Firstly, I must explain that I do not believe in any type of religion we have today. To me, they are all over-the-top Bronze Age garbage. Also, I want to state that I believe in Darwinism and the sciences that religions dismiss.

That said, I just can't step into Atheist shoes. I have tried, but, it makes more sense to me that our existance is not a mistake than believing it is. Whether we are in a dream, program, or are an experiement, I can't grasp that the complexities of life somehow fell together. This makes no sense to me and I feel it is almost absurd to think that eveything is a pure accident.

The more I study Quantum Mechanics -the more I study Chemistry and Biology - the more I study Astronomy... I am more convinced that something strange is going on. When I say "strange", I mean a strangeness that is calculated and designed.

Anyone else feel this way?

TL

I can tell you that I used to be Agnostic but have been a devout Christian theist for some 3 years. I somehow have the feeling that if there is a hell, it wouldn't make sense to avoid it. As of late, i've been feeling like an Agnostic again, so i'm open to throwing religion away for good. It occured to me that it wouldn't be logical for a subjective being to have objective views.

Of course, this is posted the Evangelism section.

__________________
Even those who claim everything is predestined tend to look when they cross the road.

I am not an agnostic, but I do not try to justify my beliefs in a God I cannot define...

Why limit your conception of God to existing religions?

I'm a Theist but I don't subscribe to any religious conceptualization of God so I came up with my own conception.

You could do the same thing.

-ITL-

I used to have frustrating debates with an evangelical agnostic. And I realized that it ultimately came down to a logomachy over what exactly we consider acceptable colloquial certainty.

We can't really be certain of anything, including that our entire lives are just a delusion, including whether the abominable snowman exists, and so on. But when this agnostic expressed that yes, he is agnostic about whether the Easter bunny exists too then I realized it was just a definitional incompatibility.

See I consider myself an atheist just as I consider myself someone who believes the Easter bunny does not exist. I acknowledge that there is no way to be absolutely certain of any knowledge but the universal applicability of this notion makes it not worth highlighting for my religious beliefs.

So in short, I don't believe there are any gods. I admit that this knowledge, like all knowledge, can't be proven with absolute certainty, but I don't find that distinction relevant enough to religion to stake a position on the fence about it.

Since some who have known me for a while, may have been, and kind of did respond with surprize (when I talked about god on in one post), I though I might take the moment here, to re-state my position. (I had done so in the past, but it may have been missed by many?)

I had grown up in the Methodist Church, my mother's father being a circuit preacher, my father being a lay-preacher (which is an offical position, and he did do evening services from time to time, but mostly ran adult Sunday schools). I had been a fully believing adherent through most of highschool, and near the end of that that period, started looking at other belief-systems too. (non-Chrisitan) Well, I went on to do studies in most the Judeo-Christian bases, and was yet a firm, baptised Christian believer, up to the early 90's . . . when the evidences against such belief-system doctrine became most obviously too high to mount.

I became, and am, a non-theist agnostic. When I use the word 'god,' I am using it in place of the better, and used more often word, 'nature.' Nature, further more, while not being nearly fully understood, and while being so mysterious (due to not understanding), has not shown us that it can be known that there is any center of intelligence behind its operations--not that we can say with absolute certainty that there is not, but simply and truthfully, cannot claim to know.

I understand that we can never be absolutely certain about anything however there are things in which we behave as if we know certainty. For example if you stood on the street corner and wanted to cross the street, you would look both ways to see if there were any cars coming and presume safe or not safe to cross. The interesting part is if you were blind and had ear plugs in, would you still make the same decision to cross and when? Most would be crippled by such a lack of sense data, yet there are others that claim they can easily make the choice to cross the street. But how? I would love to see this but I wouldn't actually want to place anyone in that kind of danger.

My point being there are times when we can accept certainty when the amount of data pointing to an event seems to be consistent with all the previous data. So therefore the easter bunny could exist however all the evidence or experience of that existence has yet to be discovered so it remains nonexistent. That is being consistent with the data. There is nothing wrong with going along with consistent data. The fact that I am not worried the sun will not rise in the morning is because it has done so, for over thirty years so far, I can rely on that data to believe it will do the same tomorrow. Will it always? I won't say always because I don't have consistent data to tell me it will always happen.

As far as god existing, there is no consistent data that supports the existence of such a being, therefore I do not think any gods exist.

The truth is out there but its damned hard to find. I find so many like minded souls out there that have travelled similar roads as me. My problem is logic, it tells me one thing and my feelings tell me another. Reconciling those differences has made me a complex schizophrenic. I have by experiences and logic concluded that there is a spirit world where nature has the same authority as here. This constant search for one omniscient being is a fruitless task. I dont think its necessary to have a hierarchical system in our beliefs. We accept nature as a power and consciousness as we posses it, is just one facet of this natural expression of creation. We cant comprehend life without this ability but the things we feel and express still exist without our consciousness, it is not a necessity for nature, only its creation. We are the consciousness of creation, maybe not the only one , its our burden to understand but not to comprehend.

Technically yes.

By preference, no.

That evangelical agnostic almost made me ditch that choice of words, but I've held on to it because of the two meanings of atheist. Under the simple "without god" definition, I'm an atheist. (I really don't think there is one.)

However the word also has connotations of "anti-god," and I'm not that. Agnostic seems to be the more neutral of the two words. I don't have a beef with people who are religious, and see many valuable things about religion. I just don't personally happen to think that there is a god.