If you believe there is no God, just as strongly as you don't believe in the orbiting teakettle, I think you're more accurately characterized as an atheist than as an agnostic.
I think an atheist is someone who believes there is no God, and by that standard it sounds to me like you're an atheist. If you instead use the definition "An atheist is someone who KNOWs with an absolute perfect unshakeable unfalsifiable certainty (of a sort that I do not have about any statement about the existence of entities in the world (except possibly myself) or about any other statement about my environment or the universe at large) that there is no God", then you're an agnostic, and so am I, and so are all of the atheists I've discussed this with. I don't think this is a particularly useful way to use the words. I think it makes sense to use the word "belief" in "an atheist is someone who believes there is no God" in the same way people use the word "belief" in other contexts, rather than in some different sense.
To relate this to the thread subject of evangelism, I find I don't do much evangelism of the sort "Persuade people that they are wrong in their beliefs about the existence of God". And almost all the evangelism I do is a fairly subtle and IMNSFHO unobjectionable form, of asking them questions about their own religious beliefs, choosing the questions so as to focus on aspects of their beliefs that I think they themselves will find inconsistent or irrational. But I do find that I do the sort of label-evangelism I'm doing in this post, encouraging people to label themselves as atheist when I think it's an accurate description. I went through a brief period where I considered myself a pantheist, because the properties of God (omnipresence, omnipotence, existing for all time) were held by the totality of things in the universe as a whole. But then I decided this was a cop-out; If I didn't believe in any other entities other than the ones an atheist believed in, I was better described as atheist.
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Date: 2010-04-14 10:28 pm (UTC)I think an atheist is someone who believes there is no God, and by that standard it sounds to me like you're an atheist. If you instead use the definition "An atheist is someone who KNOWs with an absolute perfect unshakeable unfalsifiable certainty (of a sort that I do not have about any statement about the existence of entities in the world (except possibly myself) or about any other statement about my environment or the universe at large) that there is no God", then you're an agnostic, and so am I, and so are all of the atheists I've discussed this with. I don't think this is a particularly useful way to use the words. I think it makes sense to use the word "belief" in "an atheist is someone who believes there is no God" in the same way people use the word "belief" in other contexts, rather than in some different sense.
To relate this to the thread subject of evangelism, I find I don't do much evangelism of the sort "Persuade people that they are wrong in their beliefs about the existence of God". And almost all the evangelism I do is a fairly subtle and IMNSFHO unobjectionable form, of asking them questions about their own religious beliefs, choosing the questions so as to focus on aspects of their beliefs that I think they themselves will find inconsistent or irrational. But I do find that I do the sort of label-evangelism I'm doing in this post, encouraging people to label themselves as atheist when I think it's an accurate description. I went through a brief period where I considered myself a pantheist, because the properties of God (omnipresence, omnipotence, existing for all time) were held by the totality of things in the universe as a whole. But then I decided this was a cop-out; If I didn't believe in any other entities other than the ones an atheist believed in, I was better described as atheist.