A nice chart to help when people ask questions about where you stand
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.After quitting Catholicism, I started five agnostic decades. I finished college not knowing if a god existed and lived as if there was none. ( Forget the g-d plurals! )
One day, given an opportunity to choose atheism, I recalled no lightning bolts having struck nearby and started my atheist years. I found it necessary to consider details I had ignored. One of those details was evolution. I still live as if there is no god.
In this context I don’t use the word “believe”.
yvilletom
Level 8
Jan 6, 2022
3
Tom, atheism is not required to understand and accept the SCIENCE of evolution (and many other physical realities).
BELIEF based on faith is a completely different matter; that is, faith in either 'god' or 'no god.' Both are "belief systems" without any foundation, so are inherently invalid.
That diagram is over-simplistic. It ignores the the case where it is trivial to show that two particular gods cannot exist and that all other gods remain unevidenced.
anglophone
Level 9
Jan 6, 2022
2
The annoying term "gnostic atheist" conveys the thought that atheism is a belief system. It's just people admitting reality. Supernatural phenomena is an impossibility. Realizing that to be fact is not gnosticism.
barjoe
Level 9
Jan 6, 2022
1
Ok, joe, the term annoys you. It does not annoy me, ergo it is not annoying.
I still stand as an Agnostic Atheist. I don't believe anyone can be sure 100% either way whether there are or are not gods, but I 100% don't have any belief in god/s.
I do believe there are people who have 100% belief that there is a god (or are gods) that is/are real, and they can be sure of their belief, no matter what I think.
To me, gods are figments of the imagination, a mythological creature featured in a story to explain our place in this world. Fine when used as a literary character, but trouble when people start believing the character is real not the fictional image (perhaps) that was intended.
Julie808
Level 8
Jan 6, 2022
2
An agnostic does NOT "believe in" a god or gods. An agnostic doesn't "believe in" anything.
Storm1752
Level 8
Jan 6, 2022
1
Michael, my father was an authoritarian and put me in authoritarian schools. Losing the authoritarian ways he and they taught me took years.
@yvilletom I am a refugee from a fundamentalist authoritarian family myself. So I view a statement that there is no god/gods as equally authoritarian as the statement that god/gods do exist. The word agnostic literally translates as “without knowledge”. My stance is that I neither believe nor disbelieve something that can’t be proven with the senses that I have available.
@yvilletom I'm sorry to hear that, Tom. Now maybe you can get over your overreaction to that oppression, so that finally the pendulum can eventually rest in the non-belief middle. You see, ANY belief, when it comes to this subject matter, is misplaced.
Certainty at either extreme is impossible. Uncertainty is the only rational position.
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