Whatever.

From where I stand its more like the lack of an ultimate authority is proven by the absurdity of religious claims failing to meet the ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ test, and that even if there is an ultimate being beyond our dimension or whatever, there’s still a massive jump from it actually existing to it actually caring about our lives and promising us an immortal soul. even when i consider the zillions of possibilities out there, the odds that it has a particular interest in you or i, even for one second let alone eternally, are pretty astronomically small. nothing has made me believe we are any more part of a divine plan than we are the side effect of a god farting and its shit spores distributing itself through the universe.

alright, so i’m being crass, but whatever – its 2 am.

No.

You can take absolutely ANYONE and call them an atheist or agnostic. Grab some average say, chav, off the streets of London, high off meth and fresh from stealing someone’s shoes, who doesn’t even think about religion – doesn’t believe in anything, and doesn’t know – would fit by definition as an agnostic atheist, but a skeptic? Not really, in this case someone is just passive/apathetic.

I’m sure some self described skeptic out there might disagree, but from where I stand a lot of skeptics are taking an active.

But as it applies to Maher, since he’s following one of the definitions of a skeptic during the movie out there as someone who actively believes that knowing anything for sure is impossible, as I described, maybe. Skeptic has its own negative connotations, people tend to see it as an active snarky disbelief in anything. Yet at the same time I find many skeptics are so inconsistent – I had a 9/11 truther co-worker who was skeptical of anything that debunks the conspiracy theories, but accepts just about any new theory out there, even when they conflict with each other.

…and then there’s cynicism, both in the pop-culture sense and the original Greek meaning, which cloud everything even further.

so i guess it goes back to what i was saying before, there’s overlap here and there with certain people, just as an atheist can be any political affiliation, a secular humanist, etc – beyond what the words are actually supposed to mean, there’s not that much STRICT about it when there’s nothing dogmatic preventing the overlap – the terms are simply not mutually exclusive.

You can be an agnostic atheist and an agnostic theist. You can be a gnostic theist and a gnostic atheist. gnosticism deals with what you know, theism deals with what you believe. But first off, the word ‘know’ is kind of relative, because you could say there isn’t anything we ‘know’ for sure, there are others that say ‘know’ when they really mean ‘think’ or ‘believe’, and all points in between. There are people who call themselves Christians who have their beliefs but also say that they also dont know for sure, and there are Christians who ‘know in their heart’ or claim to know for sure by all sorts of means – claiming they had direct contact, etc.

There are atheists who both dont know and dont believe, and there are atheists who ‘know’ using that relative term again – that they are convinced by evidence that the God of the bible could not be true – and also dont believe. There are those that would consider themselves ‘gnostic atheists’ in regards to some claims but ‘agnostic atheists’ towards others.

In other words – the terms are used interchangeably even though they’re not mutually exclusve, and because of the relativity of the defintion of words like ‘know’ to most people, we have a huge mess when it comes down to labels. And I thought the ‘true punk’ and ‘true metal’ discussions out there were annoying…

eh. I call myself an atheist instead of agnostic. although it may seem at times its to provoke more discussion or argument, its more or less to make it clear to people I have thought about this quite a bit and feel convinced enough in my disbelief specifically about the worlds religions to come down on that certain side of the fence. Considering when most people are talking about ‘god’ they usually mean christianity, I thought it would be clear to most people that the label is in response to their beliefs, but often it does get turned into an even bigger accusation that I’ve decided against every supernatural possibility, when its not that at all.

It does get more frustrating, more arguments do happen, but I’m happier being honest about it than I am holding back and tiptoeing around every discussion.

I just want to parse your phrasing there, i mean this is probably the kind of thing that makes agnostics wary to use the atheist term. People are used to positive statements of belief, that you BELIEVE there is no god, trying to make it just another religion. To many people there’s no difference between “I believe there is no god” and “I don’t believe in god”, however to me the first is a much more active statement, the kind people find arrogant about atheists – and the latter is a lot more nuanced, open to a lot more interpretation, varying levels of agnosticism, openness to other non-theistic belief systems, or simply my general position – I don’t believe in the god of the bible, but make it clear that a zillion other possibilities are out there. You can recognize the many possibilities and at the same time not be subscribed to or believe a single one.