Agnostic Atheism? Your opinions..

[Whateverist]

On the subject of not being able to know, or making no claims-

No worries, I'll handle the making claims bit all day long. Mythical creatures do not exist for various reasons that can be handled individually. The "god" that can't be known, yay or nay, is not any god described in the major religious traditions of today or any other point in history. Those were all testable propositions. Yahweh is the god of eden , the flood, and exodus. The stories describe events which did not occur and attribute them to a being that does not exist.

Well if they're read as historical fact then you can definitely make a good argument against all this stuff. If the purpose of the stories is allegorical, then that would be beside the point.

It's not as though we cannot know whether or not unicorns or sasquatch or fairies or werewolves exist. Each creature has a description which can be assessed on the basis of known fact. Each is non-existent based upon what we know, not what we don't.

I don't think any magical creatures exist but I'm not going to waste my precious time trying to convince anyone of it. It is far too hard to demonstrate a negative, and if your audience believes the magic beasty is real then it will be impossible to sway them. Rationality only has the power we give it. Where it is withheld it won't work.

The same is true for gods. It isn't just a lack of evidence that disqualifies these creatures. It's a lack of evidence for and a mountain of evidence against. One could suggest that we have our facts wrong, fine, lead the way.

There is a lot of that (having our facts wrong) going around. I suspect we are actually constituted of two seats of consciousness. People like to say conscious and unconscious, but that is a little one sided in my opinion. Looked at another way, there is just the seat of consciousness in which we sit (seat one) and then there is the other seat of consciousness (seat two) which is embodied in our one body and interacts with the world for its preservation and god only knows what else. Seat two is qualitatively different from seat one but has evolved along side it to allow us to focus one particular tasks from seat one while remaining vigilant from seat two for threats and opportunities arising in the wider environment, the "big picture". It is the division of the brain into two hemispheres which makes this possible and it is an adaptive advantage that many creatures including at lest all birds and mammals share with us. The two hemispheres are linked but also separated by the corpus callosum, which is smaller in proportion to the mass of the brain in humans than in any other creature. It used to be thought that language and reasoning was completely contained on the left side which houses our seat of consciousness but that is no longer true. [For more information on the latest thinking on all this see the T.E.D. talk by Ian McGilchrist at http://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchris...brain.html ]

I suspect it is the essential otherness of this other seat of consciousness which provides the experiences which lead people to suspect a 'higher consciousness' or to experience a god 'moving in their lives'. Now if theists are able to effectively relate to their second seat of consciousness by way of a Christian overlay, where is the harm? I might feel more in common with them if they didn't, but I can't fault them for going with what works for them.

If this is an important component of the god-experience, then arguing against mythological stories really is pointless, except for those of us who are adverse to delusion.