I am agnostic, so I can't vote, apparently.
I've met many agnostics who weren't aware that there are different types of atheists, including many who don't know one way or another but lean toward disbelief, which is very close to agnosticism.
The typical misunderstanding of atheism from self-described agnostics is that atheists claim to be certain that there is no God. Some atheists do that, but that's not the only kind of atheism.
Another problem with agnosticism is agnostics seem to believe that one cannot assign any probability without perfect knowledge. Yet you do it every minute of every day, in ever decision you make. We live by probabilities and beliefs (and disbeliefs). I don't see why certain concepts in life should be off limits for assignment of probabilities.
(I don't get why you've been downmodded to -1, I have just +1'd you)
As another poster wrote, often times agnostics approach the question as one of knowledge, whereas most theists as well as "weak" atheists see it as a question of belief. We all (well, almost all) believe all sorts of things that we do not truly know.
You know, it infuriates me when my theist mother tells my atheist self that I'm probably a theist without realizing it. I won't take any of that "If you're a X, you're probably just a Y without realizing it" nonsense.
Well, I do believe there is no god. And theists define themselves as not believing in the absence of a god. I mean, I think your linguistic objections are pretty disingenious.
"Atheism isn't a belief in something being true, it's a belief in other people being wrong."
I believe it is true that there is no god. And I'm pretty sure theists have a belief that me and the other atheists (and those of religions other than theirs) are wrong.
edit: Didn't capitalize "god" intentionally.
I'm not saying that atheism doesn't exist. I'm saying that it's not the same as agnosticism. Agnostic isn't defined in terms of being anti-theist. It just doesn't really believe in the validity of the question.
It's like the classical, "Are you still beating your wife?" An agnostic doesn't think that the question is framed in an answerable way.
Atheism as a term seems to be more popular in the (much more religious than the rest of the west) US where it is perhaps a minority defining itself in terms of the majority. In places where being religious is the exception, rather than the rule, it seems less sensical for those who are not religious to define themselves in terms of not holding a belief that the minority hold.
As for the negations, do you believe that atheism would have a meaning if there were no theism? Or that there's any specific substance to the term atheism, other than (usually actively) rejecting the beliefs of theism?
People change, and people are different. Grouping the understanding of life of Einstein or Gates in the same category as every 15-year old who just rejected religion is a limitation I strongly hope we'll overcome in the coming years.
I was barked at by numerous dogs. http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+barked+%22numerous+d...
http://kirtimukha.com/Krishnaswamy/Einstein/on_atheism.htm
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. [...]
I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.
When this poll was first posted, I worried it would. Then a bit later I saw the number of comments and knew that it had.
What a tar-baby the topic of religion is. A forum just can't seem to touch it any point without dragging in the whole thing.
I think this is a step towards HN being able to handle the topic maturely. Such a process is probably best done by not posting inflammatory articles. I tried to not make the poll inflammatory, though I forgot the agnostic option.
If the answer is either yes or no, and you say "maybe", you say "no", substantially.
Why? Because every "no" is simply a refuted "yes" (philosophically speaking).
And this is exactly the definition of "God".
You can't act against "logic" without hurting yourself. If you are a hacker (like me), you never ever can act against logic, otherwise your program won't work (and exactly the same happens with life itself).
Also, would you please stop telling people what they believe? I don't think I'm the only person here who finds it to be rude. You can civilly argue a point without telling people that they're not really agnostics or whatever.
Also known as negation: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/profile.html#tendency_t...
Profile of a rapist [...]
3) Negating behavior or comments - [...] Does he try to tell you what you are feeling or thinking? Or worse, tell you what you are not? Comments like "you don’t really mean that" are serious indicators of someone trying to negate you. A person who negates others is trying to take away the other person’s thoughts, feelings and needs and attempting to project his wants onto that person.
Agnostics are mathematicians. Or at lest very close to being mathematicians.
There's the old joke of a biologist, a physicist and a mathematician on a train in Scotland.
They see a black sheep and the biologist says: Hey Scotland is full of black sheep!
The Physicist responds with we have evidence of one black sheep in Scotland.
And the mathematician concludes, there exists at least one sheep, at least one of whose sides is black, in Scotland.
So when agnostics say you can't disprove anything, we mean it. We mean it in the literal mathematical sense of negatives not being provable.
Oh but you don't live your life according to such extreme ideological purity, if somethings darn close to a duck you call it a duck.
That's great if it works for you, but my mind is much stricter then that.
It is too small for our telescopes, so we have absolutely no evidence for a teapot orbiting the sun.
You don't believe in that teapot, do you? That's silly.
But Dawkins is a biologist, and I'm a computer scientist, I don't believe in the teapot, but I also don't KNOW it's not there.
And that has nothing to do with shyness.
Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
What I mean is, how can you claim to know anything if you allow the possibility of supernatural things interfering with your experiments?
You simply confirm that if 3 persons of human species are exposed to the same reality (yes, reality, because the impressions may be different, but the reality is well defined and precisely one):
So, if 3 persons of the same species are all concluding more or less different things, then you have the definite answer that none of them is seeing absolutely everything, that is: the whole reality:
So: you can't be God, because:
If you were God, you would know it (together with the exact reality of all things...)
I don't agree with the "refuted yes" idea. In logic, "no" is not necessary equal to "not yes". For example, "not black" could be "white", but also "green". "God" does not have a well defined enough definition: it's very likely that God is not a bearded man on a cloud, but questions like whether omnipotence or omnipresence exist (and their correlations) are a whole new can of philosophical worms :)