---But it was "knowledge" 500 years ago that the world was flat, and creation myths have been believed literally for millenia. ---
Knowledge can well be wrong (in fact the very IDEA of knowledge requires an admission that we are faliable!). The difference between faith and belief is not necessarily accuracy, but methodology. Knowledge actually works on the principle that we need to provide evidence for a claim, and the more good evidence, the more likely it is true (never 100% though). Faith has no such method of separating truth from falsity. Even if faith turns out to be right, that doesn't make faith an accurate method for _determining_ truth anymore than a coin flip is an accurate way of determining the right answers to a true/false question.
---I think one of my RS teachers once said something about "Science helps us understand how, religion helps us understand why". ---
This is a common idea, but it's not very helpful if you think about it. First of all, asking "why" begs the question: maybe there was no why. How can we assume that there was? Science asks "how"- and if evidence for a "why" is found, then it can perfectly well examine THAT too. "Why" is really a subset of "how," in that sense.
Of course, ultimately, asking "how" begs the question as well: maybe there was no how. But since we don't yet know of any such thing (except maybe some quantum events), it's a much safer bet.
Are you claiming that giant bannanas also exist? If you really had found these things, then perhaps we might have some leads to consider about these giant purple gorillas. However, it just as easily could be a hoax, or a giant purple cow, or whatever: the case for whatever it is you claim this evidence shows rests on the validity of the evidence, and the certainty which it points to the existence of your gorilla. In this case, since I doubt this evidence even exists (i.e., this is a joke), the case is pretty unconvincing.
---It's OK not to make any commitment for or against. ---
Noting that you don't believe is NOT making a commitment. This is what I find so confusing in your assertions. All it means is that you do not the have belief that someone is asking if you have. If you "don't know" then by definition you don't have the belief. Belief requires an affirmative answer to the question, and nothing less. Anything else is a lack of belief.
This has nothing to do with sitting on the fence, because this is not that sort of distinction.
No. First off, since these are definitional criteria, the correct statements must contain "I BELIEVE/I don't BELIEVE."- these definitions reference people, not actually answers to the questions. Atheists simply do not believe IN god. That is not the same as stating that no gods exist. Agnosticism concerns knowledge, not belief.
---I feel it would be a good time for atheists to join together in a movement implicitly to destroy theism. The control over the minds of billions that the dogma of religion gives a minority is dangerous and needs to be stopped.---
I think this would be bad, if not highly unethical. It's not my bussiness to tell people what they should or should not believe: everyone is best equipped to do that for themselves. Where I think atheists could do some good would be if they could voice calls for tolerance and respect more generally, and oppose the enroachment of religious ideology into the bussiness of public institutions. Most theists are content to believe their beliefs happily without forcing them on me, and I am content to let them. Only a small but vocal minority causes the real trouble. Plus, plenty of theisms aren't even empirically questionable, like non-willful pantheisms.
---I'm using the word as its generally accepted in the Judeo-Christian sense of "that intelligence which created the universe" or "that intelligence which runs the universe". In other words, was the universe created by a self-aware, intelligent entity, or was the universe made by "natural" processes? ---
Giving it this more clear definition DOES help the strong agnosticism problem somewhat. But it still runs into non-cognitive problems. What does it mean for something to be "self-aware" when it is "not natural in universe"? Every experience we have of awareness takes place in the context of the universe. This god's awareness may be different: but we don't even have any idea HOW it's different. It's awareness, but not. And in a totally unknown way. "All powerful" is another problem: it's really just a negative definition in disguise: it means "a power without limits." But that still doesn't really tell us anything about it. Likewise, calling something "not natural" raises other confusing issues. "Supernatural" is itself something of a non-cognitive term. Worst of all, except for "designed the universe (a claimed deed done by this being in, of course, a totally unknown/possibly unknowable manner)," this god you describe suspiciously fits all the characteristic of "nothing/non-existence."
