kalibri

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

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.