Yeah... it depends entirely on what you mean by "know". If "know" means "possessing absolute certainty" then no one knows anything.

And of course, people can "know" things that are wrong; to avoid this you have to state that what they know must be true. But since no one knows what is true, it's an impossible and useless criteria.

I avoid calling myself a gnostic atheist simply because it does generally imply a level of absolute certainty. The nearest I can come to such certainty is announcing a logically inconsistent being cannot exist. If someone presents a case containing such inconsistencies, then their claim requires the laws of logic to be breakable to work. In such a case, they must abandon logic itself as unreliable and so can't make an argument at all.

In the casual use of the word "know", then I know there is no God. I don't actually know what a god is, but I have a reasonable idea what people think a god is, even if they can't describe it properly. And I "know" it's in their imagination only, as much as know anything at all.

Is it safe to say that we are all 100% gnostic atheist with respect to our crazy arse mate, the Abrahamic God?

(August 30, 2015 at 2:58 pm)Shuffle Wrote: Are there any gnostics on here, theists or otherwise? I know I have seen a couple on here, but I have forgotten exactly who.

Gnostic atheists seem very elusive to me, so talking to one would be interesting.

Thanks!

lmao @ gnostics.  one thing nice about most atheist I have met out in the real is that they know what they don't know.  But I would agree that abrahamic god has such a low weighted value that we can say "noper-zzzz."

(August 31, 2015 at 5:35 am)ignoramus Wrote: Is it safe to say that we are all 100% gnostic atheist with respect to our crazy arse mate, the Abrahamic God?

The character described cannot logically exist, no. If it was referring to a real entity, it would have to be an innacurate account. In all likelihood, it would be so innacurate as to not resemble it at all.

Having said that, most Christians' idea of what God and Jesus are like do not resemble the characters in the bible either. So even they don't believe in them.

(September 5, 2015 at 12:36 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote:

(August 30, 2015 at 4:26 pm)Shuffle Wrote: [hide]

Has anyone ever found any leprechaun crap?  No leprechaun crap = no leprechauns.  
If there's no elephant crap in your house it's a safe conclusion that there's not an elephant in your house.

Oh, um, I have already changed my mind during the duration of this thread.

Toward named fictional characters purported to be gods of the cosmos, I am a Gnostic Atheist. Virtually all of those things can be traced back to previous influences and/or disproved by definition and/or empiricism.


Toward anything more vague than that (higher powers, cosmic consciousness, deist creator beings, etc.), I am an Ignostic Atheist, which is to say that in those cases the term "god" is basically meaningless. It can't be described or scrutinized in any useful fashion, except to say that it defies all description and scrutiny. In this stripped-down form, god becomes the purest embodiment of "Argument from Ignorance." All it's really saying is "You cannot deny the existence of a thing I refuse to describe."

Cool, another player for team ig! Let's do the iggy dance!

Definitions are so important. I find that if you try and pin people down on what they actually mean by words, you'll find they've not given it much thought before and can't say anything meaningful. This saves twenty hours of debate in which the person uses multiple meanings for the same word, quite possibly without realising it.

(September 5, 2015 at 12:36 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote:

(August 30, 2015 at 4:26 pm)Shuffle Wrote: [hide]

Has anyone ever found any leprechaun crap?  No leprechaun crap = no leprechauns.  
If there's no elephant crap in your house it's a safe conclusion that there's not an elephant in your house.

Ahem...I've found leprechaun crap. Leprechaun is in my blood, so I actually hang out with them on the regular. Incidentally, they hide big pots of their crap at the end of rainbows; we used to do gold, but that sort of became a liability so we let the gold rumor stand and switched to pots of crap. We also like to hide nearby with additional crap to throw at people who come and discover that the pots contain crap and not gold. Leprechauns make pretty terrible people, honestly.

Really, I'm not even supposed to tell anyone, but most of you guys are skeptics so I doubt word will travel too far.