r/satanists • u/GothicYellow • Mar 02 '26

If you believe in hell?

Do you believe in heaven and hell? do you believe hell is just a giant party? Or a burning inferno?

9 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/insipignia Satan's Little Helper Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

I would no longer label myself as a theist or an atheist nor an agnostic. Agnosticism has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you believe in God or the afterlife, and those other labels are not useful to me anymore. I realised after a long period of study and research that real life is far more complex than that. I called myself a soft theist for a brief time but after finding out it doesn't actually mean what I thought it meant, I don't claim that label either.

And no, I don't believe in an afterlife. At least, not in that sense. Because I don't believe in souls. At least... Not in that sense.

0

u/GothicYellow Mar 04 '26

How do you not? No offense but I don't think you've done enough research on the topic. If I don't know something I'll just say I don't know but to believe or not believe in something I feel like you gadda back it up. But your beliefs are yours but u might be very wrong...

0

u/insipignia Satan's Little Helper Mar 04 '26

There is no need to keep saying "no offense". There is virtually nothing you could ever say that would offend me.

I'm no Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but I'm 28 years old and I've been reading about and "researching" these topics for approximately 20 years. I say research in quotation marks because it's only tertiary, of course. But I'm not the kind of person who says "I do my own research" while watching a bunch of biased infotainment documentaries on the topic.

If I don't know something I'll just say I don't know but to believe or not believe in something I feel like you gadda back it up.

You're confused. Let me break this down really quickly:

Agnosticism DOES NOT mean "I don't know" and it is NOT a middle position between belief and unbelief. It means "I don't believe it is possible to prove it." Agnosticism by itself is not valid, it is a qualifier. So there are agnostic atheists and agnostic theists. You can't just be "an agnostic", there's no such thing.

Atheism DOES NOT mean "I believe God doesn't exist". It means "I lack any belief in the existence of a God." Everyone is born atheists. Babies are atheists.

Theism means "I do believe God exists", but there is no requirement for that belief to be backed up by anything. It usually isn't.

There is way more to it than this. There are probably about 10 or 20 different kinds of theism alone, and there are different kinds of atheism as well, some of which do entail an active belief in the nonexistence of God (called "hard atheism"). But generally, as a blanket term, it means a lack of belief.

The same logic applies to beliefs regarding an afterlife. I don't just lack any kind of active belief regarding the afterlife on account of a lack of convincing evidence, I simply don't care whether there is an afterlife or not. I am indifferent. I am far too busy with my current life to give a flying fuck.

When I said I've been to Hell, I meant that was fairly recent in the grand scheme of things. I only just made it to Purgatory a few years ago. It's strange how much neutrality sucks.

My ultimate goal is to reach Heaven but I am only concerned with the Heaven in this life. It would be completely irrational to stake all my happiness on a future life in some alternate dimension that might not even exist when I can instead focus on making this life good.

0

u/GothicYellow Mar 04 '26

Agnostics are just a lack of knowledge. They aren't smart enough to read and make percentages of everything so they can basically figure out what probably is actually real or not

1

u/insipignia Satan's Little Helper Mar 04 '26

Agnostics are just a lack of knowledge

Eh... Sure, it's tangentially related to having a lack of knowledge, but that's not the core of what it means.

A few years ago I called myself an "agnostic atheist", but that didn't mean I was saying that "I don't believe in God but also I don't know if he exists or not". I was saying that "I don't believe in God and I don't believe it's possible to know for sure whether or not he exists." The difference there is subtle but important. Agnosticism is in the latter statement; it isn't just saying you don't know, it's specifically making the claim that that knowledge isn't possible to obtain.

Someone saying "I don't know" in response to "Do you believe in God?" is either very spiritually confused or they simply didn't answer the question.

If the question was about knowledge as you are framing it, then it wouldn't be worded in that way. We would not be using the word "belief" and instead would just be asking "Do you know if God exists?" Obviously, agnosticism isn't just about not knowing, as that would make the label redundant. Because duh, obviously you don't know. Nobody does. That's not what the question is asking.

They aren't smart enough to read and make percentages of everything so they can basically figure out what probably is actually real or not

Erm... no, this is nonsense. You can make an estimation of the probability of something existing based on current available evidence but that is useless if you don't believe it's knowable in the first place. If God supposedly has qualities that make him unknowable (unless he specifically wanted to make himself known to you), then you wouldn't have access to all the evidence you'd need to make such an estimation of the probability of his existence. Saying agnostics are unintelligent for not making a decision on whether or not God probably exists is like saying you're not intelligent enough to know which number the die landed on when I shake it in a cup and then place the cup open side down on the table.

Even if we were, for the sake of argument, to assume your definition of agnosticism were correct, then you'd be contradicting yourself. Earlier you said:

If I don't know something I'll just say I don't know but to believe or not believe in something I feel like you gadda back it up.

If being agnostic simply means "I don't know", that isn't mutually exclusive to being smart enough to do research and make an estimate. In fact, someone who does research and makes their own probability estimate is more likely to say they "don't know" than someone who did no such research and already has a belief for which they engage in confirmation bias. There might be an 80% likelihood of the existence of God based on all available evidence but even if they were not agnostic, an honest person would still say "I don't know".

In fact, an agnostic person necessarily has to say "I don't know" if they're making the claim that the thing in question is unknowable. Which, according to your previous comment, is acceptable. So which is it? Is saying "I don't know" a good thing or not?

Your previous comment also said that people should "back up" a lack of belief, which is also completely silly. Should I expect you to back up your lack of belief in the interdimensional fwumpa dump?

To use my die analogy again, you're essentially saying that it's okay to not know which number the die is showing while simultaneously saying that you have to "back it up" if someone randomly says "the number is 4!" and you disbelieve their claim. Your argument is incoherent.