OdinHades said:
Atheism is classical greek and means "without god". So the only thing all atheists have in common is that they do not believe any gods in any form exist. I have yet to see a definition that includes other spiritual beings or events. If you have one please share it with us. Agnosticism just means that the existance of god(s) is unknowable and has pretty little to do with personal beliefs. But you're not agnostic if you do not believe in god but are certain that Nessie exists or something. You can also be an atheist and agnostic at the same time, the two do not exclude each other. You could for example say that you don't know if a god exists but that you do not believe it is the case. There you go, you are an agnostic atheist. Neither of those has anything to do with ghosts, Yetis, fairies or whatever. At least to my knowledge. |
Actually, there is a lot of discussion around scholars of what exactly defines atheism but as a broad sense, atheism is the rejection of religion and the rejection of the existence of spiritual/supernatural beings, be them deities, gods, ghosts, spirits, whatever. Agnostics, as you said, believes that the existence of such entities is unconclusive, agnostics believe that there is something, but it´s up to each one to interpretate what such entities are or may be.
Still, for some scholars, atheism would only be the rejection of the existence of a single centric entity, but that brings some questions whether religions that do not believe in a single centric entity would also be rejected. It can be confusing because most religions, even those that are single centric, do have other minor entities as well.
There are certain religions or philosophies that consider man itself as a spiritual being but not consider the existence of other spiritual beings, Such proposed atheism could admit nontheistic religions like Syntheism, Wicca, Buddhism etc. and, again, conflicting with the idea of atheism as a rejection of religion.
In the end, as in most religions, atheism also has many different lines of thought and some are conflictive. Sometimes very conflictive. That´s why I think it´s important to know the difference and not put atheism and agnosticism in the same basket.
