proximoception | (no subject)

A trouble I have with agnosticism: If you just mean you can never be certain that you are certain, and need people to take special note of this, why not just write that on all your shirts under a big asterisk and then--since everyone's now aware of your qualm--live your life making the necessary or most appropriate assumptions, including ones pertaining to whether or not God is a lie? This kind of agnosticism applies to every question at once, after all. You don't just not know about God, you don't know about ice cream or Uruguay, about knowing, about not knowing. If, on the other hand, your agnosticism finds God to be a special kind of metaphysical question: why? Why the special treatment? Because of what people have said? Because they say it's a category to itself, as prior to other questions as those of knowledge's nature and possibility? Once you're age, say, six, you should probably have figured out that what you're told needs to be screened, i.e. subjected to criteria of logical consistency and empirical appropriateness. Not that you'll know those words for a while, or yet realize they should be applied to what you've already soaked up as well as what's incoming. I can understand universal doubt (though not going on and on about it), but specific protests of doubt are always loaded. You're enclosing something. The six-year-old missed a spot.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.)