Comments by "Archangel17" (@MDP1702) on "Big Think"
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Paranormal Encyclopedia
I am a bit confused. At the beginning of this discussion I thought it was about the fact that there is nothing like just agnostic, but agnotic atheist and agnostic theist. And you seemed to claim the opposite. But then you called yourself an agnostic theist. So was this discussion basically between two people that thought the same, but didn't realize it?
The thing is, agnostic theists will usually label themselves as theist, while people that just label them agnostics usually (practically always) are non-theist => atheists. It's because of this atheists say that agnostics are just a subcategory of atheism, the other subcatergory being anti-theist.
This is why the explanation of Tyson in this video is astonishingly bad.
1) He basically says he defines atheists based on the people he knows, which are active atheists. This isn't surprising, since passive atheists (who still label themselves as atheists or are labeled as such by the official definition) don't really talk about it, afterall they're passive atheists. These passive atheists will only talk about their stance when others ask them too. It could very well be that passive atheists actually make up 90-98% of all atheists (for example, buddhist also classified as atheists, because their religion has no gods).
2) He identifies himself as agnostic, just because he doesn't want to discuss it. This sounds quite the same as passive atheists.
As for it's mostly greed, natural violence, ... that causes violence and religion being mostly just an excuse, I always like this quote about that stance:
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. Steven Weinberg
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Calvin25X
It was an analogy, just like we catogerise and subcategorise nature (plants, animals, bacteria, ...) we can categorise (a)theism, with theism and atheism being the main categories and agnostic atheism, gnostic atheism, agnostic theism, ... being subcategories.
It's a lot more illogical that people claim they belief and don't belief in the same thing at the same time, which is basically what agnostics do when they want to set themselves apart from atheists. Either you belief in god(s) (theist), or you don't belief in god(s) (atheist), there are no shades of grey in regards to believing, either you do or you don't. Here there is no middle ground. The nuances start only after that.
I personally can't be sure there isn't one, and therefor there is no god I specifically can belief in, untill for some reason I would start believing in it (an accident, a relevation, evidence, ...)
I don't believe in a god => atheist,
because I don't know one exists (but it could) => agnostic
==> agnostic atheist.
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