and things just continue on seamlessly from there to here.
The real noodle-scratcher is if there is any way to figure out that this isn't exactly what happened?
TomK - I can't make any sense of this
I'm not sure why you choose to go ten rounds with Julie over her perfectly cromulent sentences, accomplishing nothing more than demonstrating your personal confusion and belligerence. There is nothing semantically or grammatically wrong with her post IMO, it just requires keeping the original context of my statement in mind when running through her multiple clauses, a sentence structure common to legal paperwork and some fiction. (Want a real challenge in maintaining and shifting contexts? Try Faulkner's 1288 word sentence or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where just one of hundreds of footnotes goes on for 30 pages.)
While we could stop to consider if the fact that the confusion you're experiencing TomK is only in your mind, and not on the page, makes it any less real, it's probably best that we at least finish current business by you answering the question at the heart of being an atheist - do gods exist?
While the two camps have other names like Weak vs Strong, and Negative vs Positive, I've tended to stick with Soft vs Hard when talking to bold atheists, as it does seem the atheist's Soft claim of "I think there are no gods" vs the Hard claim of "There are no gods" appears to lack a certain, ahem, vigor.
DF - Obviously no one can prove no god or gods exist.
You would think so right? And yet there are all sorts of Atheists going around trying to do exactly that. As MyManao kinda pointed out, there are fanatics on all sides of the claims about the existence of gods.
MyManao - how do you reconcile your new found beliefs in the Bible which posits that the Earth is only 6,000 years old with the courses you teach in geology where the Earth is billions of years old?' And he replied, with a straight face no less, 'God made old rocks.’
Ah, the good old Omphalos hypothesis or Last Thursdayism. I always like to think of this as God booting up a Universe Simulator in their mind, hitting Enter, and with a Big Bang things are off and running, with an expanding universe forming galaxies and stars with planets possessing geological processes, weather systems, and decaying nucleotides, all sorts of life emerging, evolving, dying off and being fossilized, asteroids impacting and glaciers retreating, until just before the start of human civilization, God cuts and pastes all this from their mind into reality fully formed and things just continue on seamlessly from there to here.
The real noodle-scratcher is if there is any way to figure out that this isn't exactly what happened?
TomK - I can't make any sense of this
I'm not sure why you choose to go ten rounds with Julie over her perfectly cromulent sentences, accomplishing nothing more than demonstrating your personal confusion and belligerence. There is nothing semantically or grammatically wrong with her post IMO, it just requires keeping the original context of my statement in mind when running through her multiple clauses, a sentence structure common to legal paperwork and some fiction. (Want a real challenge in maintaining and shifting contexts? Try Faulkner's 1288 word sentence or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where just one of hundreds of footnotes goes on for 30 pages.)
While we could stop to consider if the fact that the confusion you're experiencing TomK is only in your mind, and not on the page, makes it any less real, it's probably best that we at least finish current business by you answering the question at the heart of being an atheist - do gods exist?