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Therefore, I remark that it requires a lot of faith to be an atheist--you have to believe in that which can never be proven (theories).

My friend, "belief" bears a very strong connotation of dedication that may simply not be present. Your conclusive remark is based upon pure fallacy.

Before I proceed to make my argument, allow me to cite for you two independent definitions of atheism which may be most reasonable for the context of my proposition to follow:
atheism: is one who does not believe that there is a God.
atheism: the state either of being without theistic beliefs, or of actively disbelieving in the existence of deities.

Consider, if you will, a child extracted from human culture at an age which predates his or her functioning personal use of language or immersion within theism. This child will live his or her life absolutely within "the state of being without theistic beliefs", one of many popular definitions given to what we come to regard as atheism. By your sense of reason, it is clear that this theoretical wild child is one of extremely strong belief (that belief being in theories which cannot be proved). This is an impossibility.

These strong assumptions about atheism are also dangerous, if I may, "beliefs" to conjure. Given that the object which you are so quick to blanket all atheists as requiring, faith, requires in denotation a strong belief, your argument is quite easily, quod erat demonstratum, struck down.

p.s.: An interest in scientific "revelations" as you opt to label them in jest has no fixed position within the area of the points you are trying to make. Using breakthroughs in scientific research as an argumentative "beating stick" is a sign of trite unprofessionalism that marks the coffee-shop philosopher and not the seasoned or well-read atheist.

-js

OK, you're right--there's more to be said. I now understand you to be saying something along the lines of "God is in everything, including the abstract, so separation of church and state is meaningless."

While this thesis is a worthwhile subject for debate in itself--and I'd love to go into the pre-Christian origins of algebra and multiplication--it's completely beside the point.

Here's the thing: you're completely misunderstanding the intent of separation of church and state. It's not about keeping God away from the people. It's about allowing people to hold their own religion. And here's the key point: there's more than one religion.

Freedom of religion, as guaranteed by our Constitution, means that each citizen must have the freedom to worship his or her religion of choice, without fear of persecution from the state or from neighbors. This means the state cannot promote any one religion over any other--all religions must be treated with equal respect. This includes Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, as well as the doctrine of atheism.

This means that any education promoted by the state must be free of any explicit references to any one religion. Mathematics is one such discipline: a Muslim and a Buddhist can equally appreciate that 6 * 3 = 18. (Even a fundamentalist Christian is likely to agree to this.) Now, if a particular person wishes to reflect upon the divinity inherent in multiplication, that's his private business.

The Theory of Evolution shares this property with mathematics: each person is free to intrepret the deeper meaning of evolution in the context of his own religion, but the theory itself does not impose any such requirement. It's based on mathematical principles, not doctrines from any particular religion. Note that, in spite of popular arguments to the contrary, it doesn't even reference atheism (nor, as you have argued, any kind of theism).

See, here's the separation of church and state at work: nowhere in a science textbook will you see something like "there is no God" or "so-and-so happened all by itself, proving the absence of God" or "God caused thus-and-so to happen" or "Allah's divine wisdom showed the way for this-and-that" or "Through the grace of Lord Shiva, we now have whatever-it-is." There are no references to the Christian God, or any god, or the lack thereof (except in a social sciences context, and then it's always in reference to the people who hold a particular belief). That's the whole point. Each person is free to interpret the knowledge within the context of his or her own religion; the knowledge itself does not come encumbered by a particular religious belief.

This is the difference between the Theory of Evolution and the doctrine of Intelligent Design. The ToE requires no particular religious belief in order to accept it--like any true science, it is independent of religion, and can be accepted by people of a variety of religious backgrounds. ID, on the hand, does require a particular religious belief: that there is a single intelligent being doing the designing. You may believe that to be incontrovertibly true, and you may find it incredible that anyone could believe anything else. But the fact of the matter is, there are a multitude of people who do believe something else, and our Constitution guarantees them the freedom to do so.

David

"Because some people have been murdered in the name of religion, religion should be abolished? "
Well, it's rather interesting that when it's about high moral it's true Christian. But when it's about inkvisition, discrimination by Church that is just bad human behaviour.

