With this definition (which I agree with) wouldn’t you say that most religious people qualify as agnostic?

There aren’t many options really, either you believe in something or you don’t believe in that something. There’s nothing in the middle. Being able to prove either way is on a different axis.

Saying “I believe but I’m not sure” is fine, that qualifies as believing (I think that’s even the definition of faith).

Saying “I don’t believe but I’m not sure” is also fine, that’s weak-atheism, but atheism nonetheless.

I think what most non-atheists folks have a problem with, is with strong-atheism:

“I don’t believe in god, because it doesn’t make any sense, and I am sure it doesn’t exist”.

That can come across as arrogant I guess, just like believing that Santa and Poseidon don’t exist.

There are no agnostics, or to quote Colbert, an agnostic is an atheist without balls.

The reason is really simple. If you’re agnostic, you *don’t believe* there’s a god. It’s not that you believe there’s no god, but that you don’t believe there’s one. That’s atheism, lack of belief in the existence of god.

I understand what you’re saying. Perhaps I’m extrapolating the relevance of god to the enlight platform from too few data points. And perhaps I’m mistaken with my sense that an enlighty would talk about their platform if someone asked about their relig beliefs other than questions about the orgin of wonderful phenomenonses.

Agreed. And that’s where you differ with the enlighteniststst, it seems. They talk about god a lot in their literature.

1) You’d explain your theory in terms of oxygen and energy.
2) You’d explain that phlogiston is undectable because it does not exist

The phlogistonists might say that this is just another phlogiston theory in which phlogiston=null but after a few years they’d all be dead and future generations would wonder why people ever believed in phlogiston. those people would just call it the theory of combustion.

I’ve encoutered a number of hmmm, philosophies lately that have a coherent core, then a spiritual bit tacked on the end. The spiritual bit seems to dilute the message beyond their core competency kind of thing.

This sounds like a combination of philosophy and religion (religion in the sense that so is atheism, with god=null). I think the religious part is the core competency bit – “universe=mysterious+wonderful+(god=unimportant)” and the quote above, which is great, tacked on awkwardly.

Like if she further added how being vegetarian was key to being an enlightenist.

It’s not for me to say how many different concepts one can concatenate under one name, but I think it distracts. Religions certainly tack on all kinds of cruft, but they have an excuse in that they’re ostensibly following the complete teachings of some divine source.

>Enlightenists care and wish to do good not because a vengeful God tells them to, but because intelligence suggests it is the only and the right thing to do.

It’s unforutnate to have to define yourself in terms of how you’re not XYZ, when you say plenty of other good stuff about what you are.

I guess what I’m saying that if it excluded the bit about god, you’d have lots of people of various organized religions wanting to sign up. I think inclusiveness is cool, but there may be those like Muriel that may fear the riff-raff that would let in.

On the other hand, if you removed the god part from many religions, you’d have some fine philosphies that’d attract many atheists/brights/enlightenists. I’ve been reading a lot lately about Buddhism – lots of great stuff that has nothing to do with any god or mysticism. Too bad that many folks would steer clear of these teachings because they think it’s just another flavor of invisible pink unicorns. Not saying it’s one of the “philosophies with religion tacked on the end”.

To Julio’s point, aren’t they more agnostic than atheist? Or is it The Closet Of The Damned?