(June 20, 2014 at 7:25 am)One Above All Wrote:(June 19, 2014 at 11:42 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote: 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.
Nobody is asking them to assign a truth value to the question. We're asking them their opinion. Whether they say they won't assign a truth value is irrelevant. See my "car brand" analogy.
So when you ask if someone has an opinion, you're asking for a wild hunch? "If you had to guess, .."? That certainly is not what I have in mind when I ask for an opinion. I always assume that what someone thinks .. aka their opinion .. will either reflect something they belief is true or at least something true about them. It is a way to find out what matters to them. If I get the impression that they have a much lower regard for what they portray as their opinions, I generally stop asking.
