This Was the Species that Was

or, The Philosophers Stoned

the_mishka pointed out, during the excellent dinner party she and jaegerbeast spearheaded at the Clarendon Silver Diner last night, the existence of the word 'ignosticism,' a non-belief system that holds that even agnostics claim too much knowledge about the existence of 'god.'

Now, I have the utter respect for people whose job it is to sit around inventing and then lamenting philosophical problems (usually turning on clever manipulations of language and meaning... they're basically the corporate attorneys of human understanding, but so far nobody's really caught on and lynched them). But friggin' yikes: this term is annoying and I want no part of it. The sentence 'An ignostic cannot even say whether he/she is a theist or an atheist until a better definition of theism is put forth' (from Wikipedia) is sophistry: theism could be defined as the belief in an old guy with a white beard on a throne in the sky, belief in the Force, belief in Santa Claus, or belief that, every time a box of Ritz crackers is sold in a Giant Supermarket with no broken crackers inside, an angel gets a blowjob. What does 'better definition of theism' even mean? (Falsifiable? See below.) Wait, I have one: God is me. Ding ding ding! I'm a theist! (Or 'God is I': I'm a theist and a SNOOT.)

The position seems an utterly made-up one that no human could truly be said to hold except in formal debates or on the grounds of super-principled logical orneriness: i.e., playing Spock. I don't therefore believe that ignostics exist. Call me an anignosticist. I'll also accept 'pugnostic'.

In other words, saying that a cogent definition of god precedes the arguments for or against the existence of god is one thing (to my mind, one irrefutable thing); saying that, because of a logico-semantic loophole, I cannot choose to identify as an atheist based on my opposition to the extant body of known human definitions of god is another (to my mind, horseshit).

...As is the claim by various philosophers that the proposition 'God exists' is meaningless. This is based, so far as my VAST web research reveals, on defining 'meaningless' as 'unfalsifiable'—but this is an empty if not fallacious definition. (I could accept that any proposition that is unfalsifiable is 'useless' in logical terms, but not meaningless.) No human being who would utter the proposition 'God exists' with any sort of vested interest (e.g., her/his faith) would consider it meaningless. Nor would any person who looks at the world and sees the astonishing things, both beautiful and terrible, done in the name of the gods defined by and believed in by other people! Philosophers who derive meaninglessness from meaning can suck my butt just as much as those who force meaning on poor, unsuspecting meaninglessness.< /rant>

I've just won a pair of tickets to see Jeebus Cripes Supercalifornicashazamaramadingdong on Saturday, March 21, at the Warner Theatre. Who am I going to take?

Because of my opinions about religious faith and how prompt I am to share them:

A. I am a bigot.
B. I am a bitter, old, faggot [sic].
C. I am a loser.
D. I am a total fucking asshole.
E. My statements are as much proselytizing, and every bit as evangelical, as anything you'd hear from a pentecostal, just on the other side of the fence.
F. I am a closed-minded asshole. (Or perhaps a closely minded asshole; the usage was ambiguous)
G. I'm a douchebag.
H. It's obvious that my POV is the only correct one and, well, that ends any and all discussions on the subject as far as I'm concerned.
I. I am a scared little man whose fear is stronger than his faith.

See here. One further response to a commenter lives here for lack of any other place to put it and because he posts no email address.

Yes, I was callous yesterday and livid this morning. Meanwhile, my post yesterday that made a reasonable argument (I thought without rancor) was what prompted qxbear to ban me from commenting in his journal. Now everybody gets to discuss the posted argument without my being able to weigh in—like, for example, pointing out to "H" that I'm absolutely willing to argue religion endlessly with Tyler or him or anybody, and that what really ended any and all discussions on the subject was Tyler banning me.

*Sigh*