Yeah, you do pretty well.... It's just a fine line, no? Always treading the border.
My complaint is with those who claim agnosticism, but are actually veiled atheists.
Yeah, you do pretty well.... It's just a fine line, no? Always treading the border.
My complaint is with those who claim agnosticism, but are actually veiled atheists.
I've said it often here: the more I used to argue with liberal Democrats when I worked back in Beltway Land, the more theistic I used to get. Now, the more I argue with creationists, the more atheistic I get.
I'm pretty close to the edge these days. But, unlike my pre-teen self in Sunday School, I feel no need for stealth. If fervor for the Church of Atheism strikes me, I'll say so. But I still don't see how anyone can think they know something that has to be completely divorced from observable experience.
As has been pointed out in the past, in a purely logical argument "atheist" and "agnostic" resolve to the same thing. One can make a separate distinction for "strong" agnosticism versus "weak" agnosticism, but I don't think most agnostics actually claim to be agnostics in the strong sense a majority of the time (though a mathematician might). So-called "strong agnosticism" ("it is not possible to know if God exists") can also be construed as absolutely correct and resolveable to the definition of "atheist" in a purely logical construction if one really wants to step into the mathematics of logic and set theory.
The problem with the way I see "atheist" used as a definition is that people are attaching characteristics of a specific individual to a word definition that has no such subjective interpretation. "Atheism" does not denote a "faith-based" or "religious" characterization even though many people who are atheists have religious-like personality traits. This is essentially a fallacy of categorization and incorrect association, and being of an incorrect construction such as "some priests are pedophiles, therefore all priests are pedophiles", a violation of first-order logic.