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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[Superdorf]

At its worst, religious structure validates unjust action.
At its best, religious structure encourages and contextualizes our most beautiful actions.

Hold churches accountable, yes— but don't lose sight of the best for the worst! Many of the gentlest people on this earth found their kindness in their faith.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Of course, I lied earlier--my one true belief is in Examplo, god of Examples. For whom only I may interpret His great exemplification.

[Rolan7]

When I curse in text, I often say "gods above".  But other times, I say "gods below".
What exactly do I mean by either term?  We just don't know.

Sometimes I mean to exalt and reference the heavens.
Other times, I am engaged in an act that many would see as wrong.  And I echo and mock their concerns.  "Gods below".
And to be clear, I don't just mean sexytimes.  There are many times when one does something dark and hated, for good reasons.

[Frumple]

I've long been fond of swearing by the nonexistent gods. They're a good one to use because they're categorically incapable of stepping on anyone's toes, being explicitly whatever ones don't exist.

Thanking fornication or using for love of fornication is a pretty workable one, too -- folks on the net care a lot more about that (or food, or sleep, for that matter) than religious stuff, in practice. Might as invoke what all the effort's being directed at, y'know?

... they're arguably greater powers, too, heh. Zealot and the atheist both starve just the same, and the gods have been pretty stingy with that whole spontaneous generation or virgin birth thing for the last few millennia. Give credit where it's directly observable, praise the sun, praise fornication, praise sleep. Gods can get credit when they show up to claim it instead of leaving a convoluted IOU (... YOM? You owe me?) behind

[Rolan7]

Why else would some of the ancient Norse worship Loki?

When times are tough, one's mind reels to other gods.

[MaxTheFox]

At its worst, religious structure validates unjust action.
At its best, religious structure encourages and contextualizes our most beautiful actions.

Hold churches accountable, yes— but don't lose sight of the best for the worst! Many of the gentlest people on this earth found their kindness in their faith.

Basically. I had an edgy atheist phase where I said stuff much like Magmacube. But now, with the destruction of my old identity? I am a different, and I dare say better and less violent person. Threw my misguided """rationalism""" that was nothing more than an excuse to hate right into the garbage.

My personal take on the abrahamic prototypic god, goes a bit like this:

Many worlds is true.

All humans are sinners, because all humans have branched world trees where they have done every kind of sin imaginable.

The limited humans in each terminal branch of their world tree, are each oblivious to the billions of iterations of themselves that exist-- but from the POV of god, they are all "That one human."

God, such as it is, is not "active."  It is entirely passive, as it represents the sum total of all world trees, in a condition of superposition. It is thus all things, and also, fundementally excluded from any individual world tree. (EG, you can look in every micro-angstrom of your iteration of the universe, and never find it.)  Any actions it may have chosen to undertake, were undertaken at the moment the initial flash of the universe was initiated, as this being has perfect knowledge of the total wave-function of the universe, and thus, this is the only time it actually NEEDS to be active.

When people die, and are judged, the many branches of their world-tree are superimposed, to composite their true being. This true being is then judged.


Why approach it this way? 

The bible is very consistent in asserting that those that are selected, will be able to understand god, because they will be like him/it.  This fundamentally then, requires that humans become similar beings-- eg, ones that are gestalt superbeings of all the possible manifestations of themselves.

I view that this interpretation satisfies all the necessary checkboxes in the literature, while being "plausible" (if taken with a lot of salt) from current cosmological interpretations-- but again, requires Copenhagen to be wrong, and Many Worlds to be true.

Reasonable. I focus on personal salvation and don't try to evangelize those with "wrong" interpretation but at the same time I make an effort to prevent internal diversity of faith, i.e no syncretism, no new-age bullshit, though I don't care if other people don't and honestly a lot of my friends are atheists. Guess what we talk about? Not atheism.

[WealthyRadish]

Speaking of being an edgy atheist, I need to get something off my chest...

I am no atheist. Atheism is a belief just like religion. You cannot prove that god exists, but you cannot prove that god does not exist either.
So I consider myself an agnost. I don't know. I put my faith in what we do know. Science.

(From the sad thread)

Genuine question (ok, slightly facetious): Are you an agnostic for the tooth fairy too?  Am I basically tooth-fairy-atheISIS because I am 100% willing to claim under oath that a magical being doesn't acquire teeth under the pillows of children in exchange for $USD?

One can add "to my knowledge there's no tooth fairy...", "in my opinion there's no...", "I believe that..." and so on there, but that applies to anything I say. It goes without saying.

