Who is more self rightoues? [Spirituality & Religion]

@reflectingmonkey Being human is ability to choose and have opinions if you ask me, however that rises us above animals I guess. And that is certainly disputable.

@ButterFly2023 opinions are great, if someone says they think there IS a god or someone else says they think there is none that's fine with me, what bugs me is the lack of humility and the air of superiority that accompanies certainty. as long as someone can add the words " but I could be wrong" when discussing what might or might not exist, then I am all right with that.

Every day of my life, I accept as true things I cannot know. I don't know if the weatherman or even the thermometer is giving me correct information. I have no way of verifying that. I could ask people who say they know, but I have no way of telling whether they do know or not, and no way of determining if they speak the truth about what they say they know.

It [b][i]appears[/i][/b] to me to be true, because when they say it's 95 deg F, I am uncomfortably warm.

If someone asks me, do you know what the temperature is?, the truth is, no, I don't know. I believe, because I have chosen to believe.

I have more personal knowledge about whether there is God or there isn't God [b][i]in my life[/i][/b] than I have about today's temperature. It is not knowledge you have decided to believe. I get that. I accept the fact that you want proof I can't provide, and I get that too.

For you to make the decision that you accept as true certain things you don't [b][i]know[/i][/b] either, but I am arrogant to accept my belief as true, makes you more self righteous than the rest of us combined. What you are actually saying is that we cannot know things that you don't know.

Sure, some of us are wrong and some of us are right, and some day we will know, en masse, or individually, which is which.

At this point I consider myself not only a believer, but a knower, because it has been proven to [b]my[/b] conviction that it is truth.

And if the weatherman looks sober, is standing before a convincing map, and says today's temperature will be 95 deg F, I will take his word for it and not bother with a sweater. Occasionally it will happen that is a mistaken belief. [@reflecting monkey]

@reflectingmonkey[quote]the terms agnostic and atheist overlap[/quote]

1. There's no proof that gods exist

2 there's no proof that gods don't exist

3. There's no compelling necessity to postulate gods, and the postulation explains nothing... it tries to merely explain everything away.

4. Therefore I have no gods.

Can you point out the self-righteousness in there?

@newjaninev2 although you have not stated it clearly I imagine you refer to yourself as a atheist under the definition of atheist that I specifically said I was not using in order to avoid overlaping of meaning. so by the definitions of terms that I chose to use and made clear before my statement I would call you a agnostic. So no, there is no self-righteousness in your statements. you do realise that in a philosophical discussion, when you want to use a term that might cause ambiguity because there are different definitions to this term, one must clearly state which definition he is using, and I have done so clearly. its very simple: I consider stating that there is no god to be beyond the expertise of any man and if you agree with this then I would call you an agnostic and if you claim that there is no god and that you are certain of this I would then call you atheist and self-righteous, but I don't think its the case.

@reflectingmonkey [quote]I would call you a agnostic[/quote]

I'm an agnostic atheist (agnostic is an adjective... its use as a noun, while common, leads to confusion).