I love David Mitchell, but I don't agree with him here. Agnosticism is not some sort of middle ground between belief and atheism. It's a claim about knowledge, not belief. You can be an agnostic atheist (in fact, most atheists are): someone who doesn't believe that there's a god, but doesn't claim that they know with certainty that god doesn't exist.
Also, yeah, other -isms have caused atrocities. The real problem here is dogma, and political movements can be pretty dogmatic too. But the thing with big organized religions is that they have an innate and strong tendency to default on dogma, because one of their core tenets is the idea of belief based on faith alone, even when (especially when) you have no evidence of a claim being true. And believing on principle that you must be right, and not allowing for re-examining or second guessing when new evidence arises is dogmatic by definition.
BeaverFur t1_irbnuna wrote
Reply to David Mitchell on Atheism by Huntstark
I love David Mitchell, but I don't agree with him here. Agnosticism is not some sort of middle ground between belief and atheism. It's a claim about knowledge, not belief. You can be an agnostic atheist (in fact, most atheists are): someone who doesn't believe that there's a god, but doesn't claim that they know with certainty that god doesn't exist.
Also, yeah, other -isms have caused atrocities. The real problem here is dogma, and political movements can be pretty dogmatic too. But the thing with big organized religions is that they have an innate and strong tendency to default on dogma, because one of their core tenets is the idea of belief based on faith alone, even when (especially when) you have no evidence of a claim being true. And believing on principle that you must be right, and not allowing for re-examining or second guessing when new evidence arises is dogmatic by definition.