agnostic |agˈnästik|nouna person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.
Disclaimer: I was raised Christian. Most of my readers are or were Christian. Therefore the following discussion mostly concerns that viewpoint.
Agnostics are cowards to their own brain. It's like they got tired of thinking, so they just declared all things equal and gave up.
Is there any other area of human thought in which such a ridiculous assertion be deemed sane? Crop circles? Horoscopes? Agnostics give the same weight to an invisible being who has a list of naughty and nice people on a scroll and when he opens a scroll seal a seven headed monster will appear and smite thee OR that one day the atoms in your body will be re-dispersed into the universe from whence they came. The real madness comes when people reject the hocus-pocus, but STILL think there could be a god...like looking behind the curtain and STILL believing he's the Wizard of Oz.
With the same logic, EVERY concept is disprovable to be false; including Pastafarians....
With the same logic, EVERY concept is disprovable to be false; including Pastafarians....
Pastafarians is an internet invention to counter the claims of religion. The Flying Spaghetti Monster can't be disproved either. But then, neither can fairies, or ogres.
Agnostics shouldn't be allowed on juries. As jury foreman, can you imagine talking an agnostic into reaching a conclusion without a doubt remaining?
"Well, he could have slipped on a Lego while cleaning his gun and shot his wife six times and he could have tripped when trying to comfort her and stabbed her in the heart with the knife he had in the other hand and while carrying her to the car for a ride to the hospital he could have dropped her in the pool...."
Agnostics shouldn't be allowed on juries. As jury foreman, can you imagine talking an agnostic into reaching a conclusion without a doubt remaining?
"Well, he could have slipped on a Lego while cleaning his gun and shot his wife six times and he could have tripped when trying to comfort her and stabbed her in the heart with the knife he had in the other hand and while carrying her to the car for a ride to the hospital he could have dropped her in the pool...."
With the slightest brush of research, you could learn that the idea of human's specialness is the logical invention of the notion of impending nothingness. Our brain can't stand not knowing....thus science. But some things are beyond understanding, thus the brain....just....makes....stuff....up.
Indeed.
We digest food just like other mammals, we conceive our young the same....etc, etc, etc. The only thing that makes us "special" is that by hook or crook we have developed a brain with enough neuron connections to become self awareness, and such power will not easily tolerate the notion of death and nothingness.
We digest food just like other mammals, we conceive our young the same....etc, etc, etc. The only thing that makes us "special" is that by hook or crook we have developed a brain with enough neuron connections to become self awareness, and such power will not easily tolerate the notion of death and nothingness.
I never like to refer to Fundies (new internet term for fundamentalists) as idiots. In their sphere as druggist, teacher, welder, etc, they make very calculated, rational decisions based on the evidence available. It just seems to me they go deaf and blind to reasoning when there faith in a supreme being is challenged.
Fundies question most everything they see and hear. If someone rang their doorbell and offered to sell them something that would...say....make them live for eternity, they would use their logical minds and slam the door. But they abandon this same logic if someone tells them that a book was written in the Bronze Age tells them how to live for eternity and this book must be true because it says it's true...and, of course, they have been brainwashed from birth to believe it.
But what about that book of theirs.....
Do you think the bible would pass muster if there was a law suit of some kind of trial for fraud or some such?
I actually respect the parents in this next article...
I actually respect the parents in this next article...
These people not only talk the talk, they walk the walk. They follow the book to the letter. Yet, even fundies would call them nutcases. Hypocrisy is one of the "sins" that is the most obvious, but the easiest to overlook.
Now to close....Imagine yourself in Rome in 5 BC and a man walks up to you and says, "If you believe that I am the son of god, born from a virgin, and I have made water into water and I can wake up long dead people and have them walk through town, and some other stuff, I can make it so you never die, but will live for eternity and all you have to do is to pretend to eat my flesh and drink my blood and believe that I am telling you the truth.
Using the brain you have now, would you actually believe that? Remember, you had already heard the same song and dance for a hundred other "messiahs" popping up during that same time.
LET'S MOVE ON...
This ought to be posted in every school in America...
(I have no idea if he actually said this)
Just another thing Christians don't have to do in order to live forever.....they get to keep their shoes on....
Yeah, it's called self-hypnosis and it's well documented...
Dear Fundies, Does this look silly to you?
Well, go eat your pretend flesh and drink your pretend blood and think about the meaning of the word "silly."
Just like mice, sheep, sharks,....
One would only hope....
One would only hope....
5 comments:
As with many such things, the wikipedia page on this topic provides a good overview and jumping-off point:
"In the popular sense, an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in the existence of a deity or deities, whereas a theist and an atheist believe and disbelieve, respectively. In the strict sense, however, agnosticism is the view that humanity does not currently possess the requisite knowledge and/or reason to provide sufficient rational grounds to justify the belief that deities either do or do not exist."
