On 1/17/2015 2:35 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 2:12 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 1/17/2015 2:02 AM, Jason Resch wrote:On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 7:46 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 1/15/2015 8:31 PM, Kim Jones wrote:On 16 Jan 2015, at 5:18 am, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 1/15/2015 3:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:It is the reason why I stopped, a long time ago, to qualify myself as an atheist. I realized that atheists believe to much in the christian God, paradoxically enough.By your logic one cannot disbelieve in anything because to do so you have to conceive of what it is your are failing to believe (otherwise you don't know what you're talking about);Well, yes. Of course you have to be able to conceive of what you are going to make a choice to believe in or not! Implying that you "have the right" to disbelieve in something you cannot conceive of is the height of sophistry. You are merely testifying to the limitation of your own, or of human imagination but that is precisely the terrain we are treading here: the interface of human ignorance with what is really real. Of course the human imagination cannot conceive of God the way God is. This is because WE ARE ALL THE EYES AND EARS OF GOD. The eye cannot see itself. The hammer cannot hit itself. It can only infer it's true nature using the imagination and HOPE that the description adopted is exact. It never is. We cannot know what or who we are. It's a pretty miserable state of affairs, particularly if you are a hard-nosed scientist, I gather.Hard-nosed scientists are inured to not knowing things. It's mystics who insist on making up an answer because they are uncomfortable with uncertainty. "Not knowing" a- (not) -gnostic (know) If scientists are inured to not knowing, why not consider yourself agnostic?"Agnostic" is a broad term. You can be agnostic about almost any question. People mean so many different things by "God" to say one is agnostic about the existence of God is virtually meaningless.I agree, but I also think the same applies to atheism, (which god exactly is it you believe does not exist?)But to say you are an atheist is fairly specific, one who doesn't believe the theist god exists.I think you are perhaps in the minority to take definition of the term, though I respect it for its enhanced specificity.So, if asked, I could say I'm agnostic, but what would I be agnostic about. I wouldn't be agnostic about the god of Abraham (which is how it's likely to be understood in the U.S.). What would you mean if you said you were an agnostic?By saying I was agnostic, I would mean that I don't proclaim to have reached any final truths concerning the nature of reality.
So you're assuming that the object of unqualified "agnostic" is "the final nature of reality". You don't mean you're agnostic about everything, such as Zeus or the teapot orbiting Jupiter. But the person to whom you say "I'm AN agnostic." is likely to assume the object about which you are agnostic is the God of Abraham. Which is fine if you want to dissemble.
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