The Atheist Blogger

On Monday 22nd September, several thousand new students will arrive at Royal Holloway, University of London, in order to register and join societies. The godless members of our student organisation “Atheist & Agnostic Alliance” will be there too, handing out flyers in order to grab as many new members as we can. Statistics says roughly 30% of students are non-religious, so I’m hoping we can get quite a few.

As part of our affiliation with the UK Brights, we have 1,500 flyers that present a “friendly” message, as well as something that isn’t “in your face”.

Atheist & Agnostic Alliance Flyer

UK Brights are also helping us organise an awareness week later in the year. I’ll be taking my camera along to registration and get some pictures of the group in action. No idea how many flyers we will hand out on the first day, or how many will end of torn up in bins on campus. Hopefully a few people will stop to chat, either in support or to try and convert us from our heathen ways.

Edit (in response to a complaint): http://the-brights.net, http://brights.meetup.com

To think that blog carnivals are meant to bring people of similar beliefs together. Such philosophies seem to have been completely lost when I hosted the Carnival of the Godless two days ago. SocraticGadfly had an article on the Pew Survey which claimed that 1 in 5 atheists believed in God. As he pointed out, 50% of “agnostics” made the same claim.

The quote which started the debacle was this:

Hey, idiots. If you believe something, you can’t agnostic about it!

As many people probably know, this isn’t true at all. Agnosticism is defined as “an intellectual doctrine or attitude affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge”. Simply put, the position on whether certain things can be claimed as absolute truth or knowledge.

Ergo, if you believe in God, you can be agnostic about it if you don’t claim absolute knowledge of God. These types of people are referred to as agnostic theists or agnostic deists. I’ve covered them before in my article about agnosticism.

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I was born an atheist, just like the rest of humanity. I was christened when I was 1 and became a Christian. When I was 11 I renounced my faith and became “uncertain” in the existence of gods. A little less than a year later I had converted fully to atheism. 9 years down the line, and I was wondering if “sitting on the fence” was a worthy term for agnostics, and when I had researched the original meaning of the term I realized that I’d been an agnostic atheist all along. A few weeks later, through some persuasive arguments from Kieran Bennett, I realize that whilst I’m agnostic about a so-called “unknown” god (i.e. the non-religious “creator” or “deist god”), I am gnostic about every other god humanity has ever believed in. Now I have no idea what I am. Technically speaking I’m mostly a gnostic atheist since I’m only agnostic about one particular god, but since I’m not fully gnostic I can’t label myself that. Furthermore, due to some recent conversations I had come to label myself as an apathetic agnostic atheist, or “one who doesn’t believe in gods, understands he can never be proved right or wrong, and really doesn’t care either way”. Of course this label is borderline ridiculous in common conversation.

Thus I deduce that labels are annoying, yet I can’t label myself “anti-label” since that would be hypocritical. Therefore I’m doing the most obvious thing. I’m reverting back to a single word:

Atheist

If agnosticism comes up in conversation someday I’ll just run for the nearest exit. I’m keeping my label as simple as I possibly can…

Atheist blogger Kieran Bennett was asked the question “Why are you atheist and not agnostic?” and replies in essay format. He argues that whilst I am correct in saying that agnosticism has nothing to do with gods, I am wrong in thinking that “gnostic atheism” is irrational, and it is in fact the agnostic atheists who are the irrational ones.

I find this a bit incredulous, but I think his argument stems from the semantics of the word “god”. Kieran says that every god that exists today can ben traced back through history to it’s human origin, and we can also explain why such gods have so much power over people (fear, comfort, etc). However, I do not think that any of these gods are gods that the agnostic atheist would claim are unknowable.

In essence, the agnostic atheist is as certain as the gnostic atheist about most gods humanity has ever come up with. What we are really agnostic about is a god that humanity has not just dreamt up, the god of deism. Ok, so perhaps this god was dreamt up by a human, but it very different from it’s brothers and sisters. The god of deism is an attempt at explaining the reasons for the origins of the universe. Instead of an all-powerful being, we have a semi-powerful being, able to create but not to interfere, thus letting science do all the explaining of existence and the universe.

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It seems that there are more people confused about what agnosticism means than what atheism means, and I’d like to take the chance to explain what it is, as well as dispel some common misconceptions.

Just like atheism and theism are different sides of the same coin (the belief in God coin), agnosticism and gnosticism are different sides of the same coin (the “knowability” of belief). If you have a belief in anything, you are either gnostic or agnostic about that belief.

Misconception: Agnosticism relates directly to belief in God

Whilst the modern use of the word “agnostic” is usually attributed to people who say they are “unsure” of the existence of God, it is neither a good usage of the word, nor a “direct” usage. If you are truly agnostic, you have to claim that everything is unknowable, right down to simple proofs like “1 + 1 = 2″, or “Humans need oxygen to breathe”. Such a view is rather silly, and I challenge any true agnostics to give up oxygen for a day or two and see how they feel about it afterwards.

I’d wager that everyone in the world is a gnostic “oxygenicist”. We don’t need to question the validity of the claim that oxygen is needed. It’s a known fact.

Personally speaking, I would further classify myself as a gnostic “gravitationalist” since the theory of Gravity is probably not going to be disproven. It’s a sound theory, and much better than anything flat earth theorists can come up with.

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