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So you'd be a deist if you were religious, but you're an atheist: you lack a belief in god. Everyone's agnostic; to my mind it's largely a nothingness position.
No - I'm not sure and those percentages can and do shift. I might say I was primarily atheist if I was 75% sure, but at 55% sure - well I'm not going to say I'm an atheist.
Though I think you're right to an extent on the nothingness position - many agnostics just say they're agnostic because they haven't thought about it. I'm probably in a minority who have thought about it and come to the definite conclusion I actually am agnostic - I literally do not know whether God exists or not.
You could of course argue that all but the most hardline atheists would accept they would change there position if God was proved to exist, so strictly speaking they're agnostics. But surely that would be true for religious people as well and they'd no longer believe in God if he was proved not to exist. In which case everyone from Dawkins to the Archbishop of Canterbury is agnostic. I don't actually accept that argument, however.
Hmm, I dunno. The problem with what you say there is that it is impossible to disprove the existence of anything. There are plenty of gods that people have believed in that have been disproved, but people don't stop believing in a god, they just change their definition to one that doesn't infringe on our current understanding of the universe (or they carry on believing and insist that the science must be wrong, which is you get with the creationists, et all). So God caused earthquakes, but now we know what causes earthquakes, so God doesn't cause earthquakes any more, he just created the physical conditions that led to a planet that has earthquakes.
Whereas I think with your average atheist, there would be one of two options. Either they would believe in a god because the evidence suggests it, or they would believe in whatever "it" was, but possibly deny that it is a god for philosophical reasons (because the definition of god is probably the only thing that is more flexible than the definition of atheist and agnostic), even if for all intents and purposes it is something that roughly corresponds to what religions have been banging on about for all this time. But it's hard to predict something like that, and it's hard to imagine as something as apparently infinite as a god would come to light in the lifetime of a single scientist.
The rough percentages are just their as an illustration to show where my belief lies. Its very seldom that you can be in the exact centre or not have an opinion. But yeah its semantic BS
I'm not sure I'm saying its possible to disprove the existence of anything. It is after all perfectly possible to prove William the Conqueror existed or that the computer I'm typing on exists. If I didn't there lies skepticism which seems to be the path to madness.
I am saying that you cannot proof or disproof the existence of God, Gods, a higher plane, or whatever. At least with our current knowledge - science has neither proved or disproved God. I think it is perfectly possible that God (at let's try and keep this simple by sticking to the Judeo-Chrisitian-Moslem single deity) would design a world which was logical and followed laws of Science (and possibly laws of Science he put in place another God may have created different laws of physics) and that he created the physical conditions. It may be possible that fossils were put in place to test our faith. It's also possible that we're just a freak biological miracle. Anyone who claims to have the answer is arguing with a philosophical bent not a scientific one (even if they happen to be scientists)
You're right in that I would think the only sensible position is to be agnostic, but I would say that wouldn't I?
Using historical figures provides a good analogy. We don't know for certain whether or not Plato existed, for example. We're all technically Plato agnostic - gnosticism and agnosticism speaking to what you know. But who really cares about certainty, especially any kind of absolute certainty? I suspect people in the field of mathematics, maybe.
I'm interested in what you believe. What you think is likely true and likely false. I'm an agnostic atheist, in the strictest sense; I don't know there's no god, but I don't hold a belief in one. If you have a belief in god you're a theist/deist, anything else you're an atheist - be it strong or weak as cited earlier. You can play with percentages to try muddy the water, and use "brain and heart knowing" to do so further, but at the end of the day you either believe in a god or gods, or you don't.
ETA: I've just re-read this post and it sounds a bit curt. It's not meant to be. The questions are genuine.
But we can be more certain about major historical figures (at least those for whom we have documentary evidence - for Robin Hood or Arthur is does become conjecture). Now you can take the pure skepticism argument in that we can't proof I'm not in a dream from which I'll wake up and you'll all disapear. But if you put that interesting philosophical quandry to one side I think most people can say there's some things which are easier to proof or disprove than other things - I can proof the existence of David Cameron by pointing to a TV screen, I can disproof that Gordon Brown is still Prime Minister by posting a link to his resignation. It's a lot harder to to disproof or proof God.
