I’ve always thought of atheism and agnosticism answering two different questions.
Do I believe in a god? No - atheist
Is there a god? IDK - agnostic
That could be wrong, but that’s how I’ve thought of it.
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Not really. “Belief/non-belief” and “belief/disbelief” are both binaries, but one is inclusive of the entire spectrum of possiblities concerning one’s position on the existence of a god, and one isn’t.
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I think you have to admit that if someone is using a word as it can be found to be defined in a respectable dictionary then is it not an idiosyncratic usage. An idiosyncratic usage is, by definition, using a word to convey a meaning ascribed only by one or few people. Using a dictionary definition is surely using a generally accepted usage and thus not idiosyncratic.
In no particular order, cancer, child abuse, slavery and the Holocaust would appear to prove if not the existence of God then proof He"s an uncaring asshole.
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Language use is situational and community and context specific. Dictionary definitions written by out-of-touch academics can at times be a useful description of how words are used, but they are not authoritative, especially when applied within an academic, scientific, or philosophical specialty.
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That’s cool, if that’s your reason for stating God doesn’t exist 
I’m happy to just say I’m not convinced any gods are real and I don’t even know how someone could prove that they do. All the “evidence” I’ve seen or heard so far can be explained by causes that are equally ludicrous and with equal amount of evidence for.
Universe Creating Pixies (or UCP for short) explain everything that gods are said to have done…
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These sound a lot less trouble than gods, I can dig it 
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Pixies were not created by the universe, nor anything else. Yep - I’m an apixieist.
Universe-creating pixies on the other hand … well, I already said
So, yeah it could have been universe-creating pixies, I guess.
(Yeah it’s one of these ‘punctuation matters’ things.) 
What about these propositions? Do I take a leap of faith in stating any of these?
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There are no such things as leprechauns.
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I am not the only entity that exists: the entities that I apparently interact with every day do, in fact, have independent existences; they are not mere figments of my imagination.
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The universe did not come into existence last Tuesday, and our memories from before that date are not fake.
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I am not the reincarnation of Genghis Khan.
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Abraham Lincoln did not hum the theme tune to Twin Peaks under his breath while sitting on the toilet.
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I was mainly snapping off a quick rebuttal to the assertion that a previous poster was using religious reasoning to define terms - when they were clearly using the dictionary. I didn’t intend it as a prescriptive “this and this only” definition of atheist or agnostic.
That said - Sure, what words mean in context and how they are used can and does change, but in my opinion their literal meaning does not. Their literal meaning is their etymology and original usage because their component parts usually come from dead languages - ie: a, ancient Greek prefix meaning without, and theos, ancient Greek for god/gods. So literally without god/gods.
Or terrific - which literally means “frightening” or “causing fear”, from the Latin terrificus and the root word terrere, “fear” but nobody’s really used it that way since the late-19th Century when it got flipped in slang similar to how people in the 1980s used “bad” to mean something great or cool.
So if using a word differently to its dictionary definition adds nuance, or more clearly conveys meaning - fill your boots. But in this case, we’ve got a thread where a lot of people are using athiest or agnostic in either slightly or wildly different ways none of which really seem to add anything to the commonly agreed upon definitions recorded in dictionaries [Again in my opinion, they obviously feel their definitions do do something better than the dictionary definition or they wouldn’t be using the words that way] . In a couple of cases its resulted in people more or less fiercely agreeing with each other without realizing it for several posts.
So why not just go with the established meanings of the words, and go from there and debate whether or not not believing in gods or believing there are no gods can be considered a religion or if babies count as atheists or whatever.
There’s always the idea that faith is usefully distinguished from mere belief.
