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Socialist

16 (32%)

Green

8 (16%)

Peace and Freedom

2 (4%)

Democratic

1 (2%)

Transhumanist

11 (22%)

Libertarian

8 (16%)

Republican

2 (4%)

Constitution

2 (4%)

Total Members Voted: 49

[Angle]

I like what HP Lovecraft said:  "All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hairsplitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist."

[scrdest]

Only 1, the cars/unnecessary harm to environment, but that hinges on the word 'unnecessary'.

On atheism as faith - technically, any belief can be called a 'faith'. Belief, in the sense of any statement regarded as true. In fact, agnosticism would be a faith as well, by that standard. The trick here is the implications. 'Faith' is used as a glue between 'Belief' and 'Worship/Religion', allowing a person with ulterior motives to argue that lack of belief is a statement about divine existence, and as such a belief = faith = DERM ATHEISTS WORSHIPPING NOT HAVINK GOD or whatever.

[GavJ]

No, but faith is not a synonym for belief. Faith is belief without evidence, specifically. Even if they were synonyms, agnosticism doesn't qualify, since it is an absence of either belief.

[Darvi]

What if you believe in your own uncertainty?

[GlyphGryph]

You agreed that:
So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends
But disagreed that:
The possession of drugs for personal use should be decriminalised
Drug abuse is an external argument, but suffice it to say, I strongly disagree with their implied assertion that drug use harms no one except the user.  This is especially true as a consequence of my social political views, particularly in regard to the establishment and maintenance of basic living standards.  So long as the state foots part of the medical and social bills for its inhabitants, which is a condition which I support, the use of particular recreational drugs and the health and lifestyle consequences do have knock-on effects on other people.

Sorry, but this "tension" is perfectly accurate and your justification is weak as heck. Criminalize the things that actually harm others, as long as you advocate broad criminalization (or argue that the state should have authority over the health pursuits of its citizens) you can't really argue that "So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends". Especially since drug laws, you know, have just as many (if not more) knock-on effects. The question didn't say anything about drug abuse or drug regulation, or even ask about legalization, only about decriminalization of personal use.

No, but faith is not a synonym for belief. Faith is belief without evidence, specifically. Even if they were synonyms, agnosticism doesn't qualify, since it is an absence of either belief.

Hey, guess what! An absence of evidence where evidence should exist is actually evidence of absence! If someone tells me the world is just chock-full of white llamas, and I've looked around for them my whole life and not managed to find a single one, it is not faith to believe they are wrong. (Mind you, there are a LOT of definitions of gods, depending on which semantic argument you're making the same person may become more or less theistic for this exact reason)

Anyway
I got one tension,

You agreed that:
There are no objective moral standards; moral judgements are merely an expression of the values of particular cultures
And also that:
Acts of genocide stand as a testament to man's ability to do great evil

But that one is pretty easy to explain. My moral judgements are an expression of the values of my particular culture, and genocide is totally against those values, hence evil. It's almost always against the values of the people being genocided too, and in many cases it's explicitly against the values of the culture doing the genociding as well! (They just justify it as an exception).

So that's like a triple whammy of subjective evil, even without objective moral standards.

[GavJ]

Let's define 'faith' as 'claiming knowledge of things that cannot be known' while allowing knowledge to be gained from experience. Thus atheism is faith, agnosticism is not, and knowledge about what I had for lunch (a bowl of delicious lentil soup) is not a matter of faith either, unless you have no way of reading what's inside the parentheses.

Remove the word "cannot" and replace with "are not". Otherwise you're misrepresenting classic agnosticism and making the whole conversation much more confusing than it has to be by implying specific claims and beliefs that need not be part of it.

[GlyphGryph]

Remove the word "cannot" and replace with "are not". Otherwise you're misrepresenting classic agnosticism and making the whole conversation much more confusing than it has to be by implying specific claims and beliefs that need not be part of it.

Classic agnosticism isn't even on the same scale as atheism. You can be an atheistic of theistic agnosticism. Agnosticism is opposed to gnosticism, it isn't some place in the middle of the theism scale.

[Darvi]

where evidence should exist

God wore gloves, so he didn't leave behind any fingerprints.

[GavJ]

Hey, guess what! An absence of evidence where evidence should exist is actually evidence of absence! If someone tells me the world is just chock-full of white llamas, and I've looked around for them my whole life and not managed to find a single one, it is not faith to believe they are wrong.

Omg, no No NO. This is the #1 source of the public screwing thingsa up about science, hands down.