You state that there's a God, well, show me! Prove it! I can take it - but not you. If you state that you're an alien observator disguised to a human being most people will laugh at you and probably you too. Or you state that you're owning 100 billions i Switzerland but you want me to believe it just by saying so.
Why do you expect me to accept that just the parts of Bible you want are valid, all the other parts talking about direct intervention by God are allegoric symbols?

The problem is that most people even today have not the slightest understanding of the universe. No humanity do not develope.
Stanislaw Lem a great SciFi writer wrote in Summae Technologiae that people think that humanity is just like a jung man in his 20-es he makes misstakes but will improve in time. Well humanity is just like an old alcholist who was saved to life again by doctors and he promises that tomorrow he will be sober and he will live a healthy life.
But already in the evenenig he's drunk again.
From shamanism to polytheism to monotheism was the way to defend from an overall existing concrete divine existens to a more subtle gallery of gods to an abstract, surrealistic god that by current definition could not be proven.

I'm sick of relatives who start halleluja when their dearest has been rescued thanks to the hard effort of rescue workers or hospital personal but they praise God instead thanking those people who did the job in many cases risking their own health.
They take medication but states that that was their fiath in God and prayers was resulted in God's intervention to save them. That is the most arrogant theism.

Of course not at all religious people are such jerks but all too many :-(

Being atheist is not just another belief as you state but the realisation that God is just Santa Clause - an imagination of the humans brain.

The problem is today that Companies are ruling by lobbying and they never ever cared about humans and they use archievments in sciences to enrich the owners, nothing more.
This way destroying this planet big time in a never before experienced global way and religion is just another way to deny the problem and set faith inot god hoping that God will save humanity or at least His own believers in the Heaven at least.

About moral: I do not need an invisible supervisor with a carot in one hand and a whip in the other the be tolerant, listen to and try to help others. I have empaty by all myself alone.
You want me to accept your untestable doctrines in the name of tolerance but it do not work in the other way?

You've got to be kidding.

Because some people have been murdered in the name of religion, religion should be abolished? Does that mean because some people have been murdered in the name of freedom, freedom should be abolished? Slaves were kept in the name of cotton, so cotton should be eliminated? Maybe we should talk about eugenics, which was accepted science at the beginning of the 20th century.

Your claim that indoctrinating children is always wrong is even more ludicrous. What do you think I'll be doing when I teach my children that stealing is wrong, or that driving on the right side of the road is right, or that all men are created equal? That's flat out indoctrination. Of course, so would be teaching them that stealing is right, or that driving on the right side of the road is wrong, or that some men are worth less because they've got more melanin.

What do you think you're doing to your kids when you teach them to stamp out religion everywhere they find it? What's up next, you're going to start burning bibles?

More importantly, you haven't addressed the central point: atheism is a belief system, just like theism is. You can't prove there is no god. So all you're trying to do is make sure everyone agrees with your belief system. Explain to me again how this is better than some theist trying to make sure you agree with his?

And don't give me the "because I'm right and he's wrong" argument until you can prove that there is no god.

This is why much of the world these days either enjoys or is moving towards religious tolerance. Which means I can be Catholic, and you can be atheist, and we no one has to get nailed to anything.

Then religion doesn't need to muddy the waters around unrelated issues. We can discuss, say, heliocentrism without me dismissing you because you're atheist or you dismissing me because I'm not. You, on the other hand, are going to press on with religious intolerance. The only reason people like you aren't just as damaging now as the Roman Catholic Church was centuries ago is because there aren't enough of you in charge.

And thank God for that.

I was taight evolution was science because it was testable. Theism is not science because it is untestable.

ID could be science if we could show that some existing race put us here for their own purposes, but that would involve finding them.

I agree with the statements of fact you've made, but I think you're once again misunderstanding what I mean by "opposed to the realm of."

My original topic, as it relates to that phrase, was the fact that that many people seem to think that what is true or false (reality) is the right topic of study for science, while what is good or evil (morality) is the right topic of study for religion. Not just that they disagree about reality, but they say that religion is not at all about what is real, it's entirely about what is moral, and that's what religion is good for. They are putting religion as a label for "stuff about morality", and science as a label for "stuff about reality".

