My God!

He had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictably changing their meanings without any pattern ... And this had been a very short word."

Valentine Michael Smith, in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, on God.

I can't decide whether I'm an atheist or agnostic. You might think that uncertainty on the issue would drop me by default into the agnostic category - after all, I don't know, which is what the word agnostic comes from. But the problem is, I don't know what to think, because I don't know what I mean by "god". I do not believe in the existence of some higher sentient being who created the Universe. Other than jokes about the Universe's sense of irony, I don't believe in any "plan" to the world. I don't believe things happen for any specific overarching reason. In short, I disbelieve the existence of the most common perceptions of the word "god". The uncertainty arises, however, from a feeling that someone could conceivably come up with a broader sense of the word, with which I could agree.

The word "god" gets thrown around so much, so that no one knows what it means any more. I think (hope?) it's clear that no one literally believes in the whole bearded wise-old-man in the clouds idea, but I would contend that that image clouds our perceptions to the extent where we can't discuss the idea of "god" without mentally coming back to it to some extent. Courtesy of Christianity, many people now equate God with the idea of a Heaven, Hell, and some form of cosmic judgment. God means completely different things to different people, and yet you can still hear unqualified statements about god or believing in god, without any clarification of what they mean.

Indeed, some people even seem content to make this confusion and vagueness explicit! Arguing with my mom over the existence of some kind of soul or spirit, I got at least 4 distinct impressions of what she meant by the term "soul", and not even anything coherent enough to be worth quoting. But nonetheless she maintained she believed strongly in it, whatever it was. I don't mean to pick on her; I think a lot of people do this, and she's just a convenient example. I understand and agree that faith is, well, faith, and largely outside the realm of logic. But isn't it reasonable to at least have an idea of what you're believing in?