hey...another excuse to copy stuff from the oed.
yay!
agnostic:
Quote:
f. Gr. - unknowing, unknown, unknowable (f. not + - know) + -IC. Cf. GNOSTIC; in Gr. the termination - never coëxists with the privative -.]
A. n. One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing.
[Suggested by Prof. Huxley at a party held previous to the formation of the now defunct Metaphysical Society, at Mr. James Knowles's house on Clapham Common, one evening in 1869, in my hearing. He took it from St. Paul's mention of the altar to ?the Unknown God.? R. H. HUTTON in letter 13 Mar. 1881.]
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atheist:
Quote:
[a. F. athéiste (16th c. in Littré), or It. atheista: see prec. and -IST.]
A. n. 1. One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God.
[a1568 COVERDALE Hope of Faithf. Pref. Wks. II. 139 Eat we and drink we lustily; to-morrow we shall die: which all the epicures protest openly, and the Italian atheoi.] 1571 GOLDING Calvin on Ps. Ep. Ded. 3 The Atheistes which say..there is no God. 1604 ROWLANDS Looke to it 23 Thou damned Athist..That doest deny his power which did create thee. 1709 SHAFTESBURY Charac. I. I. §2 (1737) II. 11 To believe nothing of a designing Principle or Mind, nor any Cause, Measure, or Rule of Things, but Chance..is to be a perfect Atheist. 1876 GLADSTONE in Contemp. Rev. June 22 By the Atheist I understand the man who not only holds off, like the sceptic, from the affirmative, but who drives himself, or is driven, to the negative assertion in regard to the whole Unseen, or to the existence of God.
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so bascially, ch'i, you're right.
the distinction is in the kind of claims made either by (or often about) agnostics or atheists.
it seems to me that many christian types (well believers in general, but i have more experience with xtians in number terms) can't tell the difference.
because there is also this meaning:
Quote:
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One who practically denies the existence of a God by disregard of moral obligation to Him; a godless man.
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from which you can see how the term can be tossed about by christian types to basically mean "not one of us, not one of us" (in the mode of that classic film "freaks")...and this explains a little of why xtians tend to find atheists a threat: because they collapse ethics into morality, and then claim that they monopolze morality because they have this god character running around who functions as the anchor for "morality"---and on this, again, there is really nothing to say that nietzsche didnt say better.
anyway, it is because of the order of claims (of an agnostic rather than an atheist) that i think atheists are often little more than inverted christians. because they make the same kind of claims and run into the same problems.
like i said before, personally i think god is just a word.
but i wouldn't claim that i am certain, simply because it gets to a kind of goofy paradox, something on the order of:
"nothing is certain."
which is a problematic sentence.