Is non-existence unknowable? Yes. Is Non-existence omniscient (lacks limits on its knowledge)? Yes. Omnipotent (lacks limits on its power)? Yes. Without natural form? Yes. Not in the universe? Yes. So how exactly is this "God" thing in any way distinct from non-existence, or a thing which does not exist?
---So my point is that the question of whether there is a self-aware, intelligent being behind the universe is unknowable, because we are limited by our senses to the subjective reality of the universe. ---
The problem is this: does the concept of "behind" even apply to the the noun the "universe"? We don't know. It might be like saying that justice is "blue": the adjective might simply not one that sensibly applies to the word.
---Does it make sense that we can't ultimately know objective truth while we live inside that which we are trying to analyze? I can see the logic, but it's hard to describe in this Slashdot post.:)---
To a point, but the fact is, if you cannot know the true characteristics of something, then you simply CANNOT know that it is truly unknowable. To claim that, you'd have to A.) know the limits of human knowledge (which no one knows!) and B.) know all about the thing you claim you can't know and C.) thus be able to conclusively state that the thing in question is outside the range of human knowledge. So, one can only ever really be agnostic about strong agnosticism.
---So to actively say that there is absolutely no God presupposes evidence that you don't have, and in fact, ignores that there really is some (admittedly weak) evidence for the existence of God.---
The point is: is this evidence convincing of the claim its making? No, it's not. The fact that people make claims doesn't make all claims convicing. As historical evidence goes, the late-born claims of an evangelical religious about their leader are about as unreliable as one can get. Frankly, I don't even quite understand the claims being made. God got so mad at the state of god's creation that god decided to kill himself to appease his own anger? WHAT? Only it's worse: the "sacrifice" was rendered meaningless, since god raised himself from the dead, meaning that nothing was lost in the first place. God so loved the world that he let people beat him up a little, then pretend to kill him? What the hell does THAT have to do with anything?
Well, it's probablematic, because there are many different household gods, and they may or may not all belong to the same pantheon. But belief in these gods may or may not even constitute your "religion" per se, because many Chinese then ALSO have more nameable religions on top of that, like Budhism or Confucianism (which I've never been sure about: how is this a religion, exactly?).
Yeah, in early Judiasm, Satan is more like "God's prosecuting attorney" than he was a lord of evil. His job is to test and harry mankind, but ultimately he's on God's payroll. This view changed over time, especially in Christianity, where theologians found that a good tactic to use against pagan believers was to demonize (litterally) their gods: claiming that they were really just false trickery to ensnare the guilible (again, satan still sort of as god's agent, or at least playing the purpose of testing mankind). Eventually, as Christianity stepped up its campaign of wiping out pagans by sword and slander together, the role of god in all this changed, and Satan became to be seen as outright evil, and the dark opposition to god. Satan's modern visual image, in fact, is actually an amalgamation of various pagan gods, most notably Pales (a sort of goat god who loved orgies).
---The point is that one man's "common sense" is another man's "faith", so to have a truly objective definition, we'd have to say that any set of beliefs involves "faith". This, unfortunately, includes the belief that there is no river of chocolate milk on the moon.---
No, rational beliefs do not involve faith, and faith is the antithesis of rational belief. Rational belief requires evidence, faith does not. Rational belief is always conditional, provisional, and never 100% certain (except in rare cases of deductive logic).
Even most theists accept that there is a difference between knowledge and faith. For many believers, that they believe on faith, and not evidence, is a mark of pride. So the distinction is important to them too.
---I don't subscribe to any atheist tenets, and I don't follow any atheist doctrine. I just don't believe. ---
And there you have what the vast majority of atheists will say. There are no tenets or doctrine. There is, simply, a lack of a specific tenet/doctrine: that of god belief. Nothing else but the LACK of that characteristic holds atheists together. Some are nice, some are jerks, some deny that all gods exist, some don't, some have religious beliefs, some don't, some believe in ghosts, some hate John Edward. Some are even communists (Joe McCarty was the one who tried to make "communist" and "atheist" almost synonymous), but most aren't.
