> I find it hard to understand how you can claim that there is such thing as a person who does not believe in God and yet is not an atheist.
Agnostics do not believe in God.
Muslims do not believe in God (not yours, anyway)
Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, animists, etc. do not believe in God.
Remember, there is a difference between atheism ("I believe there is no god") and agnosticism ("I do not believe in god").
> let us not forget that atheistic fanaticism killed and imprisoned more people in the 20th century than any religious doctrine ever has.
Sorry, no... that was Communism. They bleated about Atheism, but they weren't. They simply replaced one god with another... that being the State (or the "historical dialectic," or whatever other drivel it was)
This statement is not correct. Muslims believe in the God of the old testament. The first part of the Koran is the Torah, or old testament. So, they do believe in the same God. What they don't believe in is Jesus Christ. There is the difference.
I knew you were going to come back with something like this. You are very confused. Agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve, but are willing to let the question remain open in the absence of what they consider objective proof. Atheists say "There is no God" and agnostics say "I do not know whether there is a God." But agnostics do not deny that there is one.
Buddhists do not believe in the top-down God of Judaism and Christianity, but they acknowledge that there is a greater universal thought substance of which we are all apart.
Avatamsaka Sutra says, "If you want to understand that all the three worlds are Buddha, you must perceive world substance. All things are created by mind alone." This means that if you want to understand the true way you must perceive where name and form come from and you must understand that name and form are created by mind. In this world, one by one, each thing is complete; one by one, each thing has substance. If you cut off all thinking, return to before thinking then this is your substance and universal substance. We call this 'primary point'. If you keep this mind, you and everything, you and the universe, become one. Clear like space, without name and form, without opposites, that is the Absolute. We call it Mind or Buddha or God or Truth or Energy. This is Shim.
So as you see, Buddhists do believe in God, albeit not the one that looks like an old man with a beard and sits on a cloud in heaven. But I don't believe in that one either, although I do very much believe in the existence of God.
Hindus believe in divinity, although they are not monotheistic.
Muslims most certainly believe in God, although I believe their conception of God is evil. But they do believe in God even if they call him Allah. In fact, they claim to believe in the God of Moses and the one Jesus claimed to be the offspring of.
My wiccan friends tell me that they believe in a plethora of Gods, and so are not monotheistic.
I don't have any animist friends, but even they believe in divinity of a sort, if I recall correctly from my college sociology courses.
All of these belief systems may have different conceptions of the spiritual entity (entities) at the core of existnece, but only atheists believe that there is absolutely no type of divine spirit underlying the material universe.
Sorry, no... that was Communism. They bleated about Atheism, but they weren't. They simply replaced one god with another...
Sorry, but that's what atheists do, even if they are gentle and caring and not Communists. It's our nature as human beings to do that. The communists were just particularly vicious about it. If you don't believe in God, you have to believe in something.