[UPDATE: NOTE: For the purpose of this post, and to placate those who want to get into gritty details: Any time I say "agnostic", I mean "strong agnostic" as defined HERE.]
One of the things that bugs me about religion in general… Is that the very basis of it all is a foundation built upon assumptions that have no evidence to support them. I’m talking about “faith”. It’s just about the poorest foundation for any belief system. Idealism can sometimes work as the foundation of a belief system, though it’s not always logic. Practicality can as well — though it runs the risk of becoming calculating, almost reptilian. Even cynicism can be a logical foundation for a belief system. But faith? Pffft. What kind of idiot builds their belief system on that? (Hopefully not you. But if so: Don’t try to convince me. You’d be wasting both our time.)
This applies to atheists too.
How do you know God isn’t lurking somewhere, unless you can go there and see? You can’t. Nobody can. It would take a God to disprove God, which is a Catch-22. There’s no logic in that. It is quite annoying when somebody says, “I conclusively know the nature of the entire universe, and, knowing all, can say there is no god.”
Who do you think you’re kidding? Not me. To believe that there’s no god actually requires a hefty serving of… FAITH! Silly atheists.
But despite the fact that atheism makes the same mistakes as theism — at least their god is a god of reason, and not arbitrary faith and dogma. Atheists don’t tend to do a lot of the stupid shit theists tend to do. There’s not nearly as much to criticize them on.
Once I saw a big atheist brouhaha (which I can’t spell) about religious altars being put at the roadside where people died. How dare state money be involved? But seriously, guys. If my family member was killed in a car accident… And they allow a memorial to be put up in the very spot it happened… I would hope that it would involve whatever that family member would want. Even if it’s a pentagram dedicated to our dark lord Satan. Or (*gasp!*) a cross.
I’ve also seen some atheist newsletters that made me feel… Like I was exposed to a cult. They were into their non-belief just a little too much. Unsubscribe. Now.
But that’s about it. No religious wars. Nobody convinced that they will get sex for suicide bombing. None of this mystical bullshit that gets forced down our throats all the time. One nation under god? Really? Fuck that.
…
In the end, the most logical thing to do is to do nothing. Make no assumptions. You’ll find out. Or you wont find out, and blackness will envelop you as your soul and consciousness ceases to exist forever. What’s that feel like? I don’t want to know. But I’m not going to comfort myself with some b.s. sky fairy, nor am I going to be so cynical as to deny the possibilities that may be out there.
Agnosticism. It’s how I’ve always referred to myself, when not referring to myself as a SubGenius. On paperwork and such. (It always creeps me out when paperwork asks that! None of your business!)
agnostic
Etymology: Greek agnostos unknown, unknowable
1 : a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god
Yup… That’s pretty much what I just said.
Mood: waiting for company to arrive…
Music: Dethklok – Black Fire Upon Us
October 28, 2009 at 9:46 PM
I’m pressing my “like” button!
October 28, 2009 at 10:36 PM
I’m glad somebody else gets this.
October 29, 2009 at 1:11 AM
Wow, that’s pretty much how I feel. From an agnostic standpoint, well said.
October 29, 2009 at 6:17 AM
I think you spelled “brouhaha” correctly, actually. :)
I agree, very well said!! I have a few beliefs in metaphysical/somewhat spiritual things, but I also fully accept that ultimately, the beliefs are fundamentally unprovable (at least, at this point in time) and that I could be 100% wrong.
October 29, 2009 at 9:57 PM
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1664
October 30, 2009 at 11:37 AM
Heh. That was weird :)
October 30, 2009 at 1:21 PM
facebook comments:
Kier: “Christopher Conroy
Christopher Conroy
Agreed and disagreed. I fully accept the fact that my spiritual beliefs are irrational and unprovable to anyone outside of my own head… and therefore don’t ever, ever, ever expect anyone else to buy into them.”
Mandy: “Amen! (hahaha) This is EXACTLY where I’ve been for YEARS.”
Mike Zeb: “Faith is most commonly cited as a inner strength or belief that has been many many times referenced as the only thing that has helped people get through extremely rough times and tradjedies in peoples lives. Some times people are not smart enough, or strong enough to do it themselves and they find comfort in the concept. Humans are flawed as … everything else. You cant Evolve your self out of a tradjedy. We just cant go that quick. Faith fills the gap for many where there is no hope or help coming.”
Mike G: “I prefer “unaffliated” since even agnosticism implies some sort of religious affiliation and any religious/spiritual practice I may or may not involve myself in doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else other than myself.”
Mandy: “@ Michael, I completely agree that faith can be very helpful to some. The unfortunate side of that coin though is that faith/religion can also cause a lot of pain & suffering (wars, etc.).”
