The uselessness is your attempt to make agnostics agree with you in principle, when they do not. Your principles are highly flawed. Mocking is a childish act and I grew up long ago. I choose to use logic to demolish foolish arguments . . . especially yours.
at some point, the amount of faith required to be skeptical is so tiny that it isnt worth mention. in practice i can tell you i would bet the universe that tulane doesnt win the national championship next year. this, like all questions, is a scientific question, with measurables and evidence for us to use when formulating beliefs. if you ask a sane human whether tulane will win the BCS next year, they dont say "who am i to know" they say quite definitively and correctly tht is aint gonna happen. anyone that does not agree is a loon.
Apparently no one understands the state of your mind martin. As Red says you cannot change the definitions of words to suit your desire. There is also a significant difference between a short term question such as tulane football prospects and the ultimate mystery of the universe so your analogy carries no weight. You can say based on your investigation" I don't believe in God". That is not the same as saying "I don't know". How you arrive at either conclusion is your own test. Try to understand the difference.
Religion is all about ethics, didn't you realize that? Normative ethics is a non-religious morality that can express ethics in a logical, secular fashion. But it does not change the fact that religion has indeed been a prime driver of ethics and morality for over 4,000 years.
i can try. and i am not the only one. over time more people are understanding this betterr, and they are using better terms like hard and soft atheist. wrong. we are talking about faith. right, so when i ask if tulane will produce the next 500 heisman winners, you be honest and say "i do not know", which is the actual answer. i will answer that i do know, because i am a wild and arrogant guy, making allsorts of nutty assumptions that are not yet mathmatically proven.
oh i agree. to the extent that we have stupid beliefs about nonsense, and moralizing and bullshit rules and stupidity, religion has driven it. dont blame martin when our society has a childlike understanding of right and wrong and how to maximize human flourishing.
also it is so pleasing i have busted out my laptop and now the scourge of capital letters generated by my ipad is over.
Faith, however tiny is still your policy here. When you ask people to speculate, they will say "No". If you ask them to bet their lives on whether Tulane could possibly win, they will say "Who knows?" if they are honest. This is what people say when their argument is poor. A lame attempt to bias the reader. Your repeated attempts to characterize people who disagree with you as crazy speaks to your own insecurities.
You'll have eternal life in heaven or hell.....or.....you'll simply cease to exist. There's proof.....or nothingness.
The term "soft atheist" has the same definition as agnostic. It is simply another attempt by atheists to insist that all agnostics are atheists that agree with them. But they do not.
