feeling very strongly that there can't possibly be a God - or at least a God in the Judeo-Christian/Muslim sense. How's this: I'm an atheist agnostic-sympathizer.
That would be me, too, if the "maybe there is a god" part of regular agnosticism means believing in the possibility of a god in the Judeo-Christian/Muslim sense. Sorry to whoever this might offend (though I would hope that anyone who takes offense easily about this subject wouldn't read this thread in the first place), but that image seems way too simple to me.
I've never for a second doubted that humans make their religions up, maybe not by consciously inventing them but by gradual shaping of stories through oral traditions. That's what humans do, and I can understand why: it's comforting to think that somebody is watching out for you like a parent and helping you along, that there's someone you can turn to in time of need, that there's somebody who in the end will punish evildoers and reward dogooders, and that if you survive a tsunami it's because "God was looking after you." So religion and the idea of god serves an important psychological purpose for people. Human concepts of god and heaven are often shaped by earthly frustrations, and by what humans already know and can see around them.
But IMO, there's no way people can have any idea about it.
The part of me that thinks there might be a god is more inclined to believe in a much more abstract god than that, a god that doesn't exercise much if any control over what happens on earth, doesn't choose sides, that t necessarily even create the earth.
What does that leave? Well, who knows? That's the whole point of agnosticism, to me. There's no way of knowing. But obviously there's a lot of things that we don't know. Even about simple scientific physical earthly things like biology and physics, let alone things that might exist on some other plane of reality altogether.
The analogy I always think of is teaching a cat to read. You could spend hours and hours, day after day, patiently going over the alphabet and showing the cat simple beginning reader books. And yet the cat will never learn to read. It's just outside of the cat's intellectual abilities. That's how I think humans are about god.
