(July 11, 2012 at 9:03 pm)Simon Moon Wrote:(July 11, 2012 at 8:59 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: I understand agnosticism root words comes "without knowledge", but it's common usage is "without belief something is either false or true".
As I said, using colloquial (common) meanings does not help these discussions.
You do understand that people can be agnostic about other claims than the existence of gods, right?
If you look at the words in the dictionary, Atheism is given:
1) The belief there is no God or gods
2) The disbelief in God or gods.
Which one came first? From what I know, 1) was the usage of people, 2) came after.
But this doesn't make 2 illegitimate.
Agnosticism originally meant to be without knowledge, but now it has a different usage as well. It refers to being without a stance towards God as well.
I know in Arabic, there are words that have different meanings given different context.
What you would be doing is a kin to saying "kaffer" doesn't mean disbeliever, it means "coverer", because original root words were "to cover".
Even though the most common usages for thousands and thousands of years is that it's "disbelief", we are going to ignore that, and say it means "coverer" because of root meaning.
It absolutely makes no sense.
