(April 5, 2018 at 10:20 am)Mister Agenda Wrote:FatAndFaithless Wrote:Sure, but saying "I'm just an agnostic" doesn't make any real sense, if you're asking them the simple question "do you believe it's true that a god exists?". Agnostic simply means they don't think it can be known - but they're not being asked about knowledge. Just seems that the people who say "I'm just an agnostic" are simply averse to the label "atheist" for whatever reason. And the messiness of the term atheism can give them a reason.
Some people who say they are agnostic will also say they believe there's 'Something' with a capital S, a higher being or reality of some sort, they just acknowledge that they're not in a position to be able to define it, or even know that it's real, but they still believe. Or they may even believe in a particular version of God while acknowledging that rational justification of the belief is impossible. I went through that as a phase after I stopped being a Christian.
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people use agnostic that way, but the word itself isn't about what someone believes, it's a question about the knowability of that Something, whether or not we can have knowledge about it. It just rankles my futile hope of having clear, accurate labels that are used consistently. I've said many times before on here that I don't hold labels as something genuinely vital, but damn it would be nice to have shortcuts. Because the situation now is two people can say "I am an atheist" and mean two fundamentally different things, and then two other people hearing these statements will take that to mean many fundamentally different things.
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
- Thomas Jefferson