Happy Openly Secular Day!

This is David, I'm openly secular, and today is Openly Secular Day:


So what does that mean?  Openly Secular?

From the website:

The mission of Openly Secular is to eliminate discrimination and increase acceptance by getting secular people - including atheists, freethinkers, agnostics, humanists and nonreligious people - to be open about their beliefs.

Of the above list I would count myself among the agnostics, though that's more a definition question than anything else.  That is to say, it's how one defines each of those terms that delineates who's in which set.

For example if I were to start with these two defnintions:

Atheist - One who holds the denial of the statement "God exists." to be true.

Agnostic - One who holds that the statement "God exists." to be unknowable on account of there being no possible evidence to support or deny it.  A.J. Ayer would say such a statement, since it's devoid of factual information, is actually nonsense.

You'll note that neither the atheist or agnostic believes the statement "God exists" to be true. But only one believes it false, the other believes it to be nonsense.

On the other hand, if you define "atheist" to be anyone who does not hold that the statement "God exists." to be true, then both atheists and agnostics are atheists, for whatever their reasons.

See?

So why am I an agnostic (or atheist, if that's your definition)?  Because I can't see any evidence for the existence of a supreme being - and from that gap, I have to ask, "Why believe in anything for which there's no evidence to support it?"

The Universe is complicated and interesting enough without having to believe any set of ideas unsupported by facts.  The Human Mind is intelligent enough to contemplate good and evil, right and wrong and the nature of reality itself without having to depend on anything written down millennia ago.

We're much better than that.

My name is David and I am openly secular.