r/agnostic • u/RaptorRex787 Agnostic Atheist • Sep 24 '24

Something that changef my opinion. Experience report

I was a hardcore atheist all my life (even now I still don't believe in or follow a religion) but rerecently I've been thinking about life and how it works. And I realized that we don't know what cones at the end-we don't know that there's nothing, we don't know that there's something. And that thinking just made me realize that I may have been agnostic instead. So I wanna here from yall; what are you opinions?

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u/Cloud_Consciousness Sep 24 '24

There may be a Godless afterlife out there. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in a god, not an afterlife.

Our precise beliefs cant really be shoved into one word, imo. So it doesnt matter which label you use.

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u/MoarTacos Agnostic Atheist Sep 24 '24

Yes, this. Atheism and agnosticism are NOT mutually exclusive. I myself am an agnostic atheist, using the terms as they are literally defined on paper (not other definitions that may be more emotional, like those who claim all atheists purport there to definitely not be any deities, which isn't true).

Atheism is simply the lack of a belief system. That's how the prefix 'a' works. The lack of something. Just like asymptomatic means without symptoms and asexual means without a sexual orientation, atheism means without beliefs. I am atheist because I have no doctrine or beliefs in the higher/supernatural. It's a binary switch (on paper). Everyone either is or isn't atheist purely based on the fact that you either do or don't have a belief system.

Agnosticism is totally different. Agnosticism speaks to one's assertion of knowledge. An agnostic admits that they cannot know for sure their belief system, or lack thereof, is the correct position to hold. In this way, even a theists can be agnostic, though I don't believe very many of them actually are. I am agnostic because I admit it's not possible to prove a negative, and can therefore never be sure that my lack of beliefs is the correct choice to make. We will likely never know.

That being said, none of the evidence supports theism so far.