Art Thou Religious?

[Drogue]

Originally posted by MightyTiny
agnostic theist - believes in the existence of a god or gods, but does not claim to know either way.
agnostic atheist - Lacks a belif in god (or believes that there is no god or gods), but claims no special knowlege either way.

Surely these two are the same. You can't believe something but claim not to know, or disbelieve something and claim not to know. You either believe something to be true, believe it to be false, or admit that you don't know.

I suppose you could argue it as whether you think there's a good, but don't know. However that isn't either believing or not believing, that's simply an opinion. A belief is a belief that something is true or false, you can't believe something is probably true.

[SlowwHand]

YEAH! Roll those dice and quit hedging your bet.

[mrmitchell]

episcopalian

Originally posted by SlowwHand


You gotta be kidding. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting a Baptist church around here.

Yeah. Will9, take one of ours. Please.

[SlowwHand]

No lie. 2 for 1 and the first one is free.

[bipolarbear]

I'm surprised at the lack of Pastafarians here.

E: Forgot to mention I'm also a proud Universal Life Church Reverend. www.ulc.org

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Agnostic, leaning Unitarian.

[SlowwHand]

Originally posted by bipolarbear
I'm surprised at the lack of Pastafarians here.

Worship of angel hair?

[bipolarbear]

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

[Dr Strangelove]

Episcopalian. We'll find out in September whether that's still Anglican.

[SlowwHand]

There's a vote? Seriously, because I don't know.

[Alexander I]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
There's a vote? Seriously, because I don't know.

If they're able to vote on it doesn't that prove that they're not under the English crown anymore?

[Vesayen]

Well we Jews may be outnumbered by the christians and the athiests/agnostics, but at least we beast the muslims so far .

[MightyTiny]

Originally posted by Drogue

Surely these two are the same. You can't believe something but claim not to know, or disbelieve something and claim not to know. You either believe something to be true, believe it to be false, or admit that you don't know.

Now I don't understand that reasoning at all. OF COURSE you can believe something while at the same time believing that you don't KNOW it. Knowledge and belief are two separate things.

For example, if a friend of mine tells me that they just got a new job, I believe that they just got a new job. But I don't KNOW with certainty that this is the case - my friend might be lying to me.

My belief is thus tentative, subject to change with new evidence, and not absolute. It is indeed a kind of a probability estimate - I find it more likely that my friend was telling the truth than that he was lying, so I believe that he got a new job... but I can't claim to know it.

We can truly KNOW only some basic mathematical truths. The rest we believe, with varying degrees of confidence.

I'm pretty sure that the sun will come up tomorrow, and that if I drop a book, it'll fall down, not up or sideways, but I can't claim to know, with ABSOLUTE certainty even these things. After all, I might be living as a brain in a vat, being fed sensory experiences and a convincing "virtual reality", and whoever is in charge might just decide to play a trick on me and make things fall sideways, and the sun stay down.

That's extremely far fetched of course, and I don't believe for a moment that to be the case, but intellectually, I must acknowledge that I cannot have absolute knowledge even over these things; I would just rate my confidence over these things as something approaching 100%.

I also have a whole host of beliefs about reality which I only very weakly believe in - where I'm not confident at all, but find something more likely to be the case than the alternatives I know of. For example, if I had to bet, I'd say that we're living in a multiverse, and that all that we see around us, the result of the Big Bang, is just one expanding universe among countless such universes. But I freely admit that this is a belief on shaky foundation, without much in the way of evidence to go for it (I believe it only because it explains the apparent "fine-tuning" of our universe most efficiently). I wouldn't rate my confidence very high, and I certainly wouldn't claim to know any such thing.

I suppose you could argue it as whether you think there's a god, but don't know. However that isn't either believing or not believing, that's simply an opinion. A belief is a belief that something is true or false, you can't believe something is probably true.

Why not? I believe many things to be probably true, and many things to be probably false. How does an opinion as to the state of some aspect of reality differ from a tentative belief? You believe the opinions you hold to be valid, don't you? So that just seems like a terminology issue.

A gnostic theist doesn't just claim to belive, but claims that his belief is actually absolute knowledge - on the same level that mathematical axioms are true.

A gnostic atheist would claim the same level of certainty that there isn't a god or gods.

I don't think either of these positions stand up to the light of scrutiny very well.

An agnostic theist and an agnostic atheist, on the other hand, acknowledge that their beliefs are just that: beliefs, not absolute knowledge. They acknowledge that they may be wrong, even if they are highly confident that they are right.

In other word, their belief is unlike the confidence in the validity of basic mathematical axioms, but more like mundane beliefs, such as believing that your friend is not lying to you, or believing that the sun will come up tomorrow, with level of confidence varying from person to person.

I don't believe that "I'm an agnostic" answers the question "what do you belive?" at all. It's like saying "3 o'clock" when someone asks you whether or not you own a watch.

I always ask people who describe themselves only as agnostic: "So, you don't know either way, but what do you BELIEVE?"

There are some agnostics who claim no belief either way, but I find myself a bit sceptical whether they don't fall even slightly on one side or the other - it would be quite remarkable after all, that they evidence bearing on the question that they'd encountered would be exactly balanced between the claims "there are no gods" and "there is a god or gods".

An agnostic who refuses to acknowedge any level of belief as to whether or not there is a god, and claims that it is unreasonable to believe either way, is actually making a rather remarkable claim: that there exists ONE question "is there a god or gods?" that is different from all other questions on which we trivially form, reasonable, TENTATIVE, non-dogmatic beliefs on a daily basis, based on incomplete evidence. That this question, unlike the question, say "does the big foot exist?", is not only unanswerable, but unaproachable.

That is quite a claim, and I've never heard a "pure" agnostic defend it, or indeed, acknowledge that they are making such a claim.

[Bkeela]

Other...

I see Divinity in all the great religions and in the natural process of Evolution and the perfection of the Universe as revealed by Science.

[Perfection]

Originally posted by Bkeela
Other...

I see Divinity in all the great religions and in the natural process of Evolution and the perfection of the Universe as revealed by Science.

What makes somethin' divine?