[peritonlogon]

[ QUOTE ]
I personally can't see how any intellectually honest person can make a public argument that God does or does not exist with any kind of reasonable substance. If someone intuitively or emotionally believes in God then fine, I don't question their intelligence or challenge their beliefs. But to try and prove any of this through logic and method is futile, we just don't have access to the info.

[/ QUOTE ]
Right on, but then again, most people aren't intellectually honest.

As far as the semantics of Atheist Vs. Agnostic. Linguistically it is A- (alpha privitive, in greek, meaning not) theos- (god) hence one who does not believe in god... it is historically the general case of simply the non-god-beliver.. but in the Bible, in St. Anselm's Ontological proof of god, in Descaretes' equally rediculous proof, in the writings of Fracis Bacon, and almost anyone (at least in the few dozen books I've read on the subject) who has endevored to talk about Atheists before the late late eighteen hundreds has invariably refured to these non-believers as fools or heretics. As an Atheist, before I realized that almost everything people have to say as evidence or reason for or against god is just crapping out the mouth, and also before I learned that trying to clarify what I meant was usually better than debating a person, I used get pushed into positions where I found myself defending some position I neither agreed with nor particularly cared about... My guess is a lot of street-walking Atheists a few hundred years ago suffered from the same fate.

The term 'Agnostic' was only coined in the late eighteen hundreds... once Darwin made it cool not to believe (which is really amazing for two reasons, one, that while he himself was a nonbeliever, he beleived "the masses" ought to remain ignorant of his new found knowledge (or, new found lack of it) and also that he was the one who had the big impact, since the only real change in evolution theory that he made was 'natural selection.' Before that the buzz was that a creature's environment actually affected the compostition of a creature directly... as in the giraffe's neck is so long because generations of giraffes kept on reaching and reaching and this act of reaching itself made the neck longer (google Lamarck)). Agnostic (A-alpha privitive, gnosis-to know) so one who (claims) not to know. Which is another way of saying "I don't believe," since a great many theists, if they were honest with themselves would be agnostic as well, but, still a lot claim to have "knowledge of god" (that's all the mormon's ever say... I know, I know, I know). Either they mean something enirely different by "knowledge" then I do, or they just aren't honest with themselves.... But then again... I've never seen Europe... so, maybe I don't really know it exists... as Plato would term it "correct opinion".