Atheism is not a belief but a strong conviction of the non-existence of a god. Looking at purely the empirical evidence, prayers never get answered. In the rare times that prayer seems to work, it can be written off as coincidental.
Now, go search for synonyms for “conviction” and tell me what you find…
I think you’re confusing agnostic with atheist.
Agnostic means you don’t believe in any god. Atheist means you specifically believe that there is no God.
The latter still requires faith in something you can’t empirically prove.
No, agnostic means one doesn’t (claim to) know; atheist means one doesn’t believe.
Knowledge and belief are not the same thing.
I think you and I subscribe by rather different definitions of atheist and agnostic.
Gnosis means knowledge, specifically of a spiritual kind, agnosis thus is a lack thereof. An agnostic would thus be someone that doesn’t possess any hard knowledge of a spiritual kind. The way I see it, everyone is agnostic. If someone isn’t agnostic then they surely have proof otherwise.
A theist is someone that subscribes by a faith, specifically with the belief of at least one deity (from the Greek word “theos”). It could be Abrahamic, Shintou, Hindu, Asatro, you name it. If there’s a god, it’s a theistic belief. So an atheist is just someone that doesn’t subscribe to such a faith, though I recognise that it’s used as “not having any religious conviction.” Which to be fair, I use it as too.
I don’t see spirituality and atheism as being incompatible though. You might be atheist and practise wicca, or I suppose even Buddhism.
To me personally though, when I say that I’m an atheist it means that I just don’t really care. Religion isn’t a part of my daily life. There’s no belief in the existence or non-existence of any sort of deity, there’s no thought on the matter whatsoever.
You can also be an agnostic atheist - you don’t think god exists and/or don’t subscribe to religion but also believe there’s no way to know for sure.
I mean in such a scenario everyone’s agnostic. You can’t really know because it’s unprovable. If someone’s gnostic, then there must be proof, and then the entire debate is moot anyway.
Even though you can’t really know, there are still people who believe that god is provable and that they do really know. I’m sure there are plenty of agnostic Christians, people who believe in but know they can never confirm the existence of god.