Not only is this wrong, but the exact opposite is one of the basic catchy rules of thumb of science, the equivalent of "correlation is not equal to causation" etc.: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

You could live in the Australian bush and look around for elephants your whole life and never find them. So the hell what? Tells you jack squat about whether they exist.

Your example is terrible, because "the world not being chock full of X" is not at all the same thing as "X does or doesn't exist" which is what everybody in the thread is talking about and what theism and atheism are about. White llamas are also not exactly omniscient, omnipotent beings, or anything like that, thus would have far fewer resources for choosing visbility.  And there are even many conceptions of God as simply having put the universe into motion and then not interfering again, which there could be evidence of, but perhaps only on the scale of galactic cosmological extremely complex patterns not exactly visible from your back yard.

Agnosticism is opposed to gnosticism, it isn't some place in the middle of the theism scale.

1) Not really. Gnosticism doesn't really mean anything. It was a crazy super complicated cult of weird old people who believed very specific things about Gods making mistakes creating the cosmos blah blah and has basically nothing to do with any of this. Agnosticism was a term coined by some dude as being maybe loosely relevant, not a perfect literal antithesis.
2) I agree that it's not on the theism scale. Theism vs. atheism are about differences in beliefs, whereas agnosticism is an absence of belief, thus not on the scale at all.

[Darvi]

It's more like a grid, really, like how you could have atheist religions (no idea how theistic agnosticism would work though).

[GavJ]

It's more like a grid, really, like how you could have atheist religions (no idea how theistic agnosticism would work though).

Nitpick: it would be "gnosis" you're looking for. Gnosticism is a specific religion with it's own specific creation story and blah blah. Not what you want.

But yes, you can probably make a grid out of that. So? If you did, the gnosis-agnosticism dimension would be the one that varies whether it is faith or not.

Edit: actually a triangle would be more appropriate. If you are fully agnostic, theism vs. atheism is meaningless and you have no opinion (single point). As you increase in gnosis, you would gradually have more and more division ("I mostly still want evidence, but I lean very slightly in favor of there being a God in the meantime" blah blah"). This also incidentally addresses your intuitive confusion about what an agnostic theist would be: nothing, it's not really particularly valid, and a triangle design reflects that.

[Darvi]

Which is why I didn't use agnosticism to mean "opposite of gnosticism" but "lack of belief"?

[Culise]

It's more like a grid, really, like how you could have atheist religions (no idea how theistic agnosticism would work though).

An god exists, but is inherently unknowable or incomprehensible in its scope.  One such position (but obviously not the only such position) could be that a divinity is said to exist as an article of faith, but by function of its nature as being beyond the scope of rational science and observation, it cannot be known or understood from a rational perspective.  Gnosis is in its simplest definitional sense "knowledge" (albeit, I must add, one with particular connotations pertaining to spiritual and self-knowledge in common usage), and one that has far greater scope than the particular Christian sects commonly referred to as gnostic (just as catholic is, in its simplest definitional sense, "universal").

[Angle]

Arguing against the existence of god is like playing whack-a-mole. The second you take a swing at it, whoever you're arguing with goes, "Oh, I didn't mean that god, I meant this god", and substitutes some airy ineffable utterly meaningless conception of god that has no relevance whatsoever. When we talk about god, we're talking about the common conception of god- an all powerful, all knowing entity that has specific moral views, interferes with reality on an ongoing basis, and has many particular historical acts attributed to it. If you want to talk about some theoretical non-interventionist god, fine, but that's completely irrelevant.

[GavJ]

we're talking about the common conception of god

The most people who have lived and believed in gods in history are likely polytheistic believers of natural totem-type gods, like raven gods, etc., as this was extremely common throughout accounts of stone-bronze-iron age people in far flung diverse places around the world. Not what you just described.

Just sayin'.  If you want to talk about general philosophical classifications and concepts, you really should need to account for all the major, largest slices of the pie.

Bringing up some religion that 5 guys followed 100 years ago would be whackamole. But NOT just "anything not islamic or judeo-christian" ...




it's also quite pertinent to the details of the discussion. Since most historical Gods aren't SUPPOSED to be omnipotent, and have individual spheres and personalities, significant differences in what evidence they leave behind (or not) and how interventionist they are (or not) should be expected as par for the course. Also, if you're something like a raven god, you can easily be intervening in the world via your ravens or your wind or whatever, in a way that may or may not be possible to scientifically establish as different from non-God-guided winds or ravens, yes? The conception of miracles and intervention would not probably be all that modern most of the time as "omigod obvious magical shift", but rather more subtle.