Mike G: “@clint: actually agnostic literally means “without knowledge” and had nothing whatsoever to do with religion until around 1870 when Thomas Huxley coined the term in the context of religious belief (referring to the old gnostic Christian movement). I’m not willfully denying myself knowledge nor am I making any real attempt to label myself in any … Read Morereligious context (which is why Huxley coined the term; to label himself) so the term “unaffliated” is the best one I’ve found so far to describe my [non]belief to others. I’ve found it often makes for interesting conversation :). I suppose the term solitary might work too.”
(to which I said: “But agnosticism is not the same thing as gnosticim.”)
And from me to Mike Zeb:
“People who think their faith got them through something are kind of full of it. It’s the same as thinking bad things are caused by the devil and good things are caused by god.
Inner strength does not require faith. Nor does hope…. Read More
I’d even go as far as to say false hope is bad, and if faith promotes that, that makes it even worse.”
October 30, 2009 at 3:21 PM
About SMBC, one of my favorite webcomics. They’ve been making videos on Youtube that are overall pretty good too.
About Atheists, their entire thing is basically “if there isn’t evidence for something, then there’s no reason to believe it”. Based on that, being no evidence for god, there’s no reason to believe in a god. To call this viewpoint “faith” is quite a stretch. Also, this is why you don’t see atheists doing all the crazy things religious people do because atheists are big on rational thought and evidence to conclude things.
I think your entire gripe is with gnostic atheists (gnostic/agnostic and theist/atheist are two different things, and you can be any combination of the two for a total of 4 possibilities), people who say “there is no God.” I consider myself agnostic atheist.
The way I see it, there are hundreds of religions out there, each one claiming to be the true/right/correct one. So, which one is it, eh? According to South Park, it’s the Mormons! As science has disproved core and trivial aspects of religious faith one by one (Earth isn’t the center of the universe, bees don’t fly using god power, etc.), you can extrapolate from that and say religions are not a trustworthy authority on anything. This viewpoint, likewise, isn’t faith. It’s based on evidence and using a little extrapolation.
So yeah, we can’t prove anything one way or the other, so let’s all believe what we want. I’ll be waiting for the Flying Spaghetti Monster so come save us all. :)
October 31, 2009 at 3:56 PM
I actually consider agnostic atheist to be an oxymoron. The terms are in direct contradiction to me, as much as “agnostic theist” would be.
October 31, 2009 at 8:33 PM
Well then, you must see this:
November 1, 2009 at 9:19 PM
I don’t see the contradiction. An agnostic can believe in god/afterlife or not. Hence the theist/atheist. The agnostic part simply means that they are willing to accept that they may be wrong. None of us will know till we die. And if there is no afterlife, we won’t know.
October 30, 2009 at 3:41 PM
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
It is Richard Dawkins’ favorite example of refuting the logic behind statements like “well, you can’t DISPROVE something, so you have to admit some possibility of its existence.”
As our capacity for reason advances through time, the dark cloak concealing the nature reality will be increasingly pulled back. I guess I have “faith” that this will lead to a better understanding of the world, and that science won’t lead to the sudden discovery of a strange physical law that goes something like this: “All observations of the universe, made through science and reason, obfuscate the true nature of the universe through the sole act of observation.” Like some kind of evil combination of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Or maybe it truly IS “turtles all the way down”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
October 30, 2009 at 3:45 PM
“well, you can’t DISPROVE something, so you have to admit some possibility of its existence.”
That’s actually how I feel, heh.
November 2, 2009 at 10:00 AM
I understand that some people want to split agnostic into atheist agnostic, theist agnostic, etc, etc… But I kind of think it’s semantic posturing and it is also conflating the religious definition of the word with the political definition of the word..
1, the religious definition, is “one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god”.
2, the political/committal definition is “a person unwilling to commit to an opinion about something”
To me, these 2 definitions are for different situations. Definition #2 was merely people extending the original religious use to non-religious uses. “I’m agnostic about whether Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity is accurate” would be an example of that.
Ultimately, it seems atheists and theists wanted to use the 2nd definition in a religious context, which I think is about as wrong as “aint” being in the dictionary.
When I talk about agnosticism, I am talking about definition #1.
If people want to water the religious distinction of definition #1 into a more general “unsure” definition of #2, well, they certainly can. But my view is those people are wrong. It reduces the original definition of the word into a much broader, much less demonstrative word.
If all it means is “open to change” then pretty much everybody is agnostic about almost everything. We may as well throw the word “agnostic” in front of every belief we ever state. I’m agnostic that my favorite ice cream is chocolate chip mint. I could be wrong. I’m agnostic that I’m going to eat dinner tonight. I plan on waking up tomorrow, but I might die in my sleep, so I’m agnostic as to whether I wake up. It’s soooo redundant, useless, and meaningless in this context. It says very little compared to the original definition #1, which is the one I’m using.
