Subject:
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Re: Is religion dead in the water?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 17 Oct 2004 15:48:46 GMT
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Viewed:
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1436 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Laswell wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Bruce Schlickbernd wrote:
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Some quotes from Wikipedia that may be illuminating (or confusing depending
on if you can keep track of it all):
Some atheists distinguish between two variants:
Weak atheism, or negative atheism, is the standpoint that there is no
reason to believe that any particular god exists. A weak atheist sees no
reality in any god he’s been told about, and doesn’t expect to ever find a
god he can believe is real. This is not equivalent to agnosticism, although
there is often an overlap between the two; an agnostic believes he does not
or can not have enough information to say for certain whether any gods
exist.
Strong atheism, or positive atheism, goes further to make the assertion
that there are no such things as gods. This may, but need not, include the
opinion that the existence of a god is logically impossible; strong atheists
base this on logical a priori arguments intending to demonstrate that
omnipotent, omniscient, and/or transcendent conceptions of gods are
self-contradictory or internally inconsistent.
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Those definitions stray from Huxley’s
original definition (no
offense intended to atheists or agnostics by the domain, but it was the most
complete Huxley quote I could find), as he considered himself to be neither a
theist nor an atheist, since he felt that both of those stances required that
you hold an amount of certainty in your claim, something which he did not
feel he had. The confusion about the difference between the two terms seems
to have sprung from the fact that many atheists felt the term “atheist” was
viewed too negatively and started calling themselves agnostics to be more
accepted, while many agnostics felt and did exactly the opposite.
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I’m a little confused since the definitions you choose to quote above have
utterly nothing to do with the link you provide. That is talking about his
intellectual approach and not atheism at all, except in the most passing manner
possible.
-->Bruce<--
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Is religion dead in the water?
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| (...) Those definitions stray from Huxley's (URL) original definition> (no offense intended to atheists or agnostics by the domain, but it was the most complete Huxley quote I could find), as he considered himself to be neither a theist nor an (...) (20 years ago, 16-Oct-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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