Quote: wannabuyamonkey said: I hear alot of people claim to be agnostics and while they don;t necessarily share a single systematic philosophy they all seem to hold the general view that there "might" be a God, but that the evidence was insufficiant or to put it another way "the verdict was still out".
No, not exactly.
Agnostics(like me) believe that there is no way to prove whether or not God exists. It's just not possible. We believe it's something beyond human comprehension, and therefor, not worth wasting your life trying to figure out. You may as well call mathematicians who don't try to calculate Pi lazy, too.
It has nothing to do with "the verdict was still out". In my experience, that's really just been something certain overzealous religious people have attributed to agnosticism in an attempt to discredit it as a philosophy. Sort of like the way Ann Coulter likes to describe swing voters: people who are too stupid(or too cowardly) to make up their mind. I don't know if it comes from a profound misunderstanding of what agnostics actually believe, or simply an unwillingness to accept that they believe what they do. Either way, it's not right.
Quote: Now why is it that in most cases the idea that there may be a God leads most to a sort of passive Athiesm an attitude like "There might be a God, but I could really care less" and a life that reflects an indifference towards God as though His existence were inconcequential.
Well, firstly, let's clarify:
When you say "God", you mean the Judeo-Christian concept of God.
Now, I don't claim to be the norm on this particular belief, but my views on why it is inconsequential have been expressed. Real or not real, God wouldn't affect the way I live my life, because there is no way I would accept the authority of a being that would allow what happens in this world on a daily basis to occur. If that is what "true" morality is, I would rather be immoral.
That's not to say that religion is entirely bad. There are certainly tenets of Catholicism, Judaism, even Islam that I think are fine. Jesus was an out of the box thinker with some wonderful ideas about the way people should treat each other. Still, I don't think a person should believe in doing good deeds because it's written in a 2,000 year old book supposedly dictated by God, or because they might be rewarded in the afterlife. I think people should believe in doing good deeds because it's right.
