Systematically Dismantling Atheism

[bennyboy]

And what if someone is neither theist nor atheist, but is agnostic?

IDK, it would be difficult to establish that such a person exists. An -hardcore- apatheist maybe (though even this isn;t quite the same)? A super neutral neutral. Someone who really can't say with confidence whether they believe or not. They claim no knowledge -about their own beliefs/lack thereof-. Might be folks like that, never met any myself. You?

(seems to me that it might be a case of the ole "not everything we imagine exists", particularly, not every type of person we imagine actually has a representative in reality)

I am one, and I can explain why. I think reality transcends language-- and language breaks down long before you reach the truth. I believe that there's something deeper to the universe, something that makes sentience, for example, possible or even necessary. Some missing piece of the puzzle is lurking just behind everything I experience-- like a canvas under a painting.

But what is this, and what would it be called? Is it an entity with a name? A philosophical principle? Just an idea? A singularity?

I think if people ever come into contact with a deeper sense of that, whatever it is, they must necessarily have experiences that will be indescribable by words, and that they must therefore resort to metaphor. Words like "God" and "reality," I think, mean very little at the boundary conditions of our human experience-- frankly, I don't think we have the apparatus to tell one from the other. All we can do is scratch our heads, stare in the mirror, and try to figure out who that bald monkey looking back at us is.

That's why I'm agnostic-- I believe that whatever underlies reality could be CALLED God if you chose to, but I know that when most people ask the question, they're not talking about that-- they're talking about an obvious fiction. So I'm not willing to take a position, other than "I don't know what you're asking about, and neither do you." And if the question is not found to be defined, then how is one to take a position on it, one way or the other?