Expert: Vincent M. Wales - 9/28/2005

Question
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Followup To
Rephrased question:
I suppose the rephrase would be: How do you know that we cannot trust x to complete Y and yet there may or may not exist a z that we can trust?
Allied question:
It is frequently asserted that we all (and it seems to me most other atheists in particular) suffer from a failure of delayed gratification.  The argument goes that God's ways are not our ways and although our temporal pain pains himmer, the eternal is so much more relevant that our placing our wants above those eternal needs he can see makes us as incompetent at living as the whiniest child who has not learned delayed gratification.  IOW I call  myself an agnostic Christian  since the existence of a god who whines for adoration via granting some of various boons we request is continually (and internally) disproven.  OTOH we cannot decide one way or the other the existence of a loving God who sacrificially loves us; and (relevant to one of the other posts on this site (by you I think--you get the questions with the only subject headings that are interesting)) in my experience, existence without that much love would be truly hell and precludes any possibility of the beauty you asserted keeps us from suicide.  (I concede the existence of faux beauty which we in desperation call a beauty capable of preventing suicide for a time.)  So I guess the question: How can one know that living a life of delayed gratification isn't highly correlated with true eternal maturity?

Answer
"How do you know that we cannot trust x to complete Y..."  Well, you don't.  That's what makes this the realm of belief, not knowledge.  "...and yet there may or may not exist a z that we can trust?"  Again, we don't.  Religious belief, or the lack thereof, is not a matter of knowledge.

You can call yourself an agnostic Christian, but it's like saying you're a human Christian.  What other kind is there?  All of us are agnostic.  The word means "without knowledge."  No one has knowledge of this particular topic.  We have only opinion.  Period.  You're an agnostic Christian.  I'm an agnostic atheist/humanist.  The term agnostic, as it is commonly used, is just dippy, in my opinion.  I don't understand why people hide behind it, because those who do use it in seriousness are really just atheists without the balls to admit it.  Or, I'll concede, they probably don't even understand the difference.

Many people are under the impression that an atheist is someone who denies the existence of a god.  But that's not accurate.  An atheist is simply someone who does not have a theistically-based belief system.  An agnostic - who, in the conventional usage of the word, is simply one who doesn't know whether they believe in a god or not - clearly does NOT have a theistically-based belief system, and is therefore an atheist.  They aren't as strident about their non-belief - it hasn't become outright denial - but atheism is one of the few yes/no, black/white questions in the world.  It's like saying, "Are you a millionnaire?"  You either are, or you aren't.  There's no middle ground.

Anyway...  your last question, of delayed gratification vs. eternal maturity, is similarly answered:  We don't know.  Not you, not me, not the Pope.  

If you choose to believe it is, great.  If not, also great.  There's absolutely no way to tell, so it's all subjective.

John, I'd like to suggest you visit my site, The Atheist Attic.  Not that I'm trying to get you to stop posting questions, but it might be that reading the articles therein (and there are hundreds) might give you more insight into the atheist mentality.  Or it might not.  I dunno.  Either way, it's at http://www.bee.net/cardigan/attic/

Peace.