I became agnostic about the time when logic operation typically develops.

Actually to be brief, that is pretty much my story too, I asked to many questions in Catholic, Sunday school. They just made faces at me, then they threatened to dismiss me. Unfortunately they never kept their promises. LOL

I too checked out Buddhism and other things, but nothing answered my questions, so hear I am...

Most practicers of jediism do in fact end up hands solo.

At last! A forum I can finally feel at home in.
The whole lack of logic and consistency thing sealed the deal for me at a young age. You get the evangelicals preaching at you that the bible says such and such and you say you don't prescribe to the bible. Then they say "but the bible says..." and you say I DON'T BELIEVE IN WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS but they never connect the dots. But the thing that really burns me up is when these people use their book to justify excluding people or justifying imposing their beliefs on other peoples' lives and freedoms.

Absolutely agree...

It's probably the 'to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail' principle. Especially when that hammer is named 'The Truth(tm)'.

When you think of it, the Faith has had 2000 years to come up answers to most queries that challenge the cloak of perfect validity it's woven about itself, and I guess most people are daunted by the task of questioning it.

But, as Bertrand Russell said:





-Kerry O.

Your definition is not accepted by me to be exclusive.

Definitions should start simple and then add complexity. The simplest definition for atheist, a-theist, or without belief in god, just like a-sexual means reproduction without sex.

If you wish to use logic to conclude an argument your definitions must be simple and themselves logical.

Your premise must be justified first to be used as a logical starting point, something I do not feel you have done in this post.


To justify this statement we can use all kinds of examples which end in just as much head scratching . . .

What is the meaning of the color red?
What is the meaning of Cancer?
What is the meaning of anything and everything?

If we cannot come to a conclusion right this minute does that mean we must have faith to assume it exists?

Perhaps it is merely a problem with my understanding of YOUR meaning in making this presumption.

I think the major issue with your analysis is that your premise is based on the most ambiguous of all words . . . . meaning.

Then again the problem may come in when the idea and mechanics of belief are not clearly defined.

Belief is accepting something as true.
Lack of belief is everything that is not accepting this idea as true.

Which to my estimation makes uncertainty a lack of belief. You are uncertain there for you have not set your mind to accept this idea as true.

From this very logical stand point EVERY person who says I dont know, is also an atheist.

I do not think that agnosticism is an exclusive majesteria for these very reasons. Many definitions of agnosticism in relation to religion place it not as an uncertainty of the existence of god, but of the knowledge that would support, or reject the idea.

Uncertainty is built into our universe however this does not prevent us from holding a positive belief, in fact we would be paralyzed if we could not hold a single positive belief.

My point. Belief is a positive acceptance of an idea. Lack of belief is just not holding that positive acceptance, atheism is more logical and coherent as anyone that does not accept god as true.

Personally I am an agnostic atheist. I do not accept god as true, yet allow that one could.

I am also tempted to say that if there is no god, then there is no meaning in ANYTHING beyond that which intelligent creatures give it.

i started doubting when i was sixteen and really getting into physics. then i read einsteins autobigraphy. he was agnostic and thought that the human mind is not capable of knowing whether or not god exists. of course that's the very definition of agnostic. made sense to me. now i think the same and that neither the god fearing nor the atheist can ever prove himself correct or the other wrong.

i just wonder if anybody in these forums understands the definition of agnostic other than myself. gnostic is about knowledge. agnostic is about the unknowable. an agnostic thinks that the existence of god cannot be known by the human mind. we think that neither the theist nor the atheist can ever prove himself right or the other wrong. god is simply unknowable as is the after life and other supernatural phenomena. c'mon folks. get it straight. gnostic and agnostic are in the dictionary you know.

syneasthate, Bushidobillyclub, and others, there seems to a point of confusion on your understanding of the word 'belief' in the manner of which I use it.

As bushidobillyclub pointed out, the definition of belief is controversial. Here is how I present, and use it.

There is no such thing as a 'lack in', or 'lack of' a belief. A belief has a boolean state. It can only be a true or false.

'without belief in god' is the same as 'belief in no god', it is also equivalent to 'no faith in the belief of god' is the same as 'faith in the belief of no god'! I specifically dismissed the premise of the article I referenced (http://www.religioustolerance.org/atheist.htm), which claims a difference in the logic. There is no partial state of a belief.

syneast, "The lack of current proof, justifies the lack of [faith in a belief]" is incorrect. Faith corresponds to the acceptance of indeterminable matters, that are inherently unjustifiable. A lack of proof cannot prove or disprove the belief itself. The validity of a belief would remain indeterminable, but not null. There is no immediate logic outcome (true or false), so you cannot apply logic, or illogic, to such a belief.