Bald is not a hair color. It cannot be an answer to the question of "what color is your hair?" If a question asks me "what kind of god belief do you have," then there really is no good answer to that question: it's a false question that makes an assumption which is simply incorrect: that I even have a god belief in the first place.
---Atheism is a belief system. It implies an active denial of the superstitious belief in a supreme being or other supernatural forces. ---
Only according to the disinformation campaign waged by theists for centuries. An atheist CAN deny a certian god claim (and for some god claims, they can even do so logically, by deductive arguement), but doing so is NOT necessary or even unique to atheists. Theists deny the god claims of other theists all the time. Some theists, like Paul Tillich, have even gone as far as to deny that their own god exists! Atheism is simply lack of belief, at base.
---Agnositicm is another belief system, which basically says "I don't know if there is a god or not, but organized religions are all pretty silly and a waste of time". ---
Agnosticism is ALSO not a belief system, and it DOESN'T imply any sort of attitude, pro or con, about the value of spending ones time on the subject of religion. Your conversion chart doesn't make sense, because it pretends that theism/atheism and gnosticism/agnosticism are all working off the same definitional characteristic. They're not. They can't all be answers to the same criteria question.
Here's a handier conversion chart:
Thesim: I believe in God/s Atheism: I don't believe in god/s
Agnosticism: I don't have knowledge of whether or not there are any god/s Gnosticism: I do have knowledge of whether or not there are any Gods
---It seems that dichonomistic logic is the only one people are familiar with:(. I have to keep telling people (in this on thread!) that "It's OK to sit on the fence!".---
Sure it's okay. It's just that as these two words are defined, there IS no fence to sit on. If you don't like it, then you need to use different words. The only reason you see a fence is that you keep misinterpreting the question to be "tell me, does god exist or not, and how to do know?" That is NOT the question that "theist/atheist" dictonomy asks.
---I don't know if I have belief or not. It's OK to defer judgment until further evidence. This issue is too important to make a snap decision without clear evidence either or. ---
Again: judgement and belief are two different things. Belief is saying "I believe that god exists." If you DON'T do this, you are by definition not a believer, which puts you squarely in the atheist camp.
---For eg, you are sick and the doctor couldn't decide if to operate on you or not because she hasn't figured out if that's going to help. Are you going to keep insisting "So do you believe that operating on me will save me or not?" ---
If the doctor wont give an affirmative answer, then he certainly doesn't yet believe THAT it will. That doesn't mean that he believes that it wont, just that he isn't able to say he believes that it will. THAT IS consistent with the "I don't know" answer.
Note that SOME god claims CAN easily be disproven via deductive logic. It all depends on what the theist claims is true about the thing they are calling "god." So it is certainly possible to legitimately be a strong atheist about SOME god claims at least.
Also "Lack of evidence," or failure to measure up to the burden of proof requires only the weak atheist definition. No "disproof" is necessary of a claim that can't even stand on it's own two feet.
Or maybe the atheist is scared of the hatred and disdain that their society heaps upon them. If you want to hold public office, better not let anyone know that you don't believe in god. In fact, this isn't even just a de facto standard: these laws are still on the books in many states. In national polls, atheists are consistently rated even lower than homosexuals (who used to be the champions of socieities hatred) for social approval, and face all sorts of adverse social pressures if they ever get "outed."