You also put it as an either/or question which is true if the question is whether there is a God, they're either is or there isn't. However people's beliefs are more nuanced and I honestly don't know whether I believe in God or not. I suppose you could say I'm an atheist hoping for Faith or a monotheist riven with doubt; as I fluctuate between both these positions I'd call myself an agnostic.
PS - don't worry about the curtness, I didn't take it as rude - whilst sometimes religous debates can descend into bickering, you, me and IWS may have just lifted this one from the gutter.
in esence its denying god but denying is also believing in something so imo it is a religon
Atheism annoys me in one big way lately:
There's a linux command that shows you a random quotation from several that are saved in a file. The command is "fortune". If you run it as "fortune -o", it picks a quotation from the ones that have been marked as "offensive".
Doing so used to lead to you getting a dirty limerick or joke and I used to do that often. But lately it most often gives entire paragraphs of text written by atheists explaining why religion is stupid. They're not offensive, only boring.
They took my fun away. >:(
For contemporaneous people it’s fairly easy to establish their existence. Like you said, in the age of digital media we can point to a video or a picture of the person; you even can look them up online on read their published works. As you start to head further back in time, however, lots of these evidences start to drop away, and you become ever more reliable on evidence which isn’t so clear-cut, eroding any real notion of certainty. At this point you move into the realm of belief, one which I think is akin to the question of deities and religion. Once you’ve gone as far back as people like Plato, you have to be Plato-agonstic – whether that be an “I don’t know” or “it’s impossible to know” agnosticism. But as I’ve said before, that’s not really interesting or informative. You can be presented with the arguments for and against the existence of Plato, and you may end up thinking “crikey, I’ve not really been convinced either way”, at which point you’re an a-plato-ist (or whatever it’d be
If you fluctuate between the positions then that’s not agnosticism as I understand it. At any given time you’ll either hold the belief that god exists, or you won’t. Now I suspect that you’re not quite as volatile on this question as you’ve suggested, but I appreciate you taking that position for the sake of the argument.
Here’s hoping.
If there's a hell I'm most certainly going to it. My sins of self-love are on their own enough to buy me an eternity.
Answering the initial question-no, I don't think Atheism is a religion(obviously depending on your definition of religion). I believe it was recently voted to be a religion in America, but only so that Atheists get equal rights to theists or something.
It's also not a belief system as others have mentioned, there is nothing to have faith in. To use the old example it's a religion or a belief system in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Whilst I believe that the whole agnosticism/gnosticism debate is largely about semantics, it seems a little futile as well. The vast majority of atheists would, I think, happily admit that they would change their view on the subject if compelling evidence for a deity was presented to them.
So you can claim that we cannot absolutely know whether a deity exists or not, and that is true, but it seems almost like a null statement. You might as well work on what is most likely to be true. And as there has been no evidence for the divine, I would make no claims as to the nature of it.
I have always been a skeptic concerning religon. But found personal testimonies like these quite convincing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXwpHktYmQs
Due to coming across so many stories of either modern miracles or else people have strong religous experiences I became a firm believer quite some time ago now.
I feel there simply has to be a lot of truth in the idea of an all powerful God given the vast amount of religous personal experiences people have had.
Don't think so
Ghosts? Don't be so ridiculous. Now Paul the psychic octopus, on the other hand.....
I disagree.
I don't believe there is a God is not the same as I believe there is no God.
One is disbelief / skepticism (e.g. if you say you have £1000 in your wallet, I might be skeptical and not believe you), the other is denial (me actively believing there is not £1000 in your wallet). This contrasts to a belief, where I believe you absolutely that there is £1000 in your wallet - I have faith in you. Not having that faith doesn't mean I necessarily believe you are definitely lying.
There are plenty of people who do believe there is no God (e.g., deny God's existence), but that doesn't mean all Atheists deny the existence of any God - many just don't actively believe that any kind of God does exist.
If all As are Bs it does not imply that all Bs are As.
I love that octopus!