A Discussion of Terms: Gnosticism and Theism

For a long time, I called myself an agnostic. For a while, this was a pretty accurate label because I believed there was some undefined higher power that I knew nothing about. Eventually, I realized that there's no reason to assume that this higher power exists, but I still called myself agnostic because I don't deny that a God is possible, which is what I thought atheism entailed. I had a discussion with an atheist friend of mine, read a few websites, and watched a Richard Dawkins lecture or two, and realized that atheist was a better label for what I believed than agnosticism.

Discussions of agnosticism and atheism, at least within the people that care about which camp they fall into, tend to be fairly convoluted, resulting in terms like "weak" and "strong" atheism, "nontheism", etc. because they miss a fairly crucial point- agnosticism and atheism don't describe the same thing. A gnostic belief can be theist or atheist because the term gnostic (ignoring the historical definition of who the gnostics really were, and using it as the opposite of agnostic) implies that a belief is based on faith, while an agnostic belief acknowledges an uncertainty in the truth of the belief. Gnostic belief is irrational, agnostic belief is rational. There are many rational theists who choose to believe in a God even though they only have personal reasons for their belief, and there are irrational atheists who claim to know that there is no God. This is a much more elegant explanation than having agnostics be people the believe in something but say they're not sure whereas atheists are people who say God doesn't exist.