Why do many people misunderstand the term "agnostic"?

It seems you think 'misunderstanding' is the same as 'not agreeing with your opinion'....

Why do people try and redefine straightforward definitions?

AGNOSTIC – Does not believe anything can be know about or proved about a god. Thus they can still believe a god exists. This description obviously fits a lot of Christians!

ATHEIST - someone who does not believe in a God – any God – not just the Christian one. But that does not mean they do not hold strong moral or religious beliefs! They can follow any religion that does not have a god and there are a lot of those!

I can understand why Christians might try and redefine the definitions which, by the way, were not thought up by lexicographers but defined by the Christian church, but why are you so worried by them?!

I take your point about "agnostic" having roots in Greek, and etymologically it would indeed make sense to take it in the literal sense of "without knowledge". If you are without knowledge about something, you are agnostic about it.

The problem as I see it arises from the fact that as an English word "agnostic" has more than one interpretation. It adds a lot of confusion to debates when people get to use the word vaguely and interpret it any which way.

You can't solve these issues just by holding that your definition of the concept is "correct" and others misuse it. The important thing is to try to explain clearly whenever you use it in what sense you're using it. Or if that's not practicable, just avoid the word altogether and spell it out in plain English.

I don't think you can legislate what everyone must mean by the term in all contexts. You say that the Greek origin of the word is a "fact". It is also a "fact" that in the English language "agnostic" has various shades of meaning and is used even as a technical term in many different ways. Agnosticism can mean that you neither believe nor disbelieve some claim. Maybe the most typical meaning for the word in English is that an agnostic is someone who holds that it is not possible to know to whether or not God exists. But even in any good dictionary of philosophy you will find at least two different senses for the word.

Another problem that I see here is that in formal logic propositions must be either true or false. This does not correspond very well with how humans in fact reason in real life. It may very well be reasonable to believe something to some degree, where the degree of belief takes values between 0 and 1. It could also be argued that humans in fact often adopt certain habits of forming beliefs. Induction is a case in point. It is generally a very good habit for a mind to acquire that it forms beliefs by induction. But this has nothing to do with formal logic, nor no many other better or worse habits of the mind by which we operate.

With regard to what I wrote above, I think people often err in assuming themselves to be more "rational" than they are, and by equating rationality with something such as the rules of formal logic. I think if you have a mistaken view of how humans actually reason and form beliefs, then you are likely to get all sorts of poor results.

If I got to stipulate how "atheist" and "agnostic" are used, I would say that an "atheist" is someone who is "without God" and an "agnostic" is someone who is "without knowledge". In other words, you are an atheist if you live without a god or gods, and you are agnostic about some particular thing in so far as you don't know enough about it to know how things stand.

But I'm not so foolish as to think that people are going to start using these words in some strict sense and never deviate from it only because it would personally please or tickle me. People are going to have differing ideas of what an agnostic is and what an atheist is. I think yours were fine, but as far as conversations and debates go, you just have to remember to get clear on how the terms are being used and try to stick to that as far as possible.

EDIT: If you look at it closely, my preferred way of using these terms actually parallels yours very closely. If you take "atheism" to mean living without god, then it becomes a matter of a sort of life choice rather than a knowledge claim. I think it's not very useful to completely disentangle life-choices from knowledge claims, because both religious and non-religous people do in fact think that giving reasons for why they've chosen to participate or not participate in a religion is somehow relevant. It is a "choice" but it's not completely detachable from reasons altogether.

I m an atheist because I know it is impossible for the God of the bible to exist. That god contradicts himself. That god also contradicts our universe. i.e. he claims to have created plants before he created light. Well, that is just not the way the world works now or in the beginning. The biblical god also claims to have made Adam from dirt and eve from Adam's rib. False. Abiogenesis, billions of years with evolution and man finally was born.

Thus the fables written about the biblical god are not even close to reality.

I fear the reason is: they don't really want to understand

because it would clash with their dogmatic opinion.

Another reason could be that they are not educated enough

to realize the concept.

Also not less people are so filled with hatred

that they are not able to think in an objectiv way about the subject.

And especially religious minded people usually are

conditionated only to go their way of conscientiousness.

So they are not allowed to take the thougts of others serious.

I don't think you know yourself. In fact I'm sure of it. Most people need to read more. The word agnostic was coined by Thomas Huxley. I suggest people start there.

Maybe you need to actually understand the correct term, not your idea of what it should be. You say you are atheist, yet you sit in darkness, and tell the Christians who walk in the Light, what the Light is like. How can you in darkness describe the light?

most Christians think Muslim,Jewish,Buddhist, and Atheist are all different words for satanist.

Half of all people are below median intelligence.

agnostics simply say that god may exist,

but there is no way to determine that.......//

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