AND an atheist. Agnosticism describes how you do not think you have knowledge. It doesn't describe what you believe. Neither atheists NOR agnostics need take affirmative steps: especially since we are classifying them by what they lack, not what they have (lack of knowledge of god, lack of belief in god)
What does "low probability" have to do with anything? Non-belief is non-belief, plain and simple, and "atheist" DOESN'T mean "belief that...." in fact we can end that sentance right there. It doesn't necessarily require ANY belief. To say it does gives undue creedence to the claim of god, that once it is expressed, we can either agree to it or claim we can disproove it. This is not necessary: the burden of proof is on the claimaint. There's no reason anyone even HAS to bother considering the claim. Probability is something you calculate for likelihood that your knowledge is sound. You don't calculate it for whether you have a belief or not, unless you're so insane that you are unsure what's going on in your own mind.
It's sheer nonsense for the only known characteristic of a thing to be that it is entirely unknown. If that's the only characteristic you have, you are essentially just as easily talking about an "unie" or any totally other undefined term. To have a meaningful conversation about something, to even claim that there is a concept "god" in the first place that we can talk about, we need some positive characteristics beyond "it exists." WHAT exists? "Oh: this totally unknowable, indescribable thing." WHICH totally unknownable, indescribable thing! "Oh, god" But if you don't even know what a "god" is, how can you know whether or not it is knowable?
You also seem to be one of those people that doesn't understand the conditional and inferential nature of knowledge.
Note that these categories aren't asking directly if there are or are not gods, or if this is or is not knowalbe. What they are asking is for information about YOU. Do YOU currently believe or not? Do YOU currently know or not? Obviously, your musings on the actual subject itself are going to be complex. But those musings aren't necessarily what the criteria of the categories define. They are, rather, statements about what is true or is not currently true about you.
Fanatics don't define a category, especially one like "atheism" where atheists do not even hold a single positive quality in common in the first place.
The fact that you do not know whether there is a god or not still doesn't answer the question of whether you _believe_ there is a god or not. If you don't believe that there IS a god, then why isn't that atheism too (of the perfectly NON-fanatical kind) You aren't making any empirical claims: you just don't happen to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disregard it, but it's certainly not in the least convincing. Hence, I still don't believe in 1000 foot purple gorillas.
---But it was "knowledge" 500 years ago that the world was flat, and creation myths have been believed literally for millenia. ---
Knowledge can well be wrong (in fact the very IDEA of knowledge requires an admission that we are faliable!). The difference between faith and belief is not necessarily accuracy, but methodology. Knowledge actually works on the principle that we need to provide evidence for a claim, and the more good evidence, the more likely it is true (never 100% though). Faith has no such method of separating truth from falsity. Even if faith turns out to be right, that doesn't make faith an accurate method for _determining_ truth anymore than a coin flip is an accurate way of determining the right answers to a true/false question.
---I think one of my RS teachers once said something about "Science helps us understand how, religion helps us understand why". ---
This is a common idea, but it's not very helpful if you think about it. First of all, asking "why" begs the question: maybe there was no why. How can we assume that there was? Science asks "how"- and if evidence for a "why" is found, then it can perfectly well examine THAT too. "Why" is really a subset of "how," in that sense.
Of course, ultimately, asking "how" begs the question as well: maybe there was no how. But since we don't yet know of any such thing (except maybe some quantum events), it's a much safer bet.
Are you claiming that giant bannanas also exist? If you really had found these things, then perhaps we might have some leads to consider about these giant purple gorillas. However, it just as easily could be a hoax, or a giant purple cow, or whatever: the case for whatever it is you claim this evidence shows rests on the validity of the evidence, and the certainty which it points to the existence of your gorilla. In this case, since I doubt this evidence even exists (i.e., this is a joke), the case is pretty unconvincing.
---It's OK not to make any commitment for or against. ---
Noting that you don't believe is NOT making a commitment. This is what I find so confusing in your assertions. All it means is that you do not the have belief that someone is asking if you have. If you "don't know" then by definition you don't have the belief. Belief requires an affirmative answer to the question, and nothing less. Anything else is a lack of belief.
This has nothing to do with sitting on the fence, because this is not that sort of distinction.
