I saw this statement today. Do you agree? Are there different levels of atheism?

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I don't believe in "degree's" of anything. Either you are or you are not. Either you believe or you do not. The only alternative I see is you don't know.

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May your awareness be perfection

I would not say that, I don't think. These two statements are in fact quite different:

I do not believe that gods exist.
I believe that gods do not exist.

Both are statements that might be made by atheists, but the first is the "weak atheist" position, which says, essentially, in the absence of any evidence, I think it unlikely that there are any gods, and therefore I don't believe.

The second, "strong atheist" position is rather that, in my view there is enough evidence to state positively that there are no gods.

The weak position is the absence of a belief in gods, the second is a belief in the absence of gods.

I, for example, know that I cannot disprove the idea of a deity, and I also know that, even though I strongly suspect that all that is is of natural, not supernatural, origin, we also don't have all the evidence. Therefore, I classify myself in the "weak atheist" category.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Thanks for the clarification, E.H. I see what you say, but it's such a fine line. Could a "weak" atheist not also be very close to falling into another catagory? Example: Agnostic?

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May your awareness be perfection

Oh, yes, absolutely. We are talking about human beings, after all, and there's no clear way to classify them, as much as we'd all like to!

Especially when it comes to matters of belief, I know people who are perfect skeptics in one area (religion especially) and yet have all sorts of other beliefs that skeptics would normally scoff at (astrology, Atlantis, etc.). So you really never know about people -- even when they self-label -- until you actually ask them. (Even then, sometimes the answer will change depending on your question!)

There are some people who have been on this forum in the past (Amergin is one example) who call themselves agnostics (or in His case "militant agnostic") who I would prefer to call a weak atheist. But my opinion counts for very little, and is only reflective of those things that I have been able to observe.

We humans exist across a very, very slidy scale, and very few of us ever stay in the same place on it forever -- and sometimes not even for very long!

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.