SPLIT: Religious discussion from Glenn Beck Thread

[erowe1]

I'm an agnostic and an atheist. Some people define atheism as the absolute claim that there are no gods, but that makes no sense to me.

But the definition those people use is what the word actually means. It means the positive affirmation that no god exists. You can't be both an agnostic and an atheist. The new definition of atheism as the lack of belief in a god is just a neologism that some anti-religion zealots came up with because they didn't want to call themselves agnostics and also didn't want to admit that they positively believed in the nonexistence of a god without evidence.

If I say that there are aliens, you'd ask for proof. If I can't provide any proof, then you'd say, well, your claim is unsupported. That's how everything else in the world works.

That may be the way it works with aliens. But it's not the way it works with "everything else in the world." There are plenty of things whose existence must be stipulated as axioms, without which all other knowledge becomes impossible, and that cannot be proven by reason and evidence without using circular arguments, such as the laws of logic, the laws of mathematics, the trustworthiness of our senses, the correspondence theory of truth, and the existence of God. There are people who will deny any one of those, but not until they've worked their way into a worldview through a process that at one point or another depended on those very axioms. They're like someone who climbed a tower with a ladder and then kicked the ladder away to make it look like they didn't need it to get there.