What does the word Atheist mean? Is an Agnostic Atheist?

I lack a belief in God.I believe that God (as I understand it) does not exist.I don't know whether or not God exists for certain....I always had myself down as an agnostic strong atheist.Notice how you can replace God in any of the above by "Santa Claus", "Tooth Fairy" etcI think strong atheism is getting a bad press on this thread. Of course I can't be sure God exists - not in an airtight, suck-your-cheeks philosophical sense anyway. Nonetheless, I am sure that Santa Claus doesn't exist in a very day-to-day kind of way (just so the word "sure" still has some use in my lexicon). In the same way, I'm "sure" God (as it has been explained to me) doesn't exist.I'd change my mind about Santa if I had the right evidence and there's no reason to think I wouldn't do the same for God, despite being sure. I've been wrong before.Now how does that make me dogmatic or unreasonable?(Another way of looking at it is that I see myslef as an agnostic atheist philosophically but a strong atheist politically. Its my view that, on balance, religion - religious dogma - has been a bad thing).PE

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/applause

The problem is that, while "Santa Claus" means one specific thing, "God" means almost anything you like.For instance, if I defined "God" as "an entity with infinite power to remain undetected", could you really be sure it doesn't exist?It's impossible to know for sure that all possible God-ideas are wrong. But most people's God-ideas, you can know they're wrong. For instance an all-powerful, benevolent God can't (and doesn't) exist, if the universe is the way it is.I'm sure that I hold the same belief about God as you. It's just that it does get dogmatic to be sure that no God exists, because you can't know for some gods, by definition.

I dunno Crash, I don't think you could get away with defining God in any way you wanted. I couldn't define God as me for example, obvious though it might appear I was using a rather generic version of the Abrahamic God in my prev. post and you're right to pull me up there. The Scientific Pantheist "God" may very well exist for example, but I still find the whole concept incoherent. I'd normally call dogmatism a negative trait, but if all it is in this case is a internal filter for what I perceive as incoherence, then maybe its not such a bad thing.And anyway, where does dogmatism end and common-sense begin? Is it dogmatic to be sure that there aren't any teapots orbiting Pluto? True, but if I told you that I had a pair of 50 ton red socks in my sock drawer which, by a remarkable coincidence, also had the infinite power to remain undetected by *you*, would you really be unsure of their existence?I don't think we disagree on many things and if we do, I think they'll always be slightly contrived and detracting from the weightier issues. It seems to me that what you're calling "dogmatism", I'm calling "common-sense". If its just a semantic difference, I suggest we keep our labels as they best serve us.PE

Belief in [i]ANYTHING supernatural is BAD JU-JU and should be avoided!!!