We are seeing the atheists and secularists flock to the term "Agnosticism" because it seems a "safeplace", a place with no absolutes from which one can assert their values with no argument opposing them.
I do like the spirit of your OP. It frames the discussion in a way it needs to be discussed. We are ALL in the same boat here. We All have faith in something. Freedom just requires that our faith must extend freedom to others. How we live is another story. My faith is strong in what I believe and because I believe it, I will demonstrate and share with others. Because I honestly admit, I come from the premise of "faith", I have no right to restrict others from finding their own. I shudder at the idea of others that would ostracize and denigrate faith because they present the idea "they have all the facts". They certainly don't. Faith enters.
Thanks for 'getting it'. Exposing something like this, which is unfortunately growing in the public discourse, can be misconstrued. We ARE all in the same boat, and should have the freedom to follow our own minds and conscience. Mandated conformity, ridicule, and mockery of other's beliefs are detrimental to the Enlightenment, reformation, and American view of freedom. We should jealously guard that freedom, not lobby and work to make our beliefs the exclusive ones.
Rarely do I note bigotry against religion but often do I see or participate in reaction to religious individuals who show bigotry or disrespect to those who are of another or no religion. To me it seems most people simply do not much care about religion (even the religious) unless they are dealing with the devout theist with an ax to grind or misc. wild hairs.
Threads like these are a patently obvious attempt to promote bigotry against those who do not embrace any religion.
Nice ad hom. Have i even addressed scripture, in this thread? Methinks my last reply was too pointed, & hit a nerve. That would explain the resort to fallacies.. But it is a fine resort! A nice place to get away & escape from reason!
Ha! You express your "religion" all the time Derideo...whether you want to admit it or not. You just don't like the fact there are those of us that "confess" our faith while you think yours remains "subliminal". Well it doesn't. It is apparent to everyone. You just feel everyone must be a part of your religion or remain foolish.
Its ok.. enjoy your time at the resort. At least there you may not feel the need to express bigotry so much.. You really think religious bigotry.. mocking and ridiculing beliefs you don't have.. is justified? Not even a twinge of conscience for belittling and demeaning others?
Mock the beliefs of others while you pretend you don't have any of your own. Oh but you do! that is "ironic projection " at it's finest!!
When someone points out the qualities of an individual and they are seen by themselves or others as silly, this is NOT mocking what they believe in but that they hold such beliefs in the first place. Basically we are making fun of YOU not your religion.
How does one "know" that they don't know? Well, in the same manner that one does not know many other things. An absence of data. Of course, atheists take this absence of data and then makes the claim that God does not exist, for they assume that none ever will in the future. An agnostic does not make this assumption. And it is not an assumption made by an agnostic that the needed data does not exist. What data would be sufficient to turn an agnostic into a theist? Oh, the regular data that we find significant in our everyday existence. We can with our senses verify that something exists, by touching it with those senses. Like we do with most other things that we think exists. How can anyone know that God exists? Generally the response is, the bible says it, and I believe what the bible says. And yet the hindus believe their plethora of gods exists because their books says it. So, a book is not evidence, for anyone can write anything that they want in a book. It is far more arrogance to claim god does or does not exist, than to say one does not know. What does "knowing" entail? How can one know anything? It is odd that you accuse agnostics of the same thing atheists and theists are much more guilty of. You know, they know, while as an agnostic I make no such claims. I do not know. But this then becomes a claim equal to knowing? It is a negation of knowing, which you turn into a "knowing?. I think this is a tangled world of concepts you are playing with here. Mind games.
In Luther's Germany if the local political leader over you was Lutheran, you had no choice but to be Lutheran. If a Catholic was over you, you had to be Catholic. In Calvin's Geneva you had to be Reformed and do Reformed well enough to pass muster with Calvin's spies. If you weren't up to par you were banished and your property taken. It was in the USA that religious freedom came to near-fruition, sometime after the Bible Riots of 1844. But now, if you're a theist of some kind, you are going to feel the hate.
I suspect that is projection. Why would i 'hate!' someone for expressing an opinion? I have invited that, here..