The reason I mentioned secular ethics is because that is clearly (by definition) not religious and yet still is about morality, good and evil. So by the same reasoning that leads people to make the above-mentioned distinction - that despite many claims they make about what is real or true, that's not really the point of religious doctrines - once secular ethics is most widely accepted as a basis for determining good and evil, such people would argue that religion is not really about morality, despite making many claims about what is good or evil. But then, what is religion "about", if neither reality or morality?

My point is that defining religion by the subject matter it 'rightly' covers winds up with a constantly shifting definition of what religion is, eventually destroying any meaning the word has. Your definition that it covers 'supernatural' things (those things beyond our contemporary understanding of the natural universe) suffers the same problem, as things previously thought to be supernatural are finally understood naturally. A long time ago thunder was considered a supernatural effect, and diseases were the divine punishment of the gods, but we now understand these things naturally. The word "supernatural" is being continually marginalized and will someday be understood as the nonsense word it is, pointing at nothing at all, because anything that is, is natural.

If you define religion by subject matter, then you make that word suffer the same problem - once no subject matter is seen as the proper subject of religion, what exactly is left? What does "religion" *mean*? We can talk about religious approaches to ethics versus secular approaches, but if the "religion is about morality" definition is true, then that means that even secular ethics are religious - an obvious contradiction. Likewise, we can talk about religions vs secular approaches to 'supernatural' things (that which is beyond our current understanding) - the secular or natural approach is to seek to understand it naturally, while religious folk say things like "God did it" and leave it at that. Basically what I'm getting at is that if you define "religion" by subject matter, then any secular study of said subject matter is suddenly "religious", which is obviously contradictory and so that can't be how things are.

Which is why I'm emphasizing that religion is not defined by the subject matter it talks about. Religion makes claims of truth and goodness; it discusses things that we now understand far better than religious texts describe them, and things which even most intelligent and educated people don't understand all that well at all. Religion talks about both reality and morality, the natural universe and the 'supernatural' universe, and secular studies discuss all those same topics, so that cannot be the defining quality of a religion.

Thus why I say religion is defined by its *approach to* subject matters, not the subject matters themselves. The "God did it" religious approach is to see a question or problem and make up (or look up) an excuse to solve it for you, so you don't have to deal with any more questions or problems, sticking your head in the sand. The secular or naturalist approach is to see a question or problem and *try to solve it*. That is the distinction between religion and secular/natural studies. One is dogmatic an

will that make religion then opposed to the realm of ethics as well?

Religion is already in opposition with secular ethics and morality. In general secular morality is more permissive than religious morality (for example in the area of relationships and in particular premarital sex), which causes such a conflict. Most religions require (or at least practice) that their laws are imposed on the population, rather than allowing members of the population to voluntarily accept them. Imposing dogma is unethical by secular standards, where ethics and morality are logically reasoned.

Sometimes the opposition is more blatent: many forms of evangalism require an active effort to change the attitudes of others, something with is an onus on all Christians (according to doctrine), yet which is generally unethical according to secular reasoning.

Obviously there are large areas where religious and secular morality agree; but that doesn't prevent them from being in opposition.

You must be confusing me with someone else ... in fact, I didn't use any form of the word "assume" in my last post. Nonetheless, I happen to agree that every claim is an assumption.

Indeed I did confuse you and another post in this thread. But regardless of that, right here you're misunderstanding me in a vital way. I'm not just saying all claims made are assumptions. I'm saying that by thinking anything, you are implicitly making assumptions about all possible claims. The 'implicit' is important - maybe you haven't thought to ask yet whether there's a knife-wielding murderer directly behind you, but unless you have reason to think there might be you assume that there's not. It's essentially Occham's razor - posit as little as is needed to explain things and nothing more until something requires further explanation. (This is also what I mean be a "positive" idea - an idea which posits something). Put this way it should be obvious that we naturally do assume the negative until proven positive, but people often seem to make the jump to "proven positive" on extremely flimsy evidence. In your blindfold example, you have good reason to expect there might be a wall in front of you, from years of experience with rooms and walls and such. From what I've seen, with God, most people have no experience with God as they define it but believe that he exists simply because they've been told so.