The strict sense of agnosticism is a good way to approach many (but not all) religious and spiritual claims.
It's said that Christians are atheists with respect to other religions, and indeed many if not most of them actually are.
In a similar way, a skeptic can be an "atheist" about some religious claims and an "agnostic" about others. Personally, I positively disbelieve in religious claims which clearly intersect with the physical world and are wrong, e.g.:
* virgin births & divine humans
* faith healing & power of prayer
* kosher/halal, ablution rituals, etc
I can't prove or disprove (and thus don't speak positively about) these claims:
* our universe was created
* there are beings more advanced than humans
* "we are all one" and other watery pantheism
So I'm atheist about religious claims of the former type and agnostic about claims of the latter type. I think being a good skeptic entails 1) having a broad but never fixed idea about the current bounds of human knowledge, and 2) not bullshitting with positive language about stuff that may or may not exist beyond those bounds.
I think an "atheist" arguing about pre-singularity phenomena with certitude is exactly as arrogant and wrongheaded as a religious person doing the same thing. Furthermore, when atheists and religious people argue about strictly non-true ideas such as "life has innate value" their stupidity or reasonableness can span the gamut of human possibility.
I guess my point there is that being an atheist or skeptic or Christian doesn't make a person right, insightful, honest, or good anymore than it makes them the opposites of those things. There are many good reasons to criticize religions – especially Christianity – but "being X automatically makes you a bad and/or gullible person" a super-shitty critique.
Of course, many Christians are gullible fuckwits. But then so, too, are many irreligious people. I happen to know several atheists who are hateful, arrogant people I'd rather beat to a pulp than socialize with, but I don't think they're jerktastic turdlingtons because they're atheists.
Their atheism may have something to do with it; there are many flavors of youthful, naive "I don't believe in anything because I'm pubescent and rebellious" atheism that can persist long into adulthood, but that can only be a part of the problem. More important are their rearing and home lives, their hormonal and relationship status, and to some extent, their genes. Same thing applies to religious people.
How much proof do you need that we humans are not “special”? We respond to our environment the exact same way as the lowly amoeba. We avoid not knowing just like they respond to light. The “Great Planner” is a figment of our imagination. My proof for that is the thousands of “Great Planner” myths that have been proven false. No gods on the mountain, no great spirit in the cave, no fertility god, etc. But out of all this proven bullshit there still lingers a “well, maybe”?!?!
I didn't claim humans are special. If there is any theme to my comments here, it would be self-annihilation, self-doubt, self-distrust, etc. We are but self-aware fleshbags (and we're not even very aware).
Clearly most creator-deities are mythical, but what if extra-dimensional aliens caused the Big Bang? How could we tell them apart from a god? I can't say that did or didn't happen; I'd by lying if I said I knew.
I don't say "the universe was created" and I don't say "the universe was not created" because nobody knows. Similarly, I don't say "all life has value" or "all life has no value" because those questions aren't falsifiable.
I lean very much toward "not created" and "no value" because I like skepticism and absurdity respectively. But my skepticism and fondness for the absurd make me want to give religious people the benefit of the doubt. Why?
Well, again, because being an atheist doesn't mean you magically become allergic to bullshit (especially your own). Any honest investigation of secular life reveals irreligious notions that are bs through and through:
* all people are born equal
* all people should pay the same taxes
* all people deserve the same benefits
* life is good
* life is preferable to death
* the USA was at any point about liberty
* people should/shouldn't have guns
* I have unique insights
* I'm neatly distinct from everyone else
I could go on. Religious people don't monopolize stupidity. If everybody was an atheist we'd still be dumb apes groping for answers in a capricious universe and we'd still get those answers wrong with similar frequency.
Why don't we just called the creator Physics and move on down the road?
Well if the Big Bang just emerged out of randomness like various quantum fluctuations it wouldn't have been created by anything, whereas if it was the product of some extra-dimensional being's shenanigans, it would've been. That's mostly irrelevant to our everyday lives but it's still not something I'm gonna lie about (why would I waste my time on such a trivial lie?).
Sure myths are often silly, but so is football, and you apparently like that. Consider the other moral bits of religions – the Golden Rules, the calls to charity, the attunement to suffering and compassion. Surely you would agree that those things are good and can be had without religious inspiration, and yet regardless of origin they are exactly as unfalsifiable as god-claims.
I've made this point here several times. Lots of atheists are quick to point out the stupidity of bullshit when it's bullshit they don't believe in. Me, I try to call it all out, regardless of whether I believe it or not. That's only fair. I buy into lots of unfalsifiable moral ideas and I just try to remain skeptical of them lest I delude myself into conflating them with ~science~.
Post a Comment