I don’t think it’s really necessary, when stating a belief system, to also state that you might be wrong. I would hope that would be implied with most statements made by most people about most things. I’m agnostic that I’ll vote libertarian next election. Of course I am! Nobody knows anything in the future for sure unless they do it. How useless of a word. There’s a reason definition #2 is not that broadly used compared to definition #1.
When I use agnostic, I mean a real agnostic. Definition #1. Specifically, strong agnosticism. Not an atheist trying to hop onto the agnostic bandwagon by saying “i might be wrong” and using definition #2 in a context where definition #1 is a better, more demonstrative word.
Otherwise we have an agnostic subset of every religion. Agnostic muslims, agnostic christians, etc, etc. The 2nd definition of the word has been used to overtake the original, 1st definition of the world. In this context, it makes the word much less demonstrative, and much less powerful of a word.
But hey, people have been ruining words for political posturing or hopping on other bandwagons for a long time: Piracy, addiction, pollution, terrorism.
All it really serves to advance a 2nd, weaker, less demonstrative version of an existing word — is to allow atheists and theists to pretend they are agnostics (definition #1 / strong) through semantic tinkering, and to make religious discussions descend into semantics. Stupid english language.
This conversation would take half of our time if there were simply different words for these 2 definitions.
Truthfully, definition #2 is completely unnecessary and redundant — it just means “unsure”. Whoop de do. I assume most people are unsure about everything. Way to ruin the word, whoever did that.
November 2, 2009 at 11:35 AM
Semantics or not, it describes my views pretty much perfectly. I am like the woman in the video, agnostic atheist (don’t know for sure, but certainly haven’t seen evidence to the contrary) but gnostic on just about every religion I’ve encountered so far in that I know “that isn’t right.” One by one, the claims that religions make about the world, the claims based on their religious texts (or on what their leadership says) are disproved by science.
I see what you’re getting at, that science can only prove things about the physical world and anything beyond that is unknowable. You might as well call the unobservable “Heaven”, or “Elysian Fields”, “Haydes”, like the religions do, or even “Imaginationland”, haha. As far as anybody has been able to tell, the “physical world” is all we’ve got and all we’re ever going to get. Anything beyond that is speculation.
What bugs me is what you’re saying is exactly what religions people have been saying for centuries: that some things just cannot be known. That science doesn’t explain our world adequately enough. The “controversy” of bees being able to fly, how that was supposedly an example of the failing of science (aerodynamics models predicted that bees shouldn’t be able to fly, or something to that effect, therefore soooo mysterious and therefore isn’t God amazing?!), is one of my favorite examples. Time and time again, science has progressed and disproved these false claims. Science changes to fit what is observable, something religions have a very, very hard time doing.
For you to say there’s going to be some observable point we can’t get past, that just beyond that there COULD be some supernatural being(s) just because, well… you never know! That sounds a lot like what religious people claim about their deities. This unobservable point keeps being pushed back further and further and eventually, there’s going to be nowhere left to search.
Extrapolating from what was just beyond the previous “limits of observation” and what we’ve found each time we’ve surpassed them, I don’t think we’re going to find anything supernatural. If past patterns have shown anything, we’ll keep on observing anomalies and science will catch up to eventually be able to explain them.
November 2, 2009 at 11:40 AM
I think the difference is that when religion says some things can’t be known, they are using that as an excuse to believe. (“you don’t KNOW there’s no god! prove it!”)
But when me / strong agnotics say it, we are using that as an excuse to NOT believe (“you don’t KNOW there’s a god! prove it!”)
So while it is what they have been saying for centuries (probably millenia), I think it’s very different in attitude and motivation here.
As for your 2nd-to-last paragraph: Yes, you can never know. Perhaps there is a spirit particle that works on a quantum level and that cannot be observed with traditional physicals. Who knows. There’s quite possibly an infinite number of unknowable things.
Proving no god is actually harder than proving God. If God existed, he could prove himself easily. If he doesn’t, it’s almost impossible to disprove him without being one yourself. Catch 22.
Even the point where science describes every paranormal activity ever in existence — to where there is NOTHING unexplained whatsoever in the physical room — to which every ghost, UFO, and big foot is explained — I’m still going to keep an open mind.
But that open mind will be totally blank in terms of choosing [believe|don't believe] sides.
November 2, 2009 at 11:41 AM
That being said – signs point to no. But I don’t think signs are enough to make me, or any human, actually be able to claim one way or the other.
November 2, 2009 at 6:03 PM
This will most likely be my last post on the subject. I would personally consider myself a “weak agnostic” (based on the wikipedia definition), meaning that I don’t think the existence/non-existence of god is necessarily unprovable. It also depends on your definition of god. I’ll elaborate in a bit.
