DogSRoOL rolls 1d30 vs. Humour DC: 25
DogSRoOL rolls 28
DogSRoOL is unaffected by humour.

Humor?

Where?

*Gasp*

That's got me rolling.

[ Edit ] Er...no pun intended. [ /Edit ]

I'm sorry, but this is simply not the case. The Dictionary & Bertrand Russell's Definition. As you can see from the first link, one of the definitions of agnostic is actually "One who is doubtful or noncommittal about something." I do agree, however, that agnosticism CAN BE a chosen position; it is not necessarily neutral. However, I maintain that an agnostic does not HAVE TO deny the existence of God, they merely don't think there's enough info to decide. The best example I can think of off-hand would be the jury in a trial before the trial has taken place. They don't know if the defendent is guilty or innocent because they have not heard the evidence. Some jurors will already believe the defendent is guilty, some will already believe s/he is innocent, while others will simply not make a decision because they have not heard the evidence.



I agree that you cannot be an "agnostic Christian," although I think that's entirely based upon the definition of a Christian. The Bertrand Russell article above actually has a comment on this that seems pretty accurate to me. Personally, I think a Christian must believe in the existence of God (Hebrews 11:6 NIV) and could therefore not be agnostic.

As to the "thing" that all Christian denominations have in common, I personally think you are a little broad. After all Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all believe in the same God, but are clearly not all Christian denominations. The crux of Christianity is Christ, therefore a Christian denomination must have some belief in Christ, his life, death, and resuccection. To what extent varies largely by the denomination and the individual. I would also add that to actually be a Christian, belief in God's existence is not enough. "You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that–and shudder." (James 2:19 NIV) So while belief in God is necessary, I don't think it is a complete definition of a Christian.

I once read big parts of the protestant bible. That brought me to satanism. Than I gave it up. And than I forgot it all with the help of booze

Yes, this is non-belief verses disbelief.

An agnostic will usuallly say something like "I don't know", depending on how polite and diplomatic he's being. What can be inferred from this is that, yes indeed he does not hold a solid belief that God doesn't exist - he's not a proponent of the various atheist or anti-theist philosophical arguments. But, more importantly, he's not convinced that God does exist. For whatever reason, he doesn't believe it.

I disagree most strongly with your dictionary definition referring to "noncommital" as this suggests that you have to be committed to a church and religion in order to believe in God. These are cultural factors, wholly separate to the theological matter at hand. I also disagree with the "uncertainty" that an agnostic supposedly holds. God belief is a binary choice. You either believe in God, or you don't. That's it, there's no fuzzy area inbetween (for any given definition of 'God'), it's either one thing or the other.

To use your jury analogy, then the jury will always commit themselves to the policy of innocent until proven guilty. In terms of agnostics, they consider God non-existant until proven existant. Agnostics simply have hope or belief or expectance that such proof will come about in the future, and when that occurs they shall be theists. Until then, they submit themselves to the default of non-belief, and so at this point in time, they do not believe in the existance of God.

To contrast this with atheists.. they believe that God certainly does not exist, or cannot exist. Arguing for atheism in itself is a very difficult task (arguing against theology is the preferred option, which would of course result in agnosticism, not atheism). Such arguments usually make use of contradictions within the definitions of 'God' (such as whether he can be all-powerful and all-good at the same time), which are fairly interesting but not usually particularly convincing. And as they rely on the condition of the definition of 'God', one could argue that they'd fall into the catagory of agnostics as well.
I've made the point before that you cannot truly prove the non-existance of God, as you cannot prove the non-existance of anything. Which itself makes the 'atheist' catagory somewhat redundant.

But still, I just don't like the word 'agnostic'.

I just want to publicly apologize for bringing up the semantics thing about agnosticism.

I feel like Dr. Frankenstein.

Once again you've made a situation much, much worse than it would have been.

It's kind of like that British guy who coined the term metrosexual in the 80's. He has recently publicly apologized for it.

Not at all. Defining your terms is the first (and often most important) step in making a persuasive argument and communicating clearly.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to respond as work is rather busy. I'll get to it later tonight or tomorrow.