Can Someone be Simply "An Agnostic?"

[MindForgedManacle]

I lack belief in deities. Am I supposed to prove that I lack belief in deities?

Let me try to be more clear: Atheism is mostly regarded as the belief that no gods exist. Sure, people who are atheists do lack belief in the existence of God, but that's an incidental property (i.e it has nothing to do with atheism). Likewise, 0 is not a positive number, but that doesn't make it a negative number simply because it lacks positivity.

I class myself as 6.9 on the Dawkins Scale Of Theistic Probability. There are so many different concepts of what the deities are that somebody's concept could turn out to be describing reality. All I need is proof that somebody's concept actually is reality.

I think I'd say "agnostic" describes you better then, or maybe a weak atheist (although even the latter label has problems).

There's plenty of evidence that deities exist as subjective experiences produced by the brain, but then, all our experiences are produced by the brain. My own brain produces subjective experiences of pagan deities and I have learned how to tune into what I call New Age perception in order to have such experiences. Apollo turned up in a dream a few years ago. I had an experience of The Goddess on May Day and, when I tuned in again over the solstice, it was the Horned God of Wicca. As Christians can have subjective experiences of Jesus or the God of the Bible, does it mean every deity people have believed in are objective realities? It would be very difficult for the monotheistic God of Judaism/Christianity/Islam to exist as well as every other deity.

Of course our experiences sre produced by our brains, I would never make the argument that such was a cogent argument against theism or divine experiences.

Is theism false? Maybe it depends on how one is defining theism - Symbolism Of Hindu Deities

The Vedic deities symbolize the forces in nature as well as inside human beings. While discussing the symbolic significance of Vedic deities in his The Secret of the Vedas, Rishi Aurobindo says that the gods, goddesses and demons mentioned in the Vedas represent various cosmic powers, on one hand and man's virtues and vices on the other.

Idol worship and rituals are at the heart of Hinduism have great religious and philosophical significance. All Hindu deities are themselves symbols of the abstract Absolute, and point to a particular aspect of the Brahman. The Hindu Trinity is represented by three Godheads: Brahma - the creator, Vishnu - the protector and Shiva - the destroyer.

Unlike the followers of any other religion, Hindus enjoy the freedom of worshipping their personally chosen icon to offer their prayers to the indefinable Brahman. Each deity in Hinduism controls a particular energy. These energies, present in man as wild forces must be controlled and canalized fruitfully to infuse a divine consciousness in him. For this, man has to gain the goodwill of different gods who stir up his consciousness accordingly to help him master the different forces of nature. In a person's path of spiritual progress, he or she needs to develop the various attributes of these godheads in him or her to attain all-round spiritual perfection.

This makes sense from the point of view of Jungian psychology which I've been using for around 30 years. Brahman is absolute reality. What, exactly, is absolute reality, though, and does it qualify as God?

Hindusim is thousands of years old so who knows what it really started out as.

So there you are. I know that Apollo, The Goddess and The Horned God exist as personal subjective experiences but I lack belief that they, or any other deity, exist as objective realities. I shall continue to lack that belief unless science can prove that my lack of belief is wrong.

Okay.