[hnnewguy]

>These people should just suck it up and call themselves atheists.

Boy, look at you telling people what and how they should believe.

I'm agnostic because I don't know if there exists a God, and couldn't care less when it comes to the day to day affairs of my life.

[gfodor]

Right, so what you're saying is you're an atheist. It's okay. There are a lot of us.

I don't know if there is a teapot orbiting the Earth, but I wouldn't invent weasel words to distinguish between subtle groups of people who have varied opinions around the likely absence of said teapot. Especially not if most of the population believed strongly in the existence of said teapot.

edit: Also I'm not telling anyone how to believe, I'm just saying that people using the term agnostic as some way to contrast themselves with atheists either don't understand the term atheist, have an aversion to it or fear of using it to label themselves, or have some unsettled self-reflection to do on their existence because they secretly believe in a God but don't want to admit it. When you say you're an atheist you are saying you do not share the belief in God that most of the human population does. It's pretty simple.

[gliese1337]

Teapotism doesn't have significant cultural importance. Atheism does. To a lot of people, it really does make a difference whether you actually disbelieve in the god they believe in, or if you are genuinely undecided. It is thus useful to have a word to distinguish between those two states, and perfectly honest (hardly weasely) to use them. Even if its only for social signalling, that's important!

[gfodor]

I would guess most atheists would not say that they are certain a God does not exist. They certainly wouldn't say they can prove it to be the case. The path that leads you to atheism is the lack of evidence in favor of an unfalsifiable claim, that God exists. So the claim "God does not exist" is kind of meaningless, since it relies upon the definition of God, which is something atheists do not have a definition for since they do not have a belief about what that word means.

[Rooster61]

Speaking of weasel words, you use the word definition in place of concept. Atheists do have a concept of God. Otherwise the argument of what an atheist is would not only be moot but would in fact never arise as an argument.

[zaccus]

How can you be certain that 0 times any other number will always equal 0? Have you tried multiplying it against every number? Of course not, that's impossible. Does that count as uncertainty?

So I'll put it this way: I am as certain that there is no God (narrowly defined as an omnipotent being) as I am that 0 times any other number will always equal 0. The reason is because omnipotence is a logically inconsistent concept, and is thus impossible. That's as certain as I can be about anything.

[ryandvm]

I think most of us agnostics are simply identifying as such to avoid being associated with the pompous breed of atheists that the Internet's pseudo-anonymity has brought out of the woodwork.