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Tellingly, “the fixation of belief” was never an issue before reason came along. No one cared what you believed when you offered a sacrifice or prayed to the gods. What was important was to say and do the appropriate things in the appropriate way. When Odysseus seeks sanctuary from the little river as he’s being pounded by Poseidon’s waves, he doesn’t zealously affirm his belief that the river rose on the third day and is coeternal and consubstantial with its father. Instead, Odysseus simply asks for what he wants in a way that’s calculated to get it. Affirmations of belief were alien to the polytheistic outlook for the very good reason that there’s no point in affirming something everyone takes for granted.
Still, I can’t help recalling that the idea of “second order thinking” might have been used to justify some pretty horrible human institutions. Can’t find the exact context though.
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This is my position.
Could there be a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars? Technically there could be, I can’t possibly prove it isn’t with absolute certainty. Do I believe there is a teapot out there? Absolutely not.
I do not believe there are gods. I couldn’t possibly prove there aren’t, so I guess it’s possible that there are.
So I’m an athiest, and I’m agnositic.
The militant labelling of one vs the other is almost as bad as the hypothetical “militant athiest,” which honestly I’ve never met (but am willing to believe exists, and, I’m guessing, exists more in regions where there are a lot more religious people, as a reaction to that).
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That sums it up.
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Yeah, I didn’t mean the badass ones in denim.
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The english biologist Thomas Huxley said that agnosticism “means that man should not say he knows or believes what he has no scientific basis for professing to know or believe.” He also said that “consequently, agnosticism sets aside not only most popular theology, but most antitheology as well.”
Agnosticism is not a denial of theism but a denial of the knowability of God’s existence. The atheist says, “Gods don’t exist.” The agnostic says, “I don’t know if gods exist.”
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Exactly. Gnostic/agnostic and theist/atheist are like the x-y axis of potential positions on “Are there gods?”
So:
Atheist who is certain there are no gods - Gnostic Atheist. Someone who doesn’t believe in gods, but isn’t certain for whatever reason - Agnostic Atheist. Someone who does believe in gods, in general or a specific one, but isn’t certain - Agnostic Theist. Someone who is certain gods, or a particular god exists - Gnostic Theist.
A person who is certain there are no gods, AND there is no possible way they could be wrong and anyone who disagrees is stupid or deserving of contempt - Asshole Atheist. Same thing flipped - Asshole Theist.
ETA: “Isn’t certain” seems to usually be because they don’t think it is something that can be known, at least for now. And also I forgot one: someone who doesn’t believe or disbelieve, and isn’t certain/thinks certainty is impossible in this case - maybe Agnostic Adoxist (from the ancient greek doxa, for belief or opinion I think. So “without opinion”)
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In the essay “Why I Am Agnostic”, Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:
"Man must protect himself. He cannot depend on the supernatural - on an imaginary father in the heavens. He must protect himself by discovering the facts in Nature, developing his brain, so that he can overcome obstacles and harness the forces of Nature. .
Is there a God?
I don’t know.
Is man immortal?
I don’t know.
One thing I do know is that neither hope nor fear nor belief nor denial can change the fact. It is what it is, and it will be as it should be.
We wait and we hope."
This passage describes what agnosticism is.
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If you’re talking about the Capital G masculine-gendered anthrocentric Sky Daddy professed by several religions, I fully agree.
I don’t know if I can yet rule out some kind of dispassionate (perhaps animalistic?) universal consciousness beyond our ability to map, track & explain yet. What is the threshold for considering a system sentient, and how much is that biased by our human experience of self-awareness? Established understandings about this system we’re inextricably enmeshed in keep running into complications the more we learn, right? The pattern suggests we’ll run into some major conceptual upheavals in the future.
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The word for this is antitheist. Your definition of atheist is in complete opposition to my lived experience of people who identify with that word.
I don’t know why everyone in these arguments always forgets there’s another word for all this.
What most agnostics think “atheist” means is actually the definition of antitheist.
As for the rest of this thread which consists mostly of a couple of people being dicks about dictionaries and other people trying to talk them down, I am bowing out. Words are defined by how people use them. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, and get out of date quickly. Please keep that in mind.
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