I tried to describe the difference between a pure agnostic (i don't know), vs a dogmatic agnostic (and nobody else does, either). Its not a mind game, but a common occurrence among professing agnostics, for anyone who has debated philosophy. Was my explanation unclear? My central point is that EVERYONE has some kind of belief/opinion or worldview, regarding the basic mysteries of life. I have seen very few pure agnostics.. most of them add the qualifier.. 'I don't know.' ...'and nobody else does, either!' This becomes a dogmatic statement of belief.. that knowledge about the mysteries in the universe is somehow unknowable. But that is a statement of superior knowledge or awareness.. how can anyone 'know' such a thing?' Agnosticism, at its core, is a statement of ignorance.. 'i don't know.' IMO, it should be the default human belief, and likely would, barring Indoctrination from institutions and peers. But many hostile, anti-christian bigots hide behind an empty claim of ignorance, and attack theistic beliefs as much as any dogmatic atheist. Their words belie their underlying bias, and expose them as religious zealots, engaging in religious polemy, rather than the neutral position of true ignorance. Why would an agnostic attack Christian beliefs, if they were not already biased against them? IOW, they DO 'know', or more precisely 'believe', that the Christian belief is wrong, false, untenable, absurd, stupid, or any other of the colorful terms of endearment that are used to describe something they allegedly 'don't know!'
You can biased against something even if you're not convinced of the opposite. If someone tells me "Tomorrow's winning lottery number is 7395", and I don't think that this person has access to that kind of information, I am fully within my right to attack their logic, even if I'm not convinced of some other number. My stance would still be "I don't know", but it is still reasonable to attack the other person's logic. I.e. attacking Christianity in no way invalidates one's "I don't know" answer.
This is such a stupid thing to say. This agnosticicsm refers to only ONE belief. Furthermore, there are no "arguments" for your religiously dictated values. They are dictated to you by magical fairy tales...they are not arrived at by reason or argument.
I have not dictated any of my values to you here. We have not even mentioned any of my values. Talk about " stupid things " to say...stupid is as stupid does. We can discuss things by reason and argument but it will get to a point....you don't have a concrete answer. That is where your "faith" comes in. There is not enough info between your two ears to carry the conversation further and you are too arrogant to admit it, yet you think your way is the only way. You are the one living in a "fairyland. So it is with the Godless....
I have seen other posts by you. I can read. And I think your little fit you just threw when someone dared talk to you the way you talk about others is very telling. I don't need or have a "concrete answer". Neither do you. You have a bronze age book of fairy tales. I have reason and evidence. Clearly that alone makes my values far superior to yours.
No...you think you are a superior being. Pride goes before a fall. You have no reason and no evidence for your being. All you have is the idea you are all that exists.
I think it does. It exposes the 'attacker' as a believer in something, not just an impartial observer. This is not about simple skepticism. That is (or should be) the default response for any claim of knowledge. If you insist the lottery number is '7395', i have only my natural skepticism to evaluate your claim. But, if i rail against you, ridiculing your belief, and adamantly insist the number to be '7734', i have gone beyond skepticism, and am making a claim. ANY claim concerning non empirical knowledge about the universe is an opinion or belief. Only a pure admission of ignorance, with no compulsion to validate or invalidate other beliefs/opinions could be called neutral agnostic. If you truly don't know, or have any underlying opinions about the Big Questions of life, how could you dismiss the opinions/beliefs/speculations of someone else? That would indicate a leaning.. a predisposed bias towards a particular opinion, and a departure from neutrality.
It just seems to me that we can gather all the information we can hold between our two ears and multiply by millions by way of computer storage and compounded intelligence and there will always be questions unanswered that no individual in our short span of lifetime will find answers to. Questions like, what is the intended purpose of this amazing thing we call life? Why do we even contemplate the deeper questions? Why are things even considered worth contemplating.Why are we not like other species that only contemplate what they will eat next, or when will they have sex next? How is it possible that all these things just happened by chance? Enter into the discussion what I'll call intuition....or faith. We can choose to limit our thoughts to the "finite" or only provable fact, but there is so much more. If we are honest,we admit to that. My belief is that there is a common, unifying factor that unites every individual that would contemplate such things. Sure, we can prod through this short life span, limiting ourselves to proven and known factors, but denying the fact life is much bigger than we know. There is a "purpose" much bigger than that. It is held in the vastness to what we understand as "eternity". We can ignore it and plod on with the information we contain within us but that is extremely limiting. It also is divisive in that every individual is unique in their processes. So those that do not want to admit to any of this, they are "stuck" in their own small minds and limited to the finite while condemning anyone that ventures out of their convenient little box that confines them from eternal thought.