Rather, "supernatural" pertains to that which is not physical or material or can be perceived or explained by natural laws or emperical senses; and by definition includes god(s) and divinity.

So is the study of logic supernatural then? How about analytic psychology? There are a number of "sciences" which deal strictly in the realm of human thought, but in a rational and methodical way, which do not normally fall under the domain of "supernatural" topics, and yet have no more relation to the physical world and empirical observation than does talk about God.

There are countless examples in history. Religious belief held that the earth was the centre of the universe, that the sun revolved around the earth, that the story of creation was literal (the Catholic church now accepts evolution as a mechanism used by god).

This is what I meant by implying that religion is not opposite the *realm* of science. Religions make many claims about the same subject matter that science covers; people just accept science as more authoritative in those matters now. If someday a majority of people take a natural approach to ethics, will that make religion then opposed to the realm of ethics as well? Religion and science are at odds over these topics, but they do not have exclusive and opposite domains of authority, one over physical things and one over ethical. (Although I agree that science alone per se *cannot* directly answer ethical questions, but that there is a separate science-like natural method for answering such questions, with its own axioms and processes that stand on their own equal to the scientific method; and that this method is already partially developed in the notions of human rights and due process of law).

I did not mean for negation to mean "opposite" ... You seem to think I mean opposites in the sense that one would claim "if something is not being destroyed then it is being created"

I think this because of your statement:

... if you don't believe something is so, you're assuming (though not as a matter of faith; just a tentative assumption) that it's not so...

If I don't believe that something exists, I am not asserting or assuming the negation (or opposite) that it does not exist. The only thing I am assuming is that I should proceed as if it may not exist. The important word here is "believe".

As an example, imagine you are blindfolded, spun around a few times, and told that it's okay to walk forward ten paces. You do not believe that a wall exists in your path (because you trust the person who told you to walk), but that doesn't necessarily stop you from being cautious and feeling out for a wall. You don't believe it's there, but neither do you assume that it's not.

Since an agnostic position is not to believe anything until there's good reason, an agnostic must necessarily assume that any claim about something's existence is false until they have reason to believe it true

That is not the agonistic position. Agostics hold that proof or emperical evidence of god is impossible; thus any belief in or against the existance of god is strictly a matter of faith, and cannot be justified by empericism. No true agnostic is waiting around for proof of god -- they believe wholeheartedly that such proof it impossible. They may believe in the existance or god or be skeptical about it; but in either case they do so knowing that there is no proof of that belief.

...you say that agnostics believe it is scientifically impossible to know whether or not God exists. While this may be the strict use of it in comparative religion, I have seen it used more broadly in a general epistemological sense to mean the reservation of judgement about negative claims (as in "x is not so") until reason directly dictates belief in such claims

Yes, people use a lot of words more broadly than their meaning implies. But this is a religious discussion in which terminology is important (as evidenced by the attempts to define "athiest" and "agnostic"). Furthermore, I have most often heard the words "athiest" and "agnostic" abused in Christian circles, where they mean "undecided heathens waiting to be converted" (another way of saying "reserving judgement until they have reason"...).

You also say it is possible to not make any assumptions, but the claim I am making here is that everyone is always making an implicit assumption about every possible claim

You must be confusing me with someone else ... in fact, I didn't use any form of the word "assume" in my last post. Nonetheless, I happen to agree that every claim is an assumption.

You can assume all positive claims to be false (thus all negative claims true) and get nothing contrary ... it is logically safe to assume "no claim is true" (the position of skepticism) until proven otherwise

Agreed.

To be truly agnostic you must also be skeptical. You do not *know* that x is not-so (e.g. God does not exist) but you've got to assume that until you have reason to think otherwise.

Incorrect. To be agnostic does not deny the option of faith. On the contrary, it says that if you choose to hold a belief on the existance or non-existance of god, you do so knowing that your belief is on faith alone, and no evidence or proof can exist to support that belief.

