On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 04:19:55PM -0600, Grant Robinson wrote: > I was mainly playing around, as most of the definitions of agnostic > concerns whether God exists, but in common usage means someone who > doesn't take sides (or believe in) organized religion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism To be fair to the agnostics, it is a very honest and humble worldview. It is one that is very difficult to accept (that is, the possibility that life may have no more meaning than a rock or a lake has meaning - it just is). It is not fun to entertain the possibility that you are nothing more than a few billion cells that metabolize and go about reproducing, and your consciousness or ego did not exist before your body did, and it will disappear again when your body decays. The prevailing set of *scientific* evidence we have indicates that this is most likely the case though; after all, have not figured out how to build a laboratory with the equipment to test these sorts of things. An agnostic will say that a lack of evidence does not constitute proof of nonexistence, yet the agnostic will also state that he has not seen sufficient scientific evidence to prove existence, so he cannot honestly can a position on the matter. It is a sort of philosophical skepticism. So then each individual must come to the point where he must decide if there really is a Holy Ghost that prompts and inspires, or if it is a self-induced feeling or emotion created by the mind in an attempt to avoid having to accept its own mortality. It actually has little to do with accepting or rejecting organized religion; it's a bit more fundamental than that. Some agnostics believe that organized religion is a good thing - in fact, a necessity - whether or not there is a God or an afterlife, because it provides a myth that helps everyone deal with their own mortality on a psychological level while cultivating values that strengthen societies and families. That said, I am not an agnostic, but I have had plenty of conversations with agnostic-types, and I like to put myself into other peoples' minds every so often to try to see things from their point of view. Mike
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