Atheists, what are your thoughts on us Agnostics?

[Thumpalumpacus]

It's the difference between judgement and knowledge. In my judgement, there are no gods. To my knowledge, I've seen no evidence.

Don't get me wrong, I can write off many of them by virtue of their claimed characteristics. I do that with the Abrahamic god, based on claimed qualities. Indeed, I write off most all of them because I think magic is horseshit, and they all seem to rely upon magic to work.

But do I know? No, I don't. What might seem to me to be magic might be another way of the Universe operating, and some religion somewhere might have something I don't know about.

In short, agnostic atheist is not my claim about the Universe, but my claim about myself.

That seems like a claim that I couldn't make without damaging my own self-esteem so while I know none of us possesses certain knowledge, and the ideas proposed are being sufficiently disproved every second by our growing scientific understanding, if gnosticism accounts for the majority of a subject matter, it feels wrong to adopt a label that favors the corollary more.

If that's what works for you, have a field day.

Me, I don't like to claim knowledge I don't have. I think that oftentimes (though not in this case of godlings and their ilk) certitude is an obstruction to learning. It doesn't hurt me to admit I don't know something. What it does is open me up to learning about that something. That doesn't mean I resign skepticism, it only means that I am skeptical about my own "knowledge" too. It doesn't hurt my self-esteem either, because I base that on who I am and not what I know.

I don't know that gnosticism accounts for the majority of the subject matter in this particular topic anyway. If there is a god or gods, I personally think there ain't a person walking who knows diddley-squat about 'em anyway. Rather than project my own feelings of self-esteem either way, I'm comfortable saying "I don't know, and I don't believe".

If you're not comfortable with that, don't do it.