Atheist or Agnostic?

[Mister Agenda]

Only if you are a "gnostic" are you ineluctably moved toward belief by evidence either for or against God's existence.

That's not what 'gnostic' is about. It's about believing you can know something with certainty that an agnostic on the topic would say is impossible to know with certainty. It's no more difficult to change a gnostic atheist's or theist's position than to change an agnostic's, maybe easier. What's hard is also often brittle. This is just a personal observation without statistics to back it up, but I sure run into a lot of atheists who used to be hardcore fundamentalists who were definitely gnostic theists who were utterly certain of God's reality. And it seems more often than not that when I hear of an atheist who converted back to a religion (almost always the one they were raised in), they were the type to be certain about the nonexistence of God. My 'evidence' is the weakest of anecdotal weak sauce, but there's definitely no indication that gnostic certainty results from being evidence-oriented in either direction.

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It most certainly does have such value, because if God exists, then it makes sense to pay heed to Him in your own personal life. If God does not exist, then it makes sense to ignore everything that claims divinity.

I mean, are you as though autistic toward God? Even if God existed, you'd consider Him irrelevant? If the speculative question of whether God exists has been settled, say, in favor of God, would you still refuse to interact with God? That seems crazy, at least like not paying attention to other human beings.

You're skirting around the argument from Pascal's Wager. The consequences of not believing in God are so frought, one ought to believe just in case. If I said the consequences of not sending me a thousand dollars would be for all your family and close friends to be brutally murdered, you would still not send me the money, despite the claimed consequences and despite knowing that such a thing is actually possible. Why? Because you need more evidence to believe it's a credible threat. And the degree of the threat is pretty much irrelevant. You're no more likely to send me a thousand dollars if threaten to blow up a city if you don't than you would based on the previous (both for example only, of course) threat. It doesn't matter to someone what the consequences of something are supposed to be unless they already believe those consequences to be something they will actually face.

If God's existence were confirmed, there would still be the matters of God's nature, desires, plan, etc. If God's existence were confirmed, but rather than a singular God it tuned out to be the Greek pantheon, would you automatically start worshipping the Greek gods instead of Jesus and Yahweh or would you have to seriously reevaluate everything you believe in light of the new information before choosing your new course or electing to stick with the old one?

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I mean, are you as though autistic toward God? Even if God existed, you'd consider Him irrelevant? If the speculative question of whether God exists has been settled, say, in favor of God, would you still refuse to interact with God? That seems crazy, at least like not paying attention to other human beings.

You are a catholic, aren't you? I grew up as a catholic too and one of my first steps towards atheism - still as a child - was to think, I don't like that guy they're talking about in church and in the bible. For me god was petty, a schoolyard bully, shoving people around and killing them. And to top it off, he shoves you into the eternal oven if you don't play nice.

So I didn't want to worship a being like that and thought, well, if there's an almighty god, he's certainly nothing like in the bible. I didn't give a shit anymore and lived my life trying to be a decent person, but not because of god. For a pretty long time I have been a deist, thinking maybe there's something out there making things tick. But certainly not something looking into everyone's bedroom and counting the times you masturbate. Being a deist also didn't conflict with my education in the same way theism does, since I didn't have to believe in that preposterous claim of the earth only being a few thousand years old and mankind poofing into existence.

Yeah, I know, the Catholic church is moving away from that too, but that doesn't change the contradictions between science and dogma. So, to repeat myself, I'm agnostic because I can't rule out with absolute certainty that some force is moving the universe. But that doesn't have to be any kind of god. A few thousand years ago, people looked up at the sun and the moon and since they couldn't explain them, they called them gods. The classical god of the gaps reaction. Who knows, what we will know about the universe in another ten thousand years? If we still exist as a species, that is.

My path was similar, though from Pentecostalsim rather than Catholicism, and after more than a decade of holding space in my head for some kind of God, I realized one day that I no longer believed in God at all, partly because I no longer believed it was close-minded not to believe something of which you're not convinced.