Certain aspects of religion, such as creationism for instance can indeed be scientifically disproved, so I can safely say that the old testament is BS.
Now on to the definition of a deity, and I really want to avoid getting into semantics here. According to string theory, there are 10 dimension (11 according to M-theory). It is not improbable that being exist in the higher dimension that we do not have the means to detect(yet), but can influence our dimension(which to us would pretty much be a god. And if one such being were to exist, there would more likely be more than one. This would also fit in well with the existence of ghosts, and other supernatural phenomena from a scientific viewpoint.))
So from that standpoint, the existence of “gods” is plausible. For all I know, we’re some “god’s” ant farm.
Now let’s look at the religious definition of agnostic, since this is what it’s about.
1, the religious definition, is “one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god”.
This would be the opposite of faith, since someone of faith is indeed committed to believing in a god or not. That includes atheists. Pure atheists have faith that there is no god. That’s where the theist/atheist part comes in.
And lastly, this is directed at Dave’s comment: “… and that science won’t lead to the sudden discovery of a strange physical law that goes something like this: “All observations of the universe, made through science and reason, obfuscate the true nature of the universe through the sole act of observation.” Like some kind of evil combination of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”
We may just find ourselves in just such a conundrum. One of the goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to create the Higgs boson. Some scientists have postulated that it is so abhorrent to nature that it’s creation would ripple back in time to prevent it’s creation before it was created, therefore preventing its creation in the first place. If we create one, this theory would be proven wrong. If we don’t, well then that’s a catch-22. This is not coming from some quack scientist, but one of the founders of string theory.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=3&ref=science
November 2, 2009 at 6:13 PM
1) I agree. Creationism is bullshit. Of course, any God would be sufficiently powerful enough to trick us. But he’d also be sufficiently powerful enough to create a universe where such trickery would not be necessary — so why bother with all the subterfuge?
2) Your string theory/m-theory paragraph touches on Ignosticism — that the question can’t really be answered unless we define what the question precisely is. After all, to ants we are in a sense gods. And you used ants in your example too :)
3) Your mention of faith.
Yes — I considered stating earlier that my thoughts are almost an “anti-faith”. (sort of almost the same absolute value as faith, but an opposite polarity if you will.)
4) Yes, I heard about the time ripple anti-Boson theory. Very interesting indeed.
I was actually hoping that the supercollider WOULD create a black hole that would destroy ourselves/more/the universe/something noticeable, because then if any alien civilization was intelligent enough to watch us and intervene — they would have to at that point. Almost like helping an animal that just got hit by a car. And then we’d hopefully get their technology. Aassuming the space police don’t put us in space jail[*].
*[obligatory south park reference]
November 2, 2009 at 6:22 PM
4) Though a black hole would most likely not destroy the universe, seeing as there are millions of black holes in the universe already. It might take out our neck of the woods, but unless the aliens are close enough to be affected, they most likely wouldn’t give a shit.
November 2, 2009 at 6:23 PM
Oops, I missed the sentence about helping a wounded animal.
November 2, 2009 at 6:27 PM
No biggie.
November 2, 2009 at 6:26 PM
I agree, which is why I left the universe as one option.
But you never know. Maybe there are other kinds of black holes that could grow to greater size (maybe getting matter from another dimension, so as to have a larger event horizon), but we don’t see them because if they existed here — we wouldn’t.
I do enjoy thinking about all the possibilities that might be.
November 2, 2009 at 6:32 PM
In M-Theory, it is indeed postulated that black holes interact with the higher dimensions(and that the big bang was created by the interaction of “membranes”). As you can tell, I watch wayyyy to much discovery channel.
November 2, 2009 at 6:36 PM
That’s scary. Way scarier than the wrath of god.
November 9, 2009 at 4:21 AM
I may be going off topic a little here, but I just watched a show about the universe that really made me think on a philosophical level. It only went back to the big bang, and did not go into higher dimensions or M-tehory or anything like that.
But I digress. We have an idea of how long our universe has been around. We don’t know what caused the big bang, though M-theory hypothesizes that it was caused by the collision of membranes. But what created those membranes? A big bang on a level higher than that? And what created that? You can probably see where I’m going with this, which brings us to the philosophical part.
If we WERE to assume that there is a God, then who/what created that God? And would that God not wonder about his own creation? And who created his creator? Yes, we pretty much get into an infinite loop here. At what point was the multiverse created?
As humans, we cannot fully grasp the concept of infinity. We can understand the concept of no end, but not the concept of no beginning. Trying to grasp that concept only leads to one thing, insanity.
I could go on, but at this point I think I’m going to expand on this and make it a blog post on my own blog.