Timeline for Agnostic vs Atheist
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2, 2018 at 17:26 | comment | added | Nobody | @Acccumulation I'm not going to check 20 or more Wikipedia entries with machine translation, but I'm still fairly sure there those words mean the same in all languages for the simple reason that they weren't yet properly assimilated, they are still just Greek words spelled out according to the conventions for doing this in the respective language. | |
| Jan 2, 2018 at 16:56 | comment | added | Acccumulation | @Nobody I was responding to your claim that the central issue is learning the concepts, and the implication that there's a one-to-one correspondence between those concepts and terms, and converting the terms in one language to the terms of another language is trivial. Simply because wikipedia translation links have the same name, doesn't mean those words have the exact same meaning. | |
| Jan 2, 2018 at 15:52 | comment | added | Nobody | @Acccumulation I wasn't assuming, I actually checked. My usual strategy for this is looking at Wikipedia translation links, just go to the pages for atheism and agnosticism, hover the mouse over the language names in the left column and you will see how the pages are named in other languages. Of course this is not scientifically accurate, but to justify a vague "lots of languages" this is plenty. | |
| Dec 31, 2017 at 0:24 | comment | added | Acccumulation | @Nobody Assuming that the meaning of a cognate is the same in another language is dangerous. For instance, there was a Brazilian man on The Bachelorette who referred to marriage as "compromise", likely because "compromisso" means "commitment". | |
| Dec 31, 2017 at 0:07 | comment | added | Acccumulation | No, these terms are not binary. One can have differing degrees of belief. "The key difference is their degree of knowledge." No the key difference is degree of certainty or belief about knowledge. | |
| Dec 30, 2017 at 16:09 | comment | added | Nathan Tuggy | @Nobody: But the entire site is about learning English. If the question isn't about that, or the answer isn't about that, they must be fixed to take that perspective. This is not Philosophy SE. | |
| Dec 30, 2017 at 15:19 | comment | added | Benjamin Lindley | The only part of this answer I would disagree with is "when someone calls him/herself an atheist, they usually mean they are a gnostic atheist" -- Most of the people who call themselves atheists that I know (including myself) are agnostic atheists. They don't apply the agnostic descriptor because it's not the answer to the question that they are being asked, which is usually something like "do you believe in god?", not "do you know if there is a god?". | |
| Dec 30, 2017 at 12:13 | comment | added | Nobody | @NathanTuggy The whole question really isn't about learning English - "Agnostic" and "Atheist" exist with slightly different spelling and pronunciation but exactly the same meaning in lots of languages and if the OP understood the philosophical concepts in their native language, they wouldn't have problems in English either. And they clearly already understand the meaning of "something about not being religious" which both words have when used by the illiterate rabble. But I give up about this answer, they should just read plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism or something. | |
| Dec 30, 2017 at 2:33 | comment | added | Nathan Tuggy | @Nobody: For English usage practical for learners? Absolutely. In fact I think I still need a reference for the one you gave, as that appears from the article to be a rare (even vanishingly rare) and almost purely philosophical viewpoint. Put another way, I really need a citation that shows that, as a general rule, speakers of English habitually qualify "atheist" and "agnostic" the way this answer suggests. I don't need a citation that some obscure school of philosophy has, at some point in the last 500 years, come up with an interesting combination of terms in English. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 18:04 | comment | added | Nobody | @pipe Well, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism has two references, one is a book titled "The Christian Agnostic". Looks ok to me as far as references go. I think that's the most uncommonly used, do you need citations for the others too? | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:55 | comment | added | pipe | I think you made up your four permutations. You should follow up with references pointing to actual use of these combinations. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:55 | comment | added | Nobody | I made some edits, have a look. Maybe we should also add weak and strong agnosticism? But this would need citations. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:52 | comment | added | Nobody | @NathanTuggy Well, but we can call them that even if they themselves wouldn't, can't we? I know plenty of religious people whom I would classify as agnostic, they are just too tolerant to really claim that everyone else is flat out wrong. But they would need to do that if they thought they had knowledge. Like someone who knows about evolution would say that anyone who claims the opposite is flat-out wrong, no matter how tolerant and nice they are. But not all religious people are like that about their beliefs. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:50 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Dec 30, 2017 at 3:41 | |||||
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:39 | comment | added | Nathan Tuggy | @Muschkopp: I don't know about theists in general (or deists), but the numerous people of faith I know would never call themselves that. Only the nowadays very rare pure philosophical sorts of theism would consider that; even then, I'm not sure. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:34 | comment | added | Nobody | Gnosticism actually is a religion, check Wikipedia. I don't think there is a word for the opposite of agnostic, you need to spell it out. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:27 | comment | added | Muschkopp | @NathanTuggy I have heard many public atheists use the words as described here. To your other point, I would expect many, if not most, theists to classify themself as agnostic theist (as described by @Frehmin) because faith would be meaningless if you already know. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:13 | comment | added | Nathan Tuggy | Do you have evidence for this beyond etymology? I'm not aware of any practical usage of this, since there's no point in being, e.g., an agnostic theist, and a "gnostic theist" is not what anyone calls themselves, for historical reasons and for simplicity. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:10 | history | edited | Nathan Tuggy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 1 character in body
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| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:00 | review | First posts | |||
| Dec 29, 2017 at 17:11 | |||||
| Dec 29, 2017 at 16:58 | history | answered | Frehmin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |