Ugh. I'm just not gonna claim there is or isn't a God. I will just wait. God could be dead for one. Possibilities are what keep me from straying back into Atheism. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB8NzKRsZek"]YouTube- The Madman - God is Dead - Nietzsche[/ame]
it has been made abundantly clear that an atheist is someone who rejects a belief in the existence of a deity. i have not asserted that atheism and agnosticism are mutually exclusive or opposed to each other. what i am saying is that the slight differences between stark atheism and agnosticism are just splitting hairs and making assumptions about peoples beliefs in regards to whether or not they personally believe they are 100% certain about the possibility of gods existence. you have already adjusted. you claim to be an atheist who has not ruled out the possibility of a deity and therefore exist as an agnostic atheist. why then the addition of atheist? does agnostic not fit the bill pretty well? by the addition of atheism you are taking a leap of faith and making the stance that you personally believe god is not real. by the logic of the page you linked me to, agnosticism is a term that applies to theists as well, which seems to suggest that atheism outside of agnosticism is a faith based position. "Atheists are thought to be closed-minded because they deny the existence of gods, whereas agnostics appear to be open-minded because they do not know for sure. This is a mistake because atheists do not necessarily deny any gods and may indeed be an atheist because they do not know for sure - in other words, they may be an agnostic as well. " this entire page is attempting to justify atheism as an open minded position by the addition of the term agnostic.
For one, many, if not most, theists are agnostic too. On the other hand, I haven't come across a single atheist who claims to have gnosis regarding the existence of a deity, although I have come across theists who do based on their "personal relationship" with said deity. Both atheism and theism are neither intrinsically gnostic or agnostic. You don't seem to understand that, so people have to keep re-making the same god damn point! I don't know why I bother... I'm sure to get replies which profess more misunderstanding...
My position is from someone who never went to church. That being said i cannot wrap my head around the rediculous stories in the bible because i didn't grow up being told they were true. I also feel that everything in the bible is extremely biased towards the particular author's personal beliefs. If you tell everyone its the word of god then everyone will think the way you do. Realistically if I were to write the stories in the bible today everyone would call me a crazy man or consider it fiction. So i have to wonder why people think just because it was written a long time ago its absolute fact.
Well, for the millionth time, most atheists are agonstic atheists. Proof of that is that in this thread NOONE has stated that it's 100% impossible that there's a god. Almost noone would do that. That doesn't make you any less atheist, though. You don't always have to qualify by calling yourself an agnostic atheist, because for all intents and purposes you're an atheist.
I just had a thought. What if all this weak and strong atheist babble is just gnostic and agnostic atheists, with atheism being the generalization of it all. Yes, it makes perfect sense to me now! You are either Agnostic or Gnostic, in any (A)Theist belief !
Using words like atheist, agnostic, etc. as labels, is causing as much confusion as using the word 'god' does. It might be better if people just stated their position plainly so as to avoid misunderstanding what may or may not be what someone means when they use those words.
A meta-physician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there, and a theologian is one who finds the cat.
I think the real question is what is NOT a "faith based position". We've been going back and forth between the definitions of words in the English dictionary. The universe is all about perspective. How one views the world in all of its' complexities is not how another individual sees the world. Bob is a bible thumper. Jerry is a physics student. Tim is emo. Bob has read the bible all of his life and has the firm position that god does exist. Jerry sees no room in the laws that bind the world where god could exist. Tim sees pain everywhere and can't see a god allowing so much suffering. All of these are "faith based", "philosophical views", or "perceptions" of our world based upon environment, knowledge, and experience. I came into this world with no knowledge of a god. Nothing that I have read or seen has made me think otherwise. There is nothing to prove that god does exist, however there are countless scientific facts that have disproved many religious books such as the bible. If you want to call science a "faith based" position, then it is merely one conquering the other. However, that is not how I view it at all. Science to me is reliable information collected from legitimate resources whose conditions and results have been duplicated time and time again. Until science can show otherwise, I will remain "Atheist", happily burning in their hell while I dance in my heaven: life on Earth.
Think: Have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something. Belief: An acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. Seems to me they go hand and hand? Thank you. You win the thread. Even logic and reasoning is based on faith and subjective reality. You would be hard pressed to find a non faith position, because practically there isn't one.
It takes a lot more thought to truly understand god than it does to just accept what your senses tell you. But understanding god involves thinking outside the box, and to atheists that's just too much to ask.
Saying you can disprove the bible is like saying you can disprove Shakespeare's sonnets. There's nothing to disprove, it's just poetry attempting to describe what cannot be described. Taking the bible literally is the biggest mistake that can be made. Just as taking the universe is.
dude I think up there where he reffered to thinking he was refferering to the act of creating new thoughts. Not "I think the sky is blue"
not necessarily. here is an interesting quote from albert einstein which pretty clearly illustrates what i had attempted to convey. "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." a god who is revealed through what exists. an interaction between observer and environment. "A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. " what einstein has said leads me to believe that through his own experience and observation of the world, he realized that every so often "god" is manifested through reality if you take notice.