You believe what you believe, and you are unwilling to engage directly in a discussion about it. Fair enough. I still fundamentally disagree with your idea that you can simply “know” the truth upon coming to it, without any content to the knowledge. Knowledge is not really knowledge without an explicable “how do you know.” Otherwise, it’s just a feeling of knowing, which is not the same thing at all.

“Sometimes I get the feeling you don’t quite have your definitions down straight.”

As always, examples are helpful, so we can see directly if the “feeling” has merit.

Oh, I don’t know, I wouldn’t sell myself so short iffin I were you.
I suspect you can do a whole lot of Bad, or even worse, before it’s all over.

But as for who is right about what you know,
Just give it time friend.

All things prove out in time.
No one ever escapes time or what it teaches about what is never really escapable.

But as for your argument, let’s have a little whirl, shall we?:

You say it’s not that what you say is less than logical
And yet you say it cannot be that evidence be culled
For if you see it not as there then not as there it is
And yet you cannot see the (w)hole you smartly never did,
For if a man cannot find his brainstem through his ass
It does not mean he has not shit with clever upper class
A twist of phrase can make men sing when talking would be best
By saying no means yes it’s not then East becomes the West,
But what of that, it makes no count, this is the internet
And truth be damned or shouted out it will not soon abet
Just take my verse as clever words with which you’ll not agree
It does not change what ever was or change what yet will be,
An argument is like a match where men with tongues do roar
And yet the Truth is like a fight that’s much more like a war
Debates and wrestles in the mind they are for pleasant show
But when men come upon the Truth then only do they know.

Your turn.

By the way, I like your verse.
Your meter too. You show a lot of promise.
Just work on your vocabulary a little.
Sometimes I get the feeling you don’t quite have your definitions down straight.

I just can’t match you verse for verse
yet as for substance: I can’t do worse

It really seems you’ve spent no time
on any matter but the rhyme

In poem one, there’s naught but bluster
is that the best that you can muster?

Merely to insist that I
have misued terms, which is a lie?

My comments took specific stands
which you failed in full to countermand

and poem two: you offer nothing!
there’s no response, there’s naught but bluffing

you talk of “truth,” but merely claim
did you not know that’s not the same?

I never said I knew our fate
its proof of yours which I await

And thankfully, I do have patience
just give me more than accusations.

I happen to agree with this. However, I also think that this line of thinking is often used to obscure the issues. Asserting that there is no god is simply unecessary, and one does not have to assert the opposite of a claim to not believe it.

You can insist all you want that you’ve repaid a loan: I want to see evidence before I credit you for it. I don’t have to positively assert that you haven’t paid it to not believe that you have.

And thus, agnostic atheism is perfectly reasonable when it comes to god claims. Do I know what’s true or even what’s possible or makes sense in that case? Not at all. But like any claim, I need a reason to think it true before I can say that I give it credit or affirmation. Without, I remain an atheist (or non-theist, if you prefer).

“I may have gotten the exact quote wrong. I do belive that the basic ideas behind the Judeo-Christian philosophy are a great basis for building a civilization.”

I happen to think that is grossly oversimplifies things. What those “ideas” are, and what are credited to them, seem to have evolved a great deal over time: pretending that ideas of liberty are free speech and capitalism are all natural and inevitable outgrowths of Christianity, rather than contingent developments in the west as a whole, of which Christianity was a part, but not the only factor, seems resolutely ahistorical and ideological.

Um, just a wild guess, but how about “living in a country run by radical conservatives?”

I’m just saying.