No. First off, since these are definitional criteria, the correct statements must contain "I BELIEVE/I don't BELIEVE."- these definitions reference people, not actually answers to the questions. Atheists simply do not believe IN god. That is not the same as stating that no gods exist. Agnosticism concerns knowledge, not belief.
---I feel it would be a good time for atheists to join together in a movement implicitly to destroy theism. The control over the minds of billions that the dogma of religion gives a minority is dangerous and needs to be stopped.---
I think this would be bad, if not highly unethical. It's not my bussiness to tell people what they should or should not believe: everyone is best equipped to do that for themselves. Where I think atheists could do some good would be if they could voice calls for tolerance and respect more generally, and oppose the enroachment of religious ideology into the bussiness of public institutions.
Most theists are content to believe their beliefs happily without forcing them on me, and I am content to let them. Only a small but vocal minority causes the real trouble. Plus, plenty of theisms aren't even empirically questionable, like non-willful pantheisms.
---I'm using the word as its generally accepted in the Judeo-Christian sense of "that intelligence which created the universe" or "that intelligence which runs the universe". In other words, was the universe created by a self-aware, intelligent entity, or was the universe made by "natural" processes? ---
:)---
Giving it this more clear definition DOES help the strong agnosticism problem somewhat. But it still runs into non-cognitive problems. What does it mean for something to be "self-aware" when it is "not natural in universe"? Every experience we have of awareness takes place in the context of the universe. This god's awareness may be different: but we don't even have any idea HOW it's different. It's awareness, but not. And in a totally unknown way.
"All powerful" is another problem: it's really just a negative definition in disguise: it means "a power without limits." But that still doesn't really tell us anything about it.
Likewise, calling something "not natural" raises other confusing issues. "Supernatural" is itself something of a non-cognitive term.
Worst of all, except for "designed the universe (a claimed deed done by this being in, of course, a totally unknown/possibly unknowable manner)," this god you describe suspiciously fits all the characteristic of "nothing/non-existence."
Is non-existence unknowable? Yes. Is Non-existence omniscient (lacks limits on its knowledge)? Yes. Omnipotent (lacks limits on its power)? Yes. Without natural form? Yes. Not in the universe? Yes.
So how exactly is this "God" thing in any way distinct from non-existence, or a thing which does not exist?
---So my point is that the question of whether there is a self-aware, intelligent being behind the universe is unknowable, because we are limited by our senses to the subjective reality of the universe. ---
The problem is this: does the concept of "behind" even apply to the the noun the "universe"? We don't know. It might be like saying that justice is "blue": the adjective might simply not one that sensibly applies to the word.
---Does it make sense that we can't ultimately know objective truth while we live inside that which we are trying to analyze? I can see the logic, but it's hard to describe in this Slashdot post.
To a point, but the fact is, if you cannot know the true characteristics of something, then you simply CANNOT know that it is truly unknowable. To claim that, you'd have to A.) know the limits of human knowledge (which no one knows!) and B.) know all about the thing you claim you can't know and C.) thus be able to conclusively state that the thing in question is outside the range of human knowledge. So, one can only ever really be agnostic about strong agnosticism.
Not all agnostics are atheists. Many people have no knowledge of god, but choose to believe anyway: on faith.
---So to actively say that there is absolutely no God presupposes evidence that you don't have, and in fact, ignores that there really is some (admittedly weak) evidence for the existence of God.---
The point is: is this evidence convincing of the claim its making? No, it's not. The fact that people make claims doesn't make all claims convicing. As historical evidence goes, the late-born claims of an evangelical religious about their leader are about as unreliable as one can get.
Frankly, I don't even quite understand the claims being made. God got so mad at the state of god's creation that god decided to kill himself to appease his own anger? WHAT? Only it's worse: the "sacrifice" was rendered meaningless, since god raised himself from the dead, meaning that nothing was lost in the first place. God so loved the world that he let people beat him up a little, then pretend to kill him? What the hell does THAT have to do with anything?
