Agnostic or Atheist? What’s the Difference? (Video)
July 29, 2015
by Neil Carter
My New Testament Greek professor used to always say, “Words have usage; they don’t have meaning.” I used to think that was an overstatement, but now I think he’s right. The sounds and scribbles we make don’t have intrinsic significance beyond what we assign them. Even our dictionaries can only provide us with snapshots of the meanings we give our words in a given place at a given time. Webster’s doesn’t actually determine what a word means.
That’s why you should ask the people who actually use the words in question what they mean by them. If what you mean when you use a word is significantly different from what most everybody else means, I challenge that you are not communicating well. You may be entertaining yourself, I suppose. But you can’t expect the rest of us to successfully decode what you’ve just tried to explain to us.
Incidentally, this is why I think it’s pointless to use the word “God” to mean something wildly different from everyone else means when they use the word. If most people use it to mean an intervening, sentient but invisible person while you use it to mean, I dunno, physics or something, I submit that you aren’t really getting your meaning across. But I digress.
When people who are not atheists use the words “atheist” and “agnostic,” they often mean things which the people who label themselves as such would never allow. Like I’ve written before, some Christians seem to think the word “atheist” applies to anyone who hasn’t completely committed his or her life to Jesus, I guess because he or she is living as if there were no God. That can lead to an awful lot of confusion, not to mention a ton of people claiming to be “former atheists” who actually demonstrate very little awareness of how actual atheists think.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2015/07/29/agnostic-or-atheist-whats-the-difference-video/
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