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RadiantDanceMachine on 30 January 2016
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JWeinCom said:

RadiantDanceMachine said:

 Definitions are arbitrary. So your contention may be true for the definitions you hold for agnostic, atheism, but certainly not true for what I do. I was very careful with offering my definitions so you could understand. Instead you ignored them, pretended definitions are not arbitrary and asserted that THE definition is [X].

That's quite the assertion about my thread and myself. Have any supporting reasons for it? (*chuckles*)

Everything is binary. A proposition is either true or false. This is really fundamental to logic...you know it by the law of the excluded middle term. 

If you can show me where I claimed that the concept of god is flawed, I'd be happy to address it. However, knowing that I made no such claim, I doubt there is anything to address.

=)

Definitions are not arbitrary.  They are fluid, and can change, but they do not pop out of the air... which is kinda why I stopped replying to him...

Agnostic atheist is absolutely not an oxymoron.  I explained the distinction pretty clearly which is why I gave up.

A-theist

From the greek atheos.  "A" meaning without and "theos" meaning a god.  So, whitout a god. 

Gnostic is from the greek gnostikos.  Meaning "knowing".

Agnostic simply means "not knowing" or "not sure". 


Agnostic does not refer to what you believe, it refers to what you know.  For instance, I strongly believe the NX will launch in 2016, but I don't KNOW that it will.  So regarding the claim "the NX will launch in 2016" I am agnostic.

In terms of god, I am also agnostic, as in I don't think I know certainly there is no god.  I am also an atheist.  Because I do not believe the claim that there is a god.


So, you put those together and you get agnostic atheist.  I prefer the term atheist though, because the fact that I don't know that there is a god should be implicit.

If you believe there is a god, but don't know it for sure, congratulations.  You're also agnostic.  An agnostic theist.

It's really a very simply concept. A quick wikipedia search would have explained it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism

"If a man has failed to find any good reason for believing that there is a God, it is perfectly natural and rational that he should not believe that there is a God; and if so, he is an atheist... if he goes farther, and, after an investigation into the nature and reach of human knowledge, ending in the conclusion that the existence of God is incapable of proof, cease to believe in it on the ground that he cannot know it to be true, he is an agnostic and also an atheist – an agnostic-atheist – an atheist because an agnostic... while, then, it is erroneous to identify agnosticism and atheism, it is equally erroneous so to separate them as if the one were exclusive of the other..."  Robert Flint

Definitions are indeed arbitrary, which is to say that they can be anything. I can assign any meaning I want to any term. Dictionaries are an effort to have *common* meaning so in every day conversation we can actually understand what one another is saying. If you notice, dictionaries often have several different definitions for words because of their usage. 

Standard practice in philosophy to define terms you're using which tend to have non-specific meaning or create a neologism. A definition needs to have a certain level of specificity especially if we're going to use the word in an argument. Otherwise you'll never be able to make a proper inference from it. 

Etymology is really not an argument. It just displays why someone made up this particular definition for this particular word. If I do not wish to use the definitions which are currently available, I do not have to. I almost always provide definitions for terms I adopt in order to preclude misunderstanding about their meaning.