Can Someone be Simply "An Agnostic?"

[Whateverist]

Probably no one could be simply agnostic and nothing else at all. Surely you're an omnivore, vegetarian or carnivore. Politically you'd be somewhere on the liberal-conservative continuum. Then there is belief in god and as Rhyzo explained, you really do have some sort of belief one way or the other unless you've been extremely lucky and never heard the the word "god" before. I don't believe there are any but I'm not ready to argue for that in a rigorous way, nor am I motivated to dissuade anyone from belief.

[Jenny A]

For a very brief period (teen years) I thought of myself as a agnostic Christian. Meaning: I think the Christian God might possibly exist (doubtful but I will try to believe) but I'm not going to try to believe in any other gods and I'm certain no other gods exist.

These days I'm a gnostic Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Mormon, Zoroastrian (name your currently believed flavor or past myth) but a agnostic atheist. That is I'm open to proof there is a god of some sort, but the ones currently worshiped have been proven false.

[Rampant.A.I.]

I'd like to know: if agnosticism isn't a tenable position, why does ignosticism exist as a concept?

Is it possible to be opposed to irrational beliefs, and be actively critical in order to avoid them?

Is a belief for or against a proposition for which tenable evidence for or against is impossible, strictly rational?

If we can agree knowledge is a justified true belief, and beliefs are independent of knowledge; no matter how strongly a belief is held it only qualifies as knowledge if it is justified, is it strictly rational to hold beliefs for which justification is impossible?

[Rhizomorph13]

I'd like to know: if agnosticism isn't a tenable position, why does ignosticism exist as a concept?

Ignosticism is simply a re-branding of theological noncognitivism which says that the concept of God is so poorly defined as to be a meaningless concept and until someone presents a rational definition of God there is no need to even begin the discussion.

Is it possible to be opposed to irrational beliefs, and be actively critical in order to avoid them?

Yes.

Is a belief for or against a proposition for which tenable evidence for or against is impossible, strictly rational?

Yes, quite easily like the laws of logic. They are properly basic and you can't prove them without resorting to them as the structure for the proof.

If we can agree knowledge is a justified true belief, and beliefs are independent of knowledge; no matter how strongly a belief is held it only qualifies as knowledge if it is justified, is it strictly rational to hold beliefs for which justification is impossible?

Depends on what you mean by justification. According to what I think justifies a belief... no a belief without justification is not rational.

[Ravenshire]

I really don't think people can be just agnostic when talking about religion. Some make the claim but i think in most cases it's to avoid the perceived baggage that atheism carries with it or it's ignorance of what the term actually means. Gnosticism concerns knowledge. Belief plays in somewhere. At the end of the day, either you believe or you don't.

[Faith No More]

...I'm beginning to suspect that English is not your first language.
My post didn't imply that you should have placed a comma there. Quite the opposite, it inferred that, because I assumed you had missed a comma, I couldn't see the proper meaning of your post, which wasn't missing any relevant punctuation.
But, you know, call me an asshole for not understanding what I said. Whatever works for you.

Don't mind him. He thinks that if he's a big enough cunt towards atheists, that makes him better than atheists that are cunts towards Christians.

[One Above All]

Don't mind him. He thinks that if he's a big enough cunt towards atheists, that makes him better than atheists that are cunts towards Christians.

I don't usually mind people who can't understand what I'm saying due to their own idiocy, so it's OK.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

So just because some con man is sitting under a tree and comes up with the idea for a god the rest of the dummies are expected to believe him? Think about all of the attributes any god is supposed to have, according to the con man. Now pick any of the gods http://www.graveyardofthegods.org/deadgo...fgods.html. What evidence do you have that any of them existed? Countless millions of dummies believed in them. Where's Isis? Where's Zeus or Beaver Doctor?

[Mr Greene]

For a very brief period (teen years) I thought of myself as a agnostic Christian. Meaning: I think the Christian God might possibly exist (doubtful but I will try to believe) but I'm not going to try to believe in any other gods and I'm certain no other gods exist.

These days I'm a gnostic Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Mormon, Zoroastrian (name your currently believed flavor or past myth) but a agnostic atheist. That is I'm open to proof there is a god of some sort, but the ones currently worshiped have been proven false.

I'm familiar with the evidence against monotheism. What evidence have you seen regarding Hinduism that proves their gods false?

[MindForgedManacle]

I think one can be strictly an agnostic. I think many theists and atheists online are guilty of trying to claim more people as being on their side. For example, some theists will pounce on weak or agnostic atheists and imply that those individuals are halfway back to theism, since they're not really atheists and thereby imply some illegitimacy to those individuals. However, atheists (including many here) play a similar game (and to be fair, I used to as well). You'll argue something like the following:

Atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of gods. Since agnosticism deals purely with knowledge, any supposedly strictly agnostic person is actually an atheist.


But I find this game to be silly. So firstly, what exactly is meant by a "lack of belief"? It's clearly supposed to mean "to not believe", or simply disbelief. My first irritation with that definition is that it's clearly a desperate attempt by my fellow atheists to codify the claim that atheists have no burden of proof, and there's no need to do so. After all, who the hell speaks of "lacking belief" in anything else? Do you tell people you lack belief in Santa Claus, or do you simply say you don't believe in him?

Secondly, I think I would actually characterize atheism as the belief that "no gods exist" or that "theism is false" (or most probably false). The reason for this when one considers a proposition's truth value, there are a few possible positions:

1) True
2) Probably true
3) Indeterminable
4) Probably false
5) False


So for clarity, imagine the above 5 positions w/respect to the the proposition "Does God exist?" Now, think about this "merely a lack of belief" brand of atheism and which it can meaningfully apply to. Clearly it can indeed apply to #'s 3,4 & 5. However, atheists that use this definition are often equivocating. When someone asks you "Are you an atheist?", they are clearly asking for your position on the question of the existence of God/gods. Ignoring this very obvious fact just comes up against a linguistic wall. Atheism has, like all other words, gained its "meaning" from its usage, and that usage has been that people by and large use atheism to refer to those who reject the existence of God/gods, and agnosticism to mean those individuals who abstain from assigning a truth value to the question of the divine, usually because they view it as unanswerable.

I'll say more if asked or questioned, but this is getting longer than I initially planned.