There are multiple interpretations I have of what Dragonlord meant. The statement wasn't very clear. Here are three translations:
In the first, Dragonlord was defining "atheist" as someone who is 100% certain that there is no god and then meant something something like "A 100% claim that there is no God is just as irrational as someone who claims to believe in God." And then he implicitly defined the term "agnostic" as anyone assigning a probability to God's existence that isn't 0 or 1.
In the second, Dragonlord was defining atheist as someone who assigns a very low probability to God's existence. He then meant something like: "Anyone who makes a strong claim about the probability of God's existence has insufficient evidence either way and so is using "faith" to push their probability estimate in a direction unjustified by evidence." And then he implicitly identified agnostic as people with a middling probability.
In the third, Dragonlord identified atheism the same way as in the second but then meant something like "I am uncomfortable with people making strong claims about this question, so I am going to declare that everyone making strong claims about this question are being irrational in the same way." And then he identified agnostics as people who aren't making him uncomfortable with strong claims about the existence of a deity.
Ah! Very good. Thank you. That exercise was more productive than I expected.
My original interpretation (and the interpretation I still hold) was that he was saying either the first or the second. And, based on that interpretation, I felt that Dragonlord's statement was reasonable and perhaps even defensible. And I felt that the downvoting was unfair. I realize that RobinZ also thought the downvoting was unfair, but I thought that RobinZ's defense of Dragonlord ("The poor guy just doesn't understand the definitions", in effect) was worse t...
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.