(February 1, 2020 at 12:52 pm)Yongy50 Wrote: I thought I would try out this forum and see how I get on.
I was a 'born again' Christian as a young person, but soon started questioning the faith, which seemed less and less credible. I lost it by the time I was 19. I had my 70th birthday last week, and don't miss it. I have no problem with moderate Christians like my own three daughters who don't seek to force it down the throats of others. I do have a problem with extreme Christians who use their faith as an excuse for bigotry like homophobia.
Not sure if you are familiar with Neil Degrasse Tyson, who is a famous scientist who rebooted Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" PBS series, in the mid 2000s. Neil would argue like you do, "I don't know, but neither do you."
It is splitting the baby and sounds nice on the issue of fairness to call oneself an "agnostic".
It is absolutely true that nobody knows what happens after death, or what came before the big bang, be it something or nothing.
But that agreement is as far as I go.
If you study the history of the word "agnostic" it is a made up word by Thomas Huxley. He coined it to mean "fence sitter" or to mean, "Not taking sides".
The problem with the history of that word is that it never existed in either the ancient Greek prefix "a" (without)or the ancient Greek suffix "gnosis"(knowledge).
It is certainly reasonable to say "I don't know".
But nobody starts a conversation with "I believe this, but I don't know".
So the only pragmatic way the word "agnostic" can work, is if it is put in front of "theist" or "atheist".
A "theist" is one who claims to absolutely know their particular god is real.
An agnostic theist, is one who leans to a god existing, but admits they are not sure.
The same can be said for an atheist.
One can lean to "off" but also admit they are not sure "off" is correct.
I myself however, am an agnostic atheist. I hold the "off" position currently, but admit the future is not written in stone.
There is no splitting the baby which Huxley falsely created the word "agnostic" to mean.
I view all God/god/gods/super natural claims CURRENTLY as "off". Until those claiming such things have irrefutable, universal scientific proof, I am not going to fense sit or blindly accept such claims.
There is also the argument against any god existing from the problem with infinite regress. If everything has a cause, then the claimed God had a cause, and it's God had a cause, and so on and so on.
But the vast majority of my rejection of the super natural is simple science. The age of our planet the fact it has had five mass extinction events in it's 4 billion year history. The fact that our current species has only been around 200,000 years out of that 4 billion years. The fact that our species has only been writing 10,000 years of that time. The fact that scientific technology only really took off 200 years ago. And we only got to the moon in 1969. Since then our species has put space probes out that are now outside or solar system.
If one is to claim an "all powerful" being, as a naked assertion, why the hell, if the claim is that you as a species are the center of the universe., wait 13.8 billion years to get arround to a 4 billion year old planet to get to our species?
It makes much more sense to me that "God"/god's" are nothing more than our species mental projection of fight or flight and our own desires to continue.
