The story of the fall in the garden of eden is an incredibly stupid story. It’s like a father who puts their child in a room with a venomous snake, then tells the child not to touch or go near the snake, knowing fully well that the child has absolutely no understanding of the consequences of touching the snake and then seriously punishing the child and all the child’s descendants that have absolutely nothing to do with the initial event, for being bitten by the snake. And then calling the father all loving and good. No story ever written is more stupid.

I bookmarked this to respond later … Like atheists, Agnostics do not believe in God either , which is why Agnosticism and atheism aren’t mutually exclusive because they’re answering different questions. And it’s very important to know these things if you are against atheism. Atheism addresses belief….“Do you believe a god exists?”, while agnosticism addresses knowledge…“Do you claim to know whether a god exists?” You can consistently say “I don’t believe” and at the same time “I don’t know,” and that position …”agnostic atheism”… is actually where most atheists fall. There’s no contradiction here because belief and knowledge operate at different levels… belief is about what you accept as true, while knowledge implies a stronger claim of justified certainty. You don’t need certainty to withhold belief,,,in fact, we do this all the time in everyday reasoning. Once you see that distinction clearly, atheism stops looking like a bold claim and starts looking like the default rational stance. When someone aserts that a god exists, they’re making a positive claim about reality, and the reasonable response is to ask for evidence before accepting it. If that evidence isn’t provided, withholding belief isn’t dogmatic or stupid , it’s exactly what we do with any unsupported claim. You don’t belive something first and then wait for evidence…you wait for evidence and then form belief. Atheism, in this sense, is just the consistent application of that principle. By contrast, theism(which religious people hold) carries a much heavier burden because it doesn’t just posit that something exists, it usually makes specific claims… that a god exists, that this god has intentions, communicates what it wants from us, intervenes, inspires books , reveal itself to people in caves , had a son etc . Each added detail increases the burden of proof and implausibility of theism and yet these claims typically rely on tradition, revelation, or “personal experience” rather than independently verifiable evidence. Deism, on the other hand, makes a more minimal claim…a non-intervening creator…which reduces its burden compared to theism, but it still asserts the existence of an entity without direct evidence, so it remains speculative. when you line it all up, agnostic atheism comes out as the most epistemically grounded position…it avoids overreaching claims, aligns with how we evaluate evidence everywhere else, and simply withholds belief until there’s sufficient justification. It’s not claiming certainty…it’s just refusing to pretend certainty where there isn’t any…🙂