Can Someone be Simply "An Agnostic?"

[MindForgedManacle]

When it comes to religious position, I am asking for the truth about them; specifically, what they believe in. Agnosticism is not saying "I do/do not believe", therefore it is meaningless as a term to describe belief. Agnosticism (and its counterpart, gnosticism) are used to describe certainty. What self-proclaimed agnostics are trying to do is say "I don't believe, but I don't not believe either", which is utter bullshit. You can't "not believe" but also "not not believe". It's meaningless and makes no sense.

This is nonsense, and is the equivocation I mentioned earlier. Agnosticism isn't even about certainty per se, it's about the supposed inability to justify a position for or against the God/gods proposition. After all, I can still be uncertain about things I know to be true. For example, 99 × 99 = 9801, but whenever I recall that bit of knowledge, I always have some sneaking suspicion that I'm misremembering or am wrong.


As I said before, I'd say that atheism is clearly the belief that no gods exists. Agnostics are NOT saying "We neither believe nor don't believe", they're saying something like "We think the question (or our circumstances) are such that supporting or opposing the proposition of the existence of gods is unjustifiable." What you and other atheists are doing is like the following:


1
0
-1

"Oh, well since 0 isn't a positive number, we'll call it a negative number!"

It's true to say that zero isn't a positive number, but not being a positive number does not entail being a negative number. You're just conflating two different positions by describing what they have in common, and then basing your definition of atheism on that. You're saying supposedly strictly agnostic people are atheists since they're not theists. This is just a shell game.