Surely it's more useful for "agnostic" to mean people who strongly doubt something but also have contradictory impulses to positively believe it, while "atheists" just lack the latter.

i.e. why does agnosticism get to be either/both of these things:

• Absence of belief in <unprovable claim with poor evidence> without a convincing substitute ("I'm 6 and the tooth fairy seems sus, but I haven't thought that it could just be my parents yet, I'd better play both sides to be safe")
• Absence of belief in <unprovable claim with poor evidence> and a preference for <unprovable claim with some evidence> ("I don't think there's a tooth fairy dude, science says it's just your parents doing it")

...while atheism is defined to be indistinguishable from 2) but tautologically "wrong" because acktchuuually all knowledge is like, whoa, impossible to verify, man!

Just have atheism be 2) and agnosticism be 1).


(To be clear, I'm 100% fine with agnostics who genuinely have contradictory doubts/support and just say "I don't know", but this dumb "technically..." argument gets grating.)

[Egan_BW]

Well, just because I don't like, know anything, man, doesn't mean that I'm obliged to give special consideration to any extremely specific beliefs, which is why I'd call myself an atheist.

[McTraveller]

I thought agnostic was stronger than "I don't know" - I thought it was "it's unknowable?"

[Rose]

Yeah, agnostic is a very specific conviction that it's impossible to know, but are open to the idea.

[Frumple]

I thought agnostic was stronger than "I don't know" - I thought it was "it's unknowable?"

It can be either, iirc. If you're getting into technical/actual academic discussion on it, I seem to recall there's specific modifiers for it (want to say it's something like hard or soft agnosticism, or epistemic vs other sorts, or something along those lines, but it's been over a decade since I was held to any kind of standard of rigor regarding that and I don't actually, like... care... about the specific terminology anymore) or other terms for one or the other, but for general conversation you're pretty free to use it for both sorts. As long as folks get the gist of things, it's good enough

[EuchreJack]

All atheists believe in God, for they define themselves as opposed to the belief in God and strive to convince others that God does not exist.

Without God, atheists become nothing. Ergo, the atheists themselves prove God exists. _{It's the anger that really proves it, more than anything else.}

[TD1]

I see now I put the below post in the wrong thread.

I am no atheist. Atheism is a belief just like religion. You cannot prove that god exists, but you cannot prove that god does not exist either.
So I consider myself an agnost. I don't know. I put my faith in what we do know. Science.

I am an a - theist.
One who is without theism.
Theism is a belief in god/gods.
I am an atheist, someone who lacks belief in gods/god.

This doesn't mean that I can't think of gods/god as possible, only that faith isn't part of my calculation. As per my current understanding of science and the world, the possibility is vanishingly small. But with the right evidence (and it would need to convincingly explain a lot) I'd adjust my worldview.

Atheism does not seek 'to prove that god does not exist.' It doesn't actively push any agenda, really. It just kinda cuts faith out of the equation.

Agnostics believe that we can never prove/disprove the existence of god/gods. Though, granted, each agnostic seems to have a slightly different definition. It doesn't concern itself with what you put into the equation, it's only concerned with the end answer - whether there is or is not some form of divinity.

Edit: To attempt further clarification:
It's possible to be an Agnostic Christian - someone who believes in God, but doesn't think we can ever know one way or another whether he exists.

It is possible to be an Agnostic Atheist - someone who doesn't believe in god/gods, and also thinks we can never know whether they exist.

It is not possible to be an Atheistic Christian - someone who doesn't believe in God and believes in God.

((Some may prefer to replace 'Christian' with 'theist' in the above. I'm just playing to the crowd  ))

[hector13]

Well there are two binaries that aren’t mutually exclusive, yeah.

A/gnosticism, dealing with knowledge of a higher being. and a/theism, dealing with belief in a higher being.

Agnostics believe you can’t know if a higher being exists, gnostics believe you can.

Atheists believe there is no higher being, theists do.

An agnostic atheist thus believes there is no higher being, you just can’t prove it.

A gnostic atheist believes there is no higher being.

An agnostic theist believes there is a higher being, you just can’t prove it.

A gnostic theist believes there is a higher being.

It’s all a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.

However, as a counterpoint to Dwarfy, there are some atheists who are as vocal and fervent in their belief as any theist, Richard Dawkins being a good example.

[Rose]

What about somebody who believes that a higher being is there, but does not believe in them (Does not believe they deserve any respect or worship)?