Assuming your awareness of distinction is accurate, that your sense of that distinction's articulability as experience is correct, and that experience's link to externality is real, and that that externality's apparent dynamism in relation to something beyond itself (such as its own past self) is genuine, is a necessary precondition of speaking. You're already choosing among possibles, to even put the question of possibility. You have already decided what does exist. Saying "I do not believe in God" is going as far out on a limb as "God does not exist".
Our right to go out on this limb is, I think, secured by our participation in existence. Disbelief in a positive can fairly be translated to belief in a negative if one has examined the whole rest of the circular closet of positive, negative jackets. Experiential appropriateness isn't a good measure until the logic has been straightened out, but at that point it becomes the whole world. At that point, when honest (testable by our consistency), we are capable of a sense of what does not exist.
What to say after that? I refer you back to the last paragraph and a half of my previous reply, which you didn't address. Obviously I sympathize with what you're saying, and it's exactly what I'd say myself in a world where people never gave a thought to God, but as it stands I just think my pet peeve is better. 'Agnostic' has a much more harmful set of connotations than 'God does not exist'. Which has some damn good ones.
More of a lark: The existence of God also may be appealable to probability, actually, as the formulations of Him that have any interesting impact on one's view of reality hold His existence incompatible with the existence of most other "purely metaphysical entities", the which He supplants. These thus outnumber Him, outproportion Him. Of all the possible ways things might be that minds can imagine or intuit, His is but one. (I see the strict argument against this one--proportion is not a property of something without limits--, but I still find it interesting. Perhaps people attacking metaphysics itself can do more with it.)
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Our right to go out on this limb is, I think, secured by our participation in existence. Disbelief in a positive can fairly be translated to belief in a negative if one has examined the whole rest of the circular closet of positive, negative jackets. Experiential appropriateness isn't a good measure until the logic has been straightened out, but at that point it becomes the whole world. At that point, when honest (testable by our consistency), we are capable of a sense of what does not exist.
What to say after that? I refer you back to the last paragraph and a half of my previous reply, which you didn't address. Obviously I sympathize with what you're saying, and it's exactly what I'd say myself in a world where people never gave a thought to God, but as it stands I just think my pet peeve is better. 'Agnostic' has a much more harmful set of connotations than 'God does not exist'. Which has some damn good ones.
More of a lark: The existence of God also may be appealable to probability, actually, as the formulations of Him that have any interesting impact on one's view of reality hold His existence incompatible with the existence of most other "purely metaphysical entities", the which He supplants. These thus outnumber Him, outproportion Him. Of all the possible ways things might be that minds can imagine or intuit, His is but one. (I see the strict argument against this one--proportion is not a property of something without limits--, but I still find it interesting. Perhaps people attacking metaphysics itself can do more with it.)