Here are a couple of quote from Christopher Hitchens:
If you say you don't believe, which is what an agnostic has to say...because an agnostic says "I can't decide it"...you're an atheist. QED.
And:
You should take the risk of believing that if you're the only person who thinks what you think, that still might well mean you were right.
First quote: disagree. Come on, I hope Hitchens doesn't expect us to take this word game seriously. My impression is this: Hitchens wants a fight, and, in order to make conditions more conducive to fighting, he has to frame the world in black and white. Therefore there are atheists and there are religious fundamentalists, and (here he has something in common with Bush etc. in the war on terror) "if you're not with us you're against us". But, since Hitchens is a considerate and indulgent man, he'd rather not be fighting the wrong people. So, rather than paint the grey people black in his picture of the world, he paints them white, to ensure that they're all honorary atheists, kind of affably press-ganging them into his cause.
I can do better than that: If being agnostic means you don't know if there is a god, and atheist is the alternative among non-believers, that means atheists must know that there isn't a god. If someone can give an airtight reason as to how they know there isn't a god (as opposed to belief) etc., then the distinction of 'atheist', as opposed to 'agnostic' is valid. Otherwise all non-believers are agnostics, or, if they say they are atheist, they are lying.
Second quote: agree. Oddly, the second quote seems to contradict the first in spirit. The first quote seems very much in the "everyone has a right to my opinion" vein.
More Hitchens quotes:
A fundamentalist says that they believe what the books say; if you don't believe what the books say, why are you saying you're a Christian?
Again, more sophism in order to divide the world into enlightened atheists and religious fundamentalists. You can only be a Christian if you're a fundamentalist, apparently. Only the stupidest and most literal level of truth in any religion is religious. It's just a way of shifting labels about, but one has to ask why? In order to advance a particlar battle-plan, that's all.
Civilization begins where reason kicks in, and where there are no unexamined assumptions.
What about the unexamined assumption that Hitchens knows what god is. You can only disbelieve something if you know what it is, after all.
Try & live your life as if you were a free person; that you didn't have to wonder what anyone else's opinion was...
Thank you for your permission to think for myself, Hitch. I hope you're not going to revoke it again when I actually make use it of.
[Spinoza] was a pantheist. What he said was 'God is everything and everywhere' ... I don't mind people saying that at all.
After all, as Dawkins has also said, pantheism is just sexed up atheism. What a relief it must be for pantheists to know they're on the right side in this war.
Etc.
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I feel like this question doesn't apply to the situation.To be agnostic is to say that you don't know something - that nothing is proved, in a sense. Why, then, should people be disallowed from saying they are agnostic and be compelled to say that they are atheist (presumably meaning something is proved)?
In other words, the situation in which your question would apply is if someone is being asked to believe in something, and doesn't want to, or simply doesn't believe, and then he or she can of course say, "I won't believe anything that is not proven to me." However, that is not a situation that is being discussed in the blog post. Or, in fact, the closest situation to it is that Hitchens would like everyone to accept his viewpoint even though he can't prove it. Even apart from the fact that what 'God' is hasn't been established, so that to argue about its existence or otherwise is ridiculous ("Does x exist where the variable x is something yet to be defined?" is the basic question that supposedly intelligent people are arguing about), in my personal opinion, the whole idea that god might be a 'thing' that 'exists' is a playground level of thought.
actually, i think the question does apply, but in your favor. any person coming to a moment of choosing whether to believe or not, comes from a point of ignorance. or, at best, social conditioning towards one belief or another. if you are asking a person whether or not god exists, the burden of proof lies upon each equally to prove their point. so in order for an agnostic to become a believer, the existence of god must be proved. but in order to become an atheist, one must prove that there is no god. which is what you were saying.