Your example using gravity is invalid, because you are using a fact, which has a logical outcome. Gravity is provable. There is such a thing as a disillusioned belief, where someone has a belief that is contrary to a fact. However, this isn't a logic discussion on beliefs that create or alter existences. It's a logic discussion on existences that create or alter beliefs, or the 'acceptance' of a belief.

bushidobillyclub, your statement


is invalid. The subject of my statement was the existence of something, not the existence of the meaning of something, which may or may not exist itself.

It's possible to conclude whether something exists, without factoring in whether it has a meaning, reason, or purpose to exist.

Using your examples:
Does cancer exist? Yes
What is the meaning, reason, and/or purpose of cancer? indeterminable.
Does the indeterminable meaning, reason, and/or purpose of cancer make the existence of cancer indeterminable or none existent? No

I disagree. Infact, I think you're defining faith here, not belief. The state of a belief is not susceptible to all the degrees of acceptance.


There is no logical standpoint here, this is incorrect. Only at full acceptance, faith, can you claim a none fact belief to be true. Only at complete rejection, no acceptance, can you claim a none fact belief to be false. Otherwise it is indeterminable. Your claim suggests that indeterminable is equal to false, which is illogical. You seem to be implying that the method of validating a belief is to check for true, as opposed to returning the state.


That isn't how atheism is defined. There is no 'maybe' in the existence of god in atheism. If you claim atheism as everything not true, your accounting for the maybe, or indeterminable result.

Again, there is a difference in 'not true', and 'false'. Agnosticism, not atheism, accounts for the indeterminable result in the belief of god; thus, it includes everything 'not true', except 'false'.

atheism isn't any more logical than theism. They both have a belief, idea, or concept that they hold to be true in respect to the existence of a deity, while holding the other's belief, idea, or concept to be false.

For me it was not a personal decision. I was raised to be an atheist. My parents were both believers in god, but the state was cruelly enforcing atheism. Our parents never spoke of anything religious. The teachers were spewing the straight atheist party dogma. Kids were taught everywhere they went, that there is no god, no witches, no miracles, no boogie man (this was before the disco era), no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no fairies, no elves, no gargoyles, no walking excavators, no smoking and joke-telling locomotives, no spirits, no ghosts, no swamp-things. They stamped out campfire ghost stories by threatening the kids with hanging them upside down for the remainder of the two-week tent-camp. I witnessed an eight-year-old severely beaten to death for saying, "my guardian angel will protect me all my life from being beaten up."

So I am an atheist. Never knew myself to be other than that. Yeeha!

i guess i've always been an agnostic. even when my parents told me i was a christian and took me to church i remember thinking, "how can these people know all this crap?" by the time i returned from vietnam i'd come completely to the conclusion that the human mind is simply not capable of knowing about things such as gods, the afterlife and other supernatural phenomena. hell, nothing is knowable absolutely other than what i experience as i see it.

cheese and crackers, talk about over thinking something. I bet you're a lot of fun at drivethrus too.

Sorry, man. I like wordy explainations as much as the next guy, but damn...

atheism, agnosticism, are pretty simple concepts. Don't believe in a godthing? You're an atheist. Don't know if a godthing exists? You're an agnostic.
Why make it any more complicated than that?

I wanna live in your world...

When I was about 10 I started asking questions about the nature of God that my parents couldn't answer. So, they had me speak with our preacher. He couldn't answer my questions any better than my parents could. But, he did have better rhetoric. So, for a little whale I was satisfied.

Then at about 15 I started asking even deeper questions that even my preacher couldn't answer. He said I'd just have to trust in God. I started to question God's existence at that point.

As I grew and began to understand more about the world we live in and evolution in particular, I saw just how unlikely a super being like God really is.

Today I live life under the assumption that there is no god. However, you cannot prove a negative. Therefore I can only call my self about 99.99999% sure there is no god.

I think unicorns, elves and dragons are more likely than god is.

I am an atheist. Why, because I stopped believing in fairy tales long ago.

My father came from a Catholic family and my mother was raised in the Jewish community, but by the time they met one another both of them had reached an agnostic position. Consequently, I didn't really encounter religion until I went to school, as the Catholic primary (grade, if you're American) school was considered the best in the area. Even then though, I didn't get exposed to much as Mum told the principle that I was a practising Jew.

So I never decided to become an Athiest, I was just raised without religion. 'S nice.

My parents were methodist until 1 year after I was born. After a year of me, they looked into heavens a declared, "THERE CAN BE NO GOD!"
I seem to have that effect on people....

Superb.

i was quite confused until the age eleven our so when i learned my real name. until then when my father spoke to me he'd begin by yelling at the top of his lungs, "jesus christ, get in here!!!" still happens to this day. hate it when a women in bed calls me by another man's name. ever happen to you? last one kept screaming, "oh god, oh god, oh god". why people do things sometimes just cannot be known.