RE: Who are your favorite current Atheists?
March 21, 2015 at 5:55 pm
(This post was last modified: March 21, 2015 at 5:57 pm by Brian37.)
(March 20, 2015 at 7:56 pm)Esquilax Wrote:(March 20, 2015 at 7:32 pm)Delicate Wrote: I liked Carl Sagan.
But he wasn't an atheist. He was agnostic.
Do you happen to know anything about the roots of either of those words? A-theist, meaning without theism, and a-gnostic, from the root word gnossis, meaning knowledge. The former denotes what you believe, the latter what you claim to know; under an actual understanding of the words, Sagan was both an atheist and an agnostic, as are a lot of us here. Sagan misunderstood what atheism was.
Why do people, and Neil Degrasse Tyson does this too, why do people have such a problem with "agnostic atheist"?
There is a time frame issue people are not taking into account here.
Past present and future. Everyone, even if from a "technical" or "semantic" sense have to admit they are "agnostic' about what we have yet to uncover.
But as far as past and present god claims they are atheists. If you lack a believe in a god or gods you are an atheist.
I am a strong atheist as far as the future. So far it is not pointing to god being a requirement so my safe bet is that we can scrap it without losing sleep. Although "technically" only, we don't know.
You can also be an "agnostic theist" meaning you hold the belief that there is some type of god but admit "technically" you don't know.
If they ever build a time machine I would use it to go back in time and kick Thomas Huxley in the fucking nuts for coining such a fucked up word.
"agnostic" is trying to treat both on and off as a middle ground at the same time.
"a" is the Greek prefix for "without" "gnostic" is the Greek suffix for knowledge. "without knowledge" does not tell us what you are claiming to be without knowledge of. So "agnostic" has to be put in front of theist or atheist to have any meaning.
You can be on or off in regards to the past or present, but you cannot be both at the same time. If you lack a belief in the past or current god claims you are an atheist "without god" and still be open "agnostic" about the future.
I am myself only "technically" agnostic about the future and even in that I am not going to worry about god claims because right now science is saying it isn't a requirement.
Agnostics who do not believe in a god are merely atheists without the nerve to call themselves an atheist. There is nothing wrong with "agnostic atheist". I think that comes from a position of worrying too much about the history of stigma of the word.