You have to be careful with "positive" and "negative" statements. Just because something contains a "not" doesn't make it negative. "God exists" and "God does not exist" are

"What makes someone atheist is not believing in God(s). As it happens this is the default position of someone who is not religious, as without observed evidence of logical proof, it is irrational to believe in God(s)."

No, you definitely said atheist.

What I said was, being an atheist is not believing in gods; and also, as a separate thing, that the default position of a person who is not religious (that is to say does not take any claim on faith, which is the same as saying a person who is agnostic) is to assume positive claims false (and thus the contradictory negative claims true) unless there is evidence in their favor. So an agnostic may make no explicit claims about the existence of God, but must implicitly, by their other beliefs, assume one way or the other. The only way out of would be if said person did not even understand the question - you could hold not even an assumption about God if you're not sure what "God" means, but given that you understand that, you're either assuming yes or no implicitly in your other beliefs, even if you're not making any explicit claims about it.

I guess it comes down to Occam's Razor. I don't know whether or not you have elves in your pockets, but given that there is no reason to think so, and such a hypothesis offers nothing in the way of explanation as nothing requires such an explanation, I'm going to assume that you do not have elves in your pockets. The default position is not to postulate a thing's existence unless there is some need to do so; to assume it doesn't exist unless there's reason to think it does. This applies to God as well as it does to anything else.

You have grossly misstated the principle of bivalence. From Wikipedia: "In logic, the principle of bivalence states that for any proposition P, either P is true or P is false." You said "if any claim is false, its negation is true" (and in your examples you demonstrate that you intend "negation" to mean "opposite") which is only true when P is boolean.

I did not mean for negation to mean "opposite" in the sense most people think of things (capitalist vs communist, creation vs destruction, etc). I specifically chose the word "negation" to be as accurate to the principle of bivalence as possible. If "[something] exists" is false, its negation "[something] does not exist" is true, as "[something] does not exist" is equivalent to "it is not the case that [something] exists".

You seem to think I mean opposites in the sense that one would claim "if something is not being destroyed then it is being created", which is blatantly false (something being "not-destroyed" is being "preserved", not "created"), but people think of creation and destruction as "opposites" - which they are a sort of. I like to call that sort of opposite "reciprocal", as opposed to "negation", to borrow mathematical terms. The type of "opposite" I've been speaking of thus far has mostly been negation. (To take a brief tangent, I find that pretty much by definition, reciprocal-type opposites always occur together, while negation-types never do, and the confusion between them is the cause of many false dichotomies that are commonly believed, e.g. between egoism and altruism).

But to get back to the gist of things - you say that agnostics believe it is scientifically impossible to know whether or not God exists. While this may be the strict use of it in comparative religion, I have seen it used more broadly in a general epistemological sense to mean the reservation of judgement about negative claims (as in "x is not so") until reason directly dictates belief in such claims - in other words, as someone in this thread mentioned, the position that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

You also say it is possible to not make any assumptions, but the claim I am making here is that everyone is always making an implicit assumption about every possible claim - that their explicit beliefs have infinitely far-reaching implications about the rest of the universe - and that default position for such claims is usually negative, and should always be negative, unless reasonable evidence indicates otherwise. This is because, given that one is making implicit assumptions about all possible claims, it is not possible to hold all possible positive claims true at once, but it is possible to hold all negative claims true at once.

Lets take someone's height for an example. Call this person John. John may be 6'0", or 6'1", or 6'2", or 5'11", or 5'10", and so on and so forth - there's an infinite number of heights that John could be. Now, I cannot assume that John is 6'0" and 6'1" and so on, because those positions are contrary. However, I *can* assume the negations of all those claims - John is not 6'0", John is not 6'1", and so on - without ever deriving a set of contrary positions. You can assume all positive claims to be false (thus all negative claims true) and get nothing contrary, but you cannot assume all positive claims true (and thus all negative claims false) without your resulting set of claims being contrary, for John must be all heights at once, your hypothetical planet must be all colors at once, etc.

Effectively, what I'm getting at is that it is logically safe to assume "no claim is true" (the position of skepticism) until proven otherwise, but it is not logically safe to assume "every claim is true" (what would you even call that? naivety? I can't imagine anyone has ever held such a position). Since you are always making implicit assumptions about every claim, it is most rational to assume those claims false until you have evidence to the contrary - otherwise, you're picking and choosing which ones to assume

Damnit people. Stop trying to define things in terms of opposites.

