Subject:
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Re: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 26 Jul 2004 16:21:08 GMT
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Viewed:
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2431 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Eaton wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
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Okay, okay, I’ll buy that. But in casual conversation and in debates in
general, can you give me a term to use that will be as readily understood as
“atheist?”
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What’s wrong with “agnostic”?
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I dislike that term because it’s often seen as too wishy-washy, or a way to
hedge one’s bet. It can also carry a connotation of undecidedness, due not to a
lack of evidence but a lack of conclusion. Additionally, if you say “I’m an
agnostic” to 100 people on the street, I’d guess that better than 90 of them
would understand you to mean “I haven’t made a decision re: which religion is
right for me, but I think that one of them is.”
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I would add to this that the Christian God is logically impossible, and
therefore I, as a rational being, can never accept arguments in favor of his
existence as described in canonical texts (though I accept that believers in
God are able to accommodate logical impossibilities within their belief).
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This sounds closer to atheism-- IE you believe in not-the-Christian-god. In
my experience with agnostics, they often reject one (or multiple) religions,
but are ‘undecided’ about the rest: “I don’t know what religion is right, but
I *KNOW* it’s not ”.
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Do you accept that there is a difference between the statements “I believe X”
and “I conclude X”? Based on the description of the nature of the Christian
formulation of God, I judge his characteristics to be logically contradictory.
Therefore I conclude that his existence as formulated is impossible. This is
not a statement of belief, nor even, really, of disbelief. It is an assertion
of a conclusion based on logic.
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To be honest, you sound more atheist than agnostic. The empirical evidence
you’ve seen seems to suggest to you that no supernatural forces exist. Your
dedication to the scientific theory demands of you that you accept the
possibility of the supernatural, and so you accept it (begrudgingly) as a
possibility, but you prefer to believe instead that no supernatural force
exists. Hence, if you were asked to state your opinion as to whether or not a
supernatural force existed, you would probably say ‘no’, versus a “true
agnostic” who would probably have phenomenal difficulty answering the
question.
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I guess I’d say of myself that I never “believe” anything without empirical
precedent or reasonable logical deduction, and to date I “believe” in nothing
metaphysical or supernatural.
Dave!
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