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Originally posted by irateplatypus
I'm not saying that all who are agnostic or atheistic react this way, nor am I saying that those same people do not have their counterparts on the other side of the spectrum. I'm just confused why some people are as passionate about the absence of something as others are about its presence.
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I'll just say that I don't think a true agnostic can get excited about the absence or presence of God, because an agnostic as I understand it is simply saying he or she doesn't see a compelling argument one way or the other. I am an agnostic, and I have my own ideas about whether God does or does not exist. But to truly know that God doesn't exist, I'd have to _be_ God, or at least be omniscient enough to look into every little nook and cranny in the universe where it might be hiding. And I'm not.
There are people who are passionate in their proclamation that God isn't there. I class them as atheists. You may ask why they are so passionate. And that is because atheism is a belief system, a religion for them, just as your Christian religion is for you. An atheist is a believer, in his or her own way, has faith in his or her own way, and thus can possibly be just as rabid as any ultra-conservative Christian who believes that anybody who doesn't believe the Bible _verbatim (and the right translation, too), is risking God's eternal hellfire. Whereas your average agnostic will just have another iced tea and read a couple of articles on cosmology and ethnics.