As I see it, agnosticism is not a middle ground between deism/theism and atheism. You cannot say “I don’t know” to the question of whether or not you believe there is a god. Understand that this is not the same question as “is there a god?” The best question to ask is can you can make the claim there is a god. If you can’t do that, you are by default an atheist.

Agnostic atheist or agnostic theist is an oxymoron because everyone is agnostic about their beliefs. The only people who could not be agnostic are those who would not even entertain the possibility of what they believe to be false.

Sadly, the religious right in this country seem to be a little less evolved than the rest of us.

Religion does serve a purpose in giving people something to hope for and the comforting belief that their lives have some kind of meaning. However, more people have been killed in the name of god or religion than for any other reason, so I think religion has probably done more damage than good in the world.

Religion requires a leap of blind faith that is not compatible with scientific thought.

I am a pantheist–I see the universe itself as god and conscious life as a vehicle through which the universe may view itself. In that sense we are the consciousness of god.

Our planet is such a small part of god’s totality that if god did have an independent consciousness it would not be aware of our existence at all.

thanks for your clarification on your view of atheism/agnosticism/theism, that’s helpful.

I do look down upon people who believe in creation, who believe that they are better than others because of their caste, or that the movement of the planets can be used to predict the future, or that homoepathy works and is as effective as faith healing, reiki and magneto therapy..

of course i am intellectually superior to these people and I am proud of it.

Agnosticism is the intellectually water-tight position, in the sense that it is something that can never be known, or is unknowable. For me, an atheist is an agnostic who is tired of explaining this position to everyone: based on the overwhelming lack of evidence, and the repeated falsifaction of several religion claims, it is highly unlikely that a god exists. To use an analogy, we can never be sure that the sun won’t rise from the wrong side tomorrow, but based on thousands of years of observation, its bloody likely that it wont rise from the wrong side.

I hope that clears some issues regarding the atheist’s position.

Do i believe that atheists are smarter people ? No . You can be an atheist for several reasons – for eg. the same reason that anyone is a hindu or a christian – being born into such a family. You can also be an atheist because its fashionable. Or you can be an atheist because you have thought about these issues deeply, asked the right questions. The best kind of atheism is the one that is the product of a rationalist and skeptical mind. And i argue that such atheists alone are smarter, intellectually superior etc than anyone who credulously believes anything that is told to them – for or against the existence of god or not.

Yes, there is no science that says god does no exist, but as Laplace famously told napoleon, we now know that several natural, biological processes work very well without the assumption of god. god therefore is irelevant, and the true scientist is indifferent to the existence of god. Science does not claim to have an answer for the first cause , if such a cause even existed, but you can be bloody sure than great minds are trying to get to the answer through patient scientific enquiry.

Finally, about Abhivanagupta – i must admit I am intrigued, but you make an extraordinary claim, that it is ‘pure quantum physics’. One of the advantages of the ancient texts of any culture is that they are often poetic and open to wild interpretations. An uncle once told me that Darwin merely plagiarized the hindu scriptures…the Dasha Avatara (ten avatars) of vishnu mention journey from fish to amphibian to man and so on…the point is that these texts are so malleable that they may be used to fit any new scientific discovery.

Still i would be happy if you gave me links.

Kashmiri Shaivism is my particular area of study, so I would invite you to read some of the classic texts in question before dismissing them. Abhinavagupta’s commentary on the Siva Sutras and his teaching on spanda is pure quantum physics. It is a disservice to him, who is also recognized as a great mind, to lump him in with Deepak Chopra, who is most certainly, as you say, a snake oil salesman.

Fundamentally, as stated in my rant , what I take issue with is the idea that atheists are somehow smarter than people who believe in god and that they have science on their side, which is untrue. There is no science that says that god does not exist. When someone chooses to be an atheist, they are not choosing a worldview that is any intellectually superior to that of someone who believes in god. Many scientists and many very smart people believe in god, and there is nothing in science that comes close to saying that there is no greater consciousness in the universe.

Of course the outdated beliefs of religion should be changed, restructured, liberalized… and my converse argument to a fundamentalist Christian reading this would be that there is no reason why they can’t embrace the findings of modern science and still have faith. The atheist movement enters into dangerous territory when it starts to question the intelligence of faith, as there is certainly no greater intelligence in not having it.

I read your attack on Christopher Hitchens with some interest. Unfortunately, I didn’t read anything new that made me want to change my mind on the subject.

As an atheist and as someone who was born and raised in predominantly Hindu India, I think I have a very good (if somewhat biased) insight into both positions, i.e Eastern mysticism (which you appear to be defending) and rational thought and the scientific process.

1. Firstly, i must point out the flaw in your reasoning that for a large part of human history, “religion WAS science”. This, Josh, is a specious claim.

The primary goal of science lies in trying to understand how the world works. Often we have seen scientific theories being changed or even discarded to accomodate new observations or realities.

Religion claims to have all the answers already. It does not, therefore, attempt to understand the world, but merely instruct the herd. There is no attempt at enquiry about the natural world, only instruction. Admittedly, some eastern religions talk about self-enquiry, and the power of mind, and “quantum” healing. etc, but you will ageee that these can hardly be called scientific.

2. On the issue of ethics and religion, this is an argument that has been bandied about by religious apologists for quite sometime. I don’t think that Hitchens, or any other atheist worth his salt, claims that atheism is the panacea for all suffering in this world. However, our position is that while atheism is not a sufficient condition for a more peaceful world, it is, unfortunately, a necessary one.

Yes, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China are also old boring arguments. I would say that Stalin and Mao and the Khmer Rouge and other butchers didnt massacre millions because of something they did NOT believe in. To use another example, Hitler (who had active support from the Vatican) did not kill the jews because he did not believe in god. He killed the jews because he believed they were wicked, cunning, responsible for the german loss in WW1 etc.

The religious monopoly over human rights violations goes back a long way – well beyond Asoka. To take the most obvious example, the caste system (which has its roots in religion, and which apologists claim is an ossified version of a once efficient system of division of labour) is the earliest form of institutional racism. While it was a secular Indian government that criminalised caste discrimination after Independence, it is still rampant because it is considered to be ’socially accepable’ and it has a divine mandate. Needless to say, it is utterly revolting.

3. Finally, there is nothing more infuriating to a rationalist and lover of reason than the sight of religious apologists hijacking some of the most breathtaking achievements of science. After the Big Bang became widely accepted, Islam, for instance claimed that it was mentioned in the Quran all along. They proceed to provide a wild interpretation of a 1400 arabic verse, which ‘confirms’ that the muslims knew all along about the Big Bang.

The recent hijacking of quantum mechanics by charlatans and snake oil salesmen like Deepak Chopra is a sad continuation of these state of affairs. These retrospective interpretations of religious texts (Kashmiri Shaivism???) to fit modern day scientific discoveries is a fantastic insult to some of the greatest thinkers of modern times.

4. Finally, I know that there is a temptation for the West to be enamoured of Eastern mysticism. It is far less dogmatic set of beliefs, and has a relatively clean and bloodless history compared to the Abrahamic cults. However, in their disregard for rationalism and by propogating their own dogma, these sects are just as bad.

Yes, some obscure Hindu and Buddhist texts are vaguely agnostic and extol the virtues of reasoning and the dangers of blind faith. However, such verses are few and far between, and often contradicted by other verses in other parts of the mythology.

I have spent some time on this post, it better be worth it.