Comment Re:Atheism vs. agnosticism (Score 1) 1570
Ben:
Yes, thank you. You are making the same argument that I would have just a few years ago. I don't think there's anything wrong with your argument and I for over 20 years had the exact same argument (I'm 51 now). However, after living in Colorado Springs for seven years and then eight years of the religious right running this country, I've spent a lot of time examining what I really believe and where the definitions of words such as theist, agnostic, and atheist come from. It's the study and thinking about it all that made me chose the word atheist to define myself. Dawkins has a chart in his book The God Delusion that shows a scale from -9 to +9 with Theists at the negative side of the scale and atheists at the positive. Very few atheists would call themselves absolutely sure +9 atheists--and I suspect more but not the majority of theists would call themselves -9 theists.
People try to break agnosticism into hard and soft and the same with hard and soft atheists. I don't think it breaks so easy. A soft agnostic believes that we can't know and won't know whether there is a god. That's not me, and I don't think it's the position that most "self-professed" agnostics take. A hard agnostic doesn't know if there is a god, but has no more belief in one than he does the tooth fairy or Thor. That is me and that is the position taken by the vast majority of us who call ourselves atheists. There are many theists that want to set-up the non-belief in a deity as an absolute. That is a straw-man argument, and I and other atheists will stand against it and should just as much as people stand against misuse of the word liberal.
Now to mention some names: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Stephen Gould, and Carl Sagan. They all call(ed) themselves atheists, the religious right calls them atheists, and they all call(ed) themselves atheists, but they all belived in the possibility of a God. If I have to follow your definition they are really agnostics. I, however, chose to follow the definition of my fellow atheists and ignore the definition that theists are trying to thrust upon us. Now I don't care if you prefer to call yourself agnostic and use that word to describe yourself. You and I believe the same and I like you a lot for that. I do care when you try to make me and my fellow thinkers into something we're not. We don't deny they possibility of a god and we're not a religion. Those definitions are denegrating and make me unhappy. I'll use the old argument that if atheism is a religion then bald is a hair color. The lack of belief is not a belief.
Oh and you ask what I call people who are sure there is no god (not who believe there is no god): I call them kooks, just like the people who are sure there is a god. Atheism is not a bad word it describes a lot of rational, thinking people. Please don't joing the side of the theists and accept their definition of us
People try to break agnosticism into hard and soft and the same with hard and soft atheists. I don't think it breaks so easy. A soft agnostic believes that we can't know and won't know whether there is a god. That's not me, and I don't think it's the position that most "self-professed" agnostics take. A hard agnostic doesn't know if there is a god, but has no more belief in one than he does the tooth fairy or Thor. That is me and that is the position taken by the vast majority of us who call ourselves atheists. There are many theists that want to set-up the non-belief in a deity as an absolute. That is a straw-man argument, and I and other atheists will stand against it and should just as much as people stand against misuse of the word liberal.
Now to mention some names: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Stephen Gould, and Carl Sagan. They all call(ed) themselves atheists, the religious right calls them atheists, and they all call(ed) themselves atheists, but they all belived in the possibility of a God. If I have to follow your definition they are really agnostics. I, however, chose to follow the definition of my fellow atheists and ignore the definition that theists are trying to thrust upon us. Now I don't care if you prefer to call yourself agnostic and use that word to describe yourself. You and I believe the same and I like you a lot for that. I do care when you try to make me and my fellow thinkers into something we're not. We don't deny they possibility of a god and we're not a religion. Those definitions are denegrating and make me unhappy. I'll use the old argument that if atheism is a religion then bald is a hair color. The lack of belief is not a belief.
Oh and you ask what I call people who are sure there is no god (not who believe there is no god): I call them kooks, just like the people who are sure there is a god. Atheism is not a bad word it describes a lot of rational, thinking people. Please don't joing the side of the theists and accept their definition of us
