marjorie, reasonableists — lolz. the ration(al) police,maybe? prognostic rolls off the tongue a bit easier, no?

My issue with agnostic is two-fold. One is semantic, the word itself, it literally means “don’t know”, “no knowledge”. Second, it is too easy a label for religious folk to throw back at us skeptics and non-believers, and claim — “see? you can’t really know, can you. join us, seek bliss in not knowing.”

But here is what I say to anyone that claims religious beliefs. I do know. I know that your God, and every God, scripture & holy book cooked up by humankind since the dawn of self-awareness, is a made up figment of human imagination, a placeholder. I simply do not accept that shamans 2–3 thousand years ago had the facilities to communicate with the otherworld but today we cannot easily replicate those experiments, even as we send people to the moon and commandeer nanobots to fight cancer cells. The fact that spirituality is all or mostly made up is a wonderful testament to the power of imagination, but it has to be paired with a big slice of humility, and admission that placeholders eventually become obsolete with the onward march of human knowledge.

Waiting for Godot … I mean, Jack to chime in ;-)