An athiest believes there is no god. That is a much strong statement that simply not believing in a god, or not believing that there are one or more gods. It is an unprovable statement of belief (also known as "faith") in the non-existance of any form of divinity.

An agnostic believes that scientific knowledge or proof of the existance or non-existance of god (or gods) is impossible. Note that this does not preclude an agnostic from being a theist or an athiest -- it just means that the agnostic is aware that there can be no scientific evidence to back his/her beliefs. Agnosticism itself is a belief -- currently there are no proofs that scientific knowledge of god is impossible, largely because there is no definition for "god".

Agnostics are not uncertain. They have a view and they hold it firmly. But that view does not concern whether or not they believe in gods, it concerns whether scientific knowledge of gods is possible. An agnostic could be uncertain about his/her beliefs in the supernatural, but that's not inherent to agnosticism.

Religion is a belief system concerning the supernatural. A religion is, by definition, organized (a belief system); and by extension contains various doctrines (such as rituals and moral codes). Without doctrine religion would not be organised, and unorganised belief in the supernatural is termed "spirituality", not "religion".

Because of the need for organization and doctrine, and because they do not concern belief in the supernatural so much as belief against the supernatural, neither athiesm nor agnosticism are considered to be religions. This is both by definition and by convention in comparative religious studies.

The default position is neither athiest nor agnostic. It is "non-believer". A non-believer is someone who does not have a determined viewpoint on the supernatural. (Wikipedia uses the term "weak athiest").

This is different to "secularism", which holds that religion and supernatural beliefs are not paramount in understanding life and the natural world. Secularism is another ideological standpoint with specific views, and does not necessarily describe someone who simply does not have a determined viewpoint on the supernatural.

It is also different to "irreligious", which is the absence of religious belief. An irrelgious person could be spiritual (belief in the supernatural) or a non-believer, or an athiest.

You have grossly misstated the principle of bivalence. From Wikipedia: "In logic, the principle of bivalence states that for any proposition P, either P is true or P is false." You said "if any claim is false, its negation is true" (and in your examples you demonstrate that you intend "negation" to mean "opposite") which is only true when P is boolean.

If P is "I believe jam tastes good", then bivalence says that either P is true (jam tastes good) or P is false (jam does not taste good). The latter does not mean that jam tastes bad (which is the opposite of P), merely that it does not taste good. There are a whole range of tastes in between "bad" and "good". It could taste "just, y'know, okay, i suppose".

Back on agnosticism: agnostics simply believe that claims regarding the existance of god (or gods) are inherently unknowable. There is no statement of whether the gods do or do not exist, only that we can't be sure either way. Thus you get athiest agnostics, theist agnostics, and agnostics who are non-believers.

The quote of mine you're responding to is simply stating that the rational, agnostic default position, for anything, is to assume that a claim is false until there is reason to believe it is so.

"What makes someone atheist is not believing in God(s). As it happens this is the default position of someone who is not religious, as without observed evidence of logical proof, it is irrational to believe in God(s)."

No, you definitely said atheist.

By the principle of bivalence (that if any claim is false, its negation is true), if you don't believe something is so, you're assuming (though not as a matter of faith; just a tentative assumption) that it's not so.

This is simply not true. One simple example: take a random planet, one that you have not ever seen. Do you believe it is blue? Do you believe it is red? Do you believe it is green? Do you believe it is white? I'm guessing you'd say no to all, but that you'd not assume it's none of those colours either.

More to the point, it's possible to be agnostic and not make assumptions either way about the existence of God.

May I suggest reading Faith and Reason by Pope John Paul II.

Then you might know that, at least for Catholics, it is expected that they use their reason fully in the investigation and acceptance of their faith.

It is quite analogous to the way that scientists "blindly" accept the scientific method, but are expected to use their reason fully to understand the how the universe works.

If that is so, then the burden of proof is on YOU. YOU are the one asserting a particular position, of which, from my experience as an ex-atheist, I am highly sceptical!