Don't forget the strong facist, genetic elitist element that Lucas has worked into it over the years...
Well, it's probablematic, because there are many different household gods, and they may or may not all belong to the same pantheon. But belief in these gods may or may not even constitute your "religion" per se, because many Chinese then ALSO have more nameable religions on top of that, like Budhism or Confucianism (which I've never been sure about: how is this a religion, exactly?).
Yeah, in early Judiasm, Satan is more like "God's prosecuting attorney" than he was a lord of evil. His job is to test and harry mankind, but ultimately he's on God's payroll.
This view changed over time, especially in Christianity, where theologians found that a good tactic to use against pagan believers was to demonize (litterally) their gods: claiming that they were really just false trickery to ensnare the guilible (again, satan still sort of as god's agent, or at least playing the purpose of testing mankind).
Eventually, as Christianity stepped up its campaign of wiping out pagans by sword and slander together, the role of god in all this changed, and Satan became to be seen as outright evil, and the dark opposition to god.
Satan's modern visual image, in fact, is actually an amalgamation of various pagan gods, most notably Pales (a sort of goat god who loved orgies).
---The point is that one man's "common sense" is another man's "faith", so to have a truly objective definition, we'd have to say that any set of beliefs involves "faith". This, unfortunately, includes the belief that there is no river of chocolate milk on the moon.---
No, rational beliefs do not involve faith, and faith is the antithesis of rational belief. Rational belief requires evidence, faith does not. Rational belief is always conditional, provisional, and never 100% certain (except in rare cases of deductive logic).
Even most theists accept that there is a difference between knowledge and faith. For many believers, that they believe on faith, and not evidence, is a mark of pride. So the distinction is important to them too.
---I don't subscribe to any atheist tenets, and I don't follow any atheist doctrine. I just don't believe. ---
And there you have what the vast majority of atheists will say. There are no tenets or doctrine. There is, simply, a lack of a specific tenet/doctrine: that of god belief. Nothing else but the LACK of that characteristic holds atheists together. Some are nice, some are jerks, some deny that all gods exist, some don't, some have religious beliefs, some don't, some believe in ghosts, some hate John Edward. Some are even communists (Joe McCarty was the one who tried to make "communist" and "atheist" almost synonymous), but most aren't.
No.
Bald is not a hair color. It cannot be an answer to the question of "what color is your hair?"
If a question asks me "what kind of god belief do you have," then there really is no good answer to that question: it's a false question that makes an assumption which is simply incorrect: that I even have a god belief in the first place.
---Atheism is a belief system. It implies an active denial of the superstitious belief in a supreme being or other supernatural forces. ---
Only according to the disinformation campaign waged by theists for centuries. An atheist CAN deny a certian god claim (and for some god claims, they can even do so logically, by deductive arguement), but doing so is NOT necessary or even unique to atheists. Theists deny the god claims of other theists all the time. Some theists, like Paul Tillich, have even gone as far as to deny that their own god exists!
Atheism is simply lack of belief, at base.
---Agnositicm is another belief system, which basically says "I don't know if there is a god or not, but organized religions are all pretty silly and a waste of time". ---
Agnosticism is ALSO not a belief system, and it DOESN'T imply any sort of attitude, pro or con, about the value of spending ones time on the subject of religion.
Your conversion chart doesn't make sense, because it pretends that theism/atheism and gnosticism/agnosticism are all working off the same definitional characteristic. They're not. They can't all be answers to the same criteria question.
Here's a handier conversion chart:
Thesim: I believe in God/s
Atheism: I don't believe in god/s
Agnosticism: I don't have knowledge of whether or not there are any god/s
Gnosticism: I do have knowledge of whether or not there are any Gods
---It seems that dichonomistic logic is the only one people are familiar with :(. I have to keep telling people (in this on thread!) that "It's OK to sit on the fence!".---
Sure it's okay. It's just that as these two words are defined, there IS no fence to sit on. If you don't like it, then you need to use different words. The only reason you see a fence is that you keep misinterpreting the question to be "tell me, does god exist or not, and how to do know?" That is NOT the question that "theist/atheist" dictonomy asks.
