(May 19, 2016 at 2:14 pm)AgnosticMan123 Wrote:(May 19, 2016 at 2:03 pm)The_Empress Wrote: They're not mutually exclusive terms. I am an agnostic atheist.
A/gnosticism has to do with knowledge; A/theism has to do with belief.
By agnostic I meant I am neither a believer nor disbeliever that there is a God. To me maybe there is a God and maybe there isn't.
Can you persuade me that there isn't a God?
You are using a colloquial, and inaccurate, definition of agnostic. The formal definition is "someone that does not know, or believes it is possibly unknowable, if a god exists or not".
There is no middle ground between belief and disbelief. "Belief' is an "on-off" mental state. Either you accept a premise to be true (belief), or you do not accept the premise to be true (disbelief).
Agnosticism and atheism are answers to different questions.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
