this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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My parents used to fearmonger the everliving shit about LGBTQ+ and abortion, and as a small kid I ate that shit up. But then at some point, my brain probably developed some modicum of critical thinking and thought, wait a minute, why in the world does it matter to me what people do with their own lives, if it doesn't even affect me or anyone else for that matter? Why are my parents, along with every single bigot, incorrectly think that they are entitled to weigh in on someone else's life decisions?
Every single argument from them boils down to "because religion", but as someone who was raised Catholic (agnostic now), one of the things that they taught me was quite literally to "love thy neighbour" and to not shit on people only because of their beliefs. So why are the very same people who taught me that now doing the opposite of what they preach, trying (and fortunately failing) to shit on other people just because they don't have the same beliefs? "My religion says it's not OK," well they don't believe in the same things you do and could not give less of a shit about what you believe, so why not just leave them alone and let them live their life? It was around that point that I realised they were just hypocrites, and absolutely nothing more.
I grew up extremely conservative christian (homeschooled, no tv, women don't work outside the house) and was taught that anything other than married man and women was evil.
The thing is we were also taught critical thinking and logic albeit it was to compare "new teachings" against the bible. My parents always said since the bible is true [sic] it would stand up to any scrutiny. They thankfully never learned the lesson most christian leaders have that Christianity needs to be mandated for it to be effective. Obviously the bible did not hold up to logic and I'm now a proud atheist and in the process of healing.
Man, that's worse than what I experienced growing up. Out of curiosity, why did you decide to go with atheism? Personally, I'm agnostic (I think that's the right term) because I see no compelling evidence or argument for either side, and I am of the opinion that a human's finite brain could never even come close to figuring out the answer. And no, the Bible isn't evidence, not one that's even close to being the slightest bit rigorous at least. To me, it's as much evidence for Christianity as the Harry Potter books are for wizardry.
You're confusing belief with knowledge.
If you don't believe in a deity, guess what, you're an atheist regardless of whether you know for sure a god doesn't exist or not.
Most atheists are agnostic because it's not on us to prove that a god doesn't exist, no one should ever take the burden of proving a negative.
Huh, never thought of it that way, thanks for that. If you'll excuse me, I have quite a lot of rethinking to do.
That’s not entirely true, most definitions of Agnosticism frame it as a different position from Atheism.
Plus, you don’t have to prove something to believe it, if you’re convinced that there is no god you can define yourself an Atheist, that’s it. Agnostics are just “on the fence” and have no horse in the race.
No.
If you're not convinced a god exists you're atheist, plain and simple.
Now, you can be a hard atheist where you know a god doesn't exist, or a soft atheist where you don't know.
Knowledge is a subset of belief. A belief when you have strong evidence is knowledge if you will. Like science.
Because one cannot choose a belief, you either are convinced or not, you can't really be on the fence.
Wikipedia defines Agnosticism as:
It is not related to actual knowledge. No matter the claims one can make, no one can be 100% sure whether a god exists or not. It’s called “faith” because people choose to believe despite the lack of irrefutable evidence.
Belief, on the other hand, is definitely a spectrum and you can be convinced or skeptical of affirmations from both sides. There’s also apatheists that simply don’t care whether it exists or not, or Ignostics that question the question itself. There’s plenty of people “on the fence”. The definition of Nontheism for example encompasses all those three, but not Atheism.
Agnostic Atheism is a position that’s very close to Atheism, but not all Agnostics are Agnostic Atheists.
I relate a lot to this. If asked "does God exist?", my personal belief is always that we don't know and that we will never know, and it doesn't matter anyways so why bother? I do certainly see some value in religion, in that it does bring a lot of people comfort when faced with the concept of mortality, and that religious organisations do a lot of charity (this is true where I come from, at least). However, I do think that said value has been greatly diminished, if not perhaps even eliminated entirely, in the face of the attrocities people have committed in the name of religion, i.e. attempts at restricting women's and LGBTQ+ rights, etc.
Belief is not a choice, you're either convinced or you're not.
Wikipedia can also be wrong on various topics so let's not get nitpicky. But, if you want to look up Gnosticism on Wikipedia, you'll see that being a gnostic means having knowledge.
So people can be either theists or atheists and at the same time gnostic or agnostic.
A gnostic theist would mean they believe and also know a god exists.
An angostic atheist doesn't believe and also doesn't know a god doesn't exists. That's most of us atheists.
So people can't be on the fence and say I'm agnostic, that doesn't tell anything about what they believe.
And when it comes to belief, you are either convinced or you're not. There's no middle ground.
Hope I cleared it up.
I think we're just entering semantics at this point. "Agnostic" has been used plenty of times as a position in itself separate from "Atheist": even Thomas H. Huxley, who created the term, saw it as a specifically distinct thing from atheism, and so did Darwin and Ross at the time.
You can indeed have middle ground on beliefs, and the term has been invented for that exact reason: Huxley didn't feel like he fit in any of the definitions that existed at the time.
Yeah, it is semantics.
I think most people don't realise that saying "I'm not sure a god exists" makes them atheists though and I was trying to make that point.
Good discussion nevertheless.