---I don't know if I have belief or not. It's OK to defer judgment until further evidence. This issue is too important to make a snap decision without clear evidence either or. ---
Again: judgement and belief are two different things. Belief is saying "I believe that god exists." If you DON'T do this, you are by definition not a believer, which puts you squarely in the atheist camp.
---For eg, you are sick and the doctor couldn't decide if to operate on you or not because she hasn't figured out if that's going to help. Are you going to keep insisting "So do you believe that operating on me will save me or not?" ---
If the doctor wont give an affirmative answer, then he certainly doesn't yet believe THAT it will. That doesn't mean that he believes that it wont, just that he isn't able to say he believes that it will. THAT IS consistent with the "I don't know" answer.
Note that SOME god claims CAN easily be disproven via deductive logic. It all depends on what the theist claims is true about the thing they are calling "god." So it is certainly possible to legitimately be a strong atheist about SOME god claims at least.
Also "Lack of evidence," or failure to measure up to the burden of proof requires only the weak atheist definition. No "disproof" is necessary of a claim that can't even stand on it's own two feet.
Or maybe the atheist is scared of the hatred and disdain that their society heaps upon them. If you want to hold public office, better not let anyone know that you don't believe in god. In fact, this isn't even just a de facto standard: these laws are still on the books in many states. In national polls, atheists are consistently rated even lower than homosexuals (who used to be the champions of socieities hatred) for social approval, and face all sorts of adverse social pressures if they ever get "outed."
AND an atheist. Agnosticism describes how you do not think you have knowledge. It doesn't describe what you believe. Neither atheists NOR agnostics need take affirmative steps: especially since we are classifying them by what they lack, not what they have (lack of knowledge of god, lack of belief in god)
What does "low probability" have to do with anything? Non-belief is non-belief, plain and simple, and "atheist" DOESN'T mean "belief that...." in fact we can end that sentance right there. It doesn't necessarily require ANY belief. To say it does gives undue creedence to the claim of god, that once it is expressed, we can either agree to it or claim we can disproove it. This is not necessary: the burden of proof is on the claimaint. There's no reason anyone even HAS to bother considering the claim.
Probability is something you calculate for likelihood that your knowledge is sound. You don't calculate it for whether you have a belief or not, unless you're so insane that you are unsure what's going on in your own mind.
It's sheer nonsense for the only known characteristic of a thing to be that it is entirely unknown. If that's the only characteristic you have, you are essentially just as easily talking about an "unie" or any totally other undefined term. To have a meaningful conversation about something, to even claim that there is a concept "god" in the first place that we can talk about, we need some positive characteristics beyond "it exists." WHAT exists? "Oh: this totally unknowable, indescribable thing." WHICH totally unknownable, indescribable thing! "Oh, god" But if you don't even know what a "god" is, how can you know whether or not it is knowable?
You also seem to be one of those people that doesn't understand the conditional and inferential nature of knowledge.
Note that these categories aren't asking directly if there are or are not gods, or if this is or is not knowalbe.
What they are asking is for information about YOU. Do YOU currently believe or not? Do YOU currently know or not? Obviously, your musings on the actual subject itself are going to be complex. But those musings aren't necessarily what the criteria of the categories define. They are, rather, statements about what is true or is not currently true about you.
Fanatics don't define a category, especially one like "atheism" where atheists do not even hold a single positive quality in common in the first place.
The fact that you do not know whether there is a god or not still doesn't answer the question of whether you _believe_ there is a god or not. If you don't believe that there IS a god, then why isn't that atheism too (of the perfectly NON-fanatical kind) You aren't making any empirical claims: you just don't happen to believe.