In all of human history no one has provided any factual or even compelling evidence for god or gods. Furthermore, theism is not based on observance but mysticism, emotionalism, and ritual; it's is an inherently irrational system.

Irrelevant: since no particular theistic position is up for discussion, and you are making a defence of atheism, which must prove the non-existence of a Divine Being, regardless of what some other person might or might not believe.

Finding religion wrong does not require counter-evidence, it requires an examination of its own axioms.

Which is why I am trying to get you to examine the axioms (the Presumptive Beliefs) that underly atheism. Yet for some reason, you keep trying to change the subject/play semantic games.

Irrelevant either way, because in order to demonstrate the worth of their beliefs, atheists need to disprove the existence of ANY Divine Being, regardless of whether any theist believes in that God or not.

The burden of proof is on the claimant, not the skeptic. It is not my job to make someone else's argument then disprove it.

In all of human history no one has provided any factual or even compelling evidence for god or gods. Furthermore, theism is not based on observance but mysticism, emotionalism, and ritual; it's is an inherently irrational system. Finding religion wrong does not require counter-evidence, it requires an examination of its own axioms.

"Absence of proof is not the proof of absence."
This is the core fallacy of atheism. It requires just as much a leap of faith as religion: believing in the absence or presence of a supreme being require similar facilities, and are different than believing nothing at all.

Thus, it is wrong to say that atheists don't believe in God(s), as atheists specifically believe that Gods do not exist. In essence, Agnostics are completely without dogma; atheists are not.

Disclaimer: It's the atheists' right to make the leap of faith, even though it's a pretty short and easy leap, from believing in nothing to believing there is nothing, but I believe differently.

Although I agree with you, it raises some practical issues, in that you must be agnostic-EVERYTHING. You cannot specifically prove that there aren't green men living 10-feet below the martian surface, therefore u must be green-men agnostic. Replace green-men for $abitrary make believe thing and you'll see what I mean. I believe this is against the spirit of what agnosticism means, in that, agnostics believe either option is likely. Clearly in the green-men case this is not true. You should be green-men atheist.

Atheism includes both positive non-belief and lack of belief. Agnosticism is orthogonal to theism and atheism; it is the philosophy that the existence of gods is unknowable. One can be a theistic agnostic or an atheistic agnostic. Religion requires a belief in a supernatural force; as such, atheism is not a religion.

I find an agnostic approach infinitely more rational than a religious approach. Question everything. Nothing is ever entirely certain (though there are some things very strongly suggested by evidence, i.e. the laws of gravity, or things that are very safe to assume, i.e. the rules of logic).

And before some grammar Nazi finds this, yes, I just noticed that I used "i.e." where I should have used "e.g." So sue me.

I think you're confusing atheist and agnostic, the latter being the logical default position, since there's no proof God doesn't exist either.

I'm not confusing them - that's my very point.

The opposite of religious is not atheist, it's agnostic. Religious people believe "[This] is so. Period. End of story." Agnostic people say "I'm not entirely certain what is so. (But the evidence suggests [this], and I think it's safe to assume [that])."

Atheism, theism, or what have you, are all words describing a type of claim about the existence or non-existence of God(s). One can be religiously theistic, religiously atheistic, agnostically theistic or agnostically atheistic. Theism and atheism describe the claim at stake, namely, about the existence of God(s): religious or agnostic describe the attitude toward those claims (or any other claims for that matter).

I find an agnostic approach infinitely more rational than a religious approach. Question everything. Nothing is ever entirely certain (though there are some things very strongly suggested by evidence, i.e. the laws of gravity, or things that are very safe to assume, i.e. the rules of logic).

The quote of mine you're responding to is simply stating that the rational, agnostic default position, for anything, is to assume that a claim is false until there is reason to believe it is so. By the principle of bivalence (that if any claim is false, its negation is true), if you don't believe something is so, you're assuming (though not as a matter of faith; just a tentative assumption) that it's not so. Since an agnostic position is not to believe anything until there's good reason, an agnostic must necessarily assume that any claim about something's existence is false until they have reason to believe it true. So unless you have good reason to believe in God, don't.