[quote=Jannah]
I agree with basically everything you just said here. I have always argued that gnostic atheism is just as irrational as gnostic theism. Agnosticism in any form is typically the most rational stance since the existence or non-existence of God is not really provable.
[/quote]

Agreed. Any stance of sure knowledge on an issue which has no evidence to back up one stance or another is utterly irrational.

[quote=Magic Magnum]I had honestly just really learned the differences between Agnostic and Atheist only recently.
Before I always treated Agnostic as meaning "Believes in a God, just not any worshiped one".
And being someone who wasn't able to learn that until recently, and having spent several years in religious debates (From both sides) I felt the need to clarify since it is a term that many people have a misleading idea on.

This is all a pretty complex issue though, I grant you that.
Most likely we'll need even more terms and definitions than the LGBT community has (and they have a lot) in order to properly make sense of and understand all the different stances and such people take.

But so far what we have gathered is:

Agnostic = Unknowing
Gnostic = Certain Extreme Beliefs
Fundamentalist = All the Extreme Beliefs

If I'm understanding this right that is.[/quote]

Ah, yeah, mistaken definitions like that are kind of common, which is what I was saying in a snarky way in the first paragraph of my last post.

You've got it almost right.

Agnostic = Lacking certain knowledge; "I think so-and-so is true" is agnostic, it acknowledges that you do not know for sure if it's true.
Gnostic = Possessing certain knowledge; "So-and-so is true" is gnostic, it claims that you know for sure it's true.

These are antonyms that are directly related to one another. As I said in my last post, fundamentalism is just a certain kind of gnosticism.

Fundamentalism = Extremist stance in a wider belief, typically that every tenet is literally true and they brook no question. Expressions of fundamentalism are always gnostic statements, because fundamentalists think they are guided by infallible knowledge.

I don't see it as a spectrum on which fundamentalism could be a third point, because fundamentalism is a sub-type of gnosticism just as non-fundamental Christians who claim certain knowledge of the existence of their deity constitute another sub-type of gnosticism. The term "fundamentalism" is referring to how extreme one's beliefs are, not certainty or lack thereof of one's knowledge because it's a given that they are gnostic in their beliefs by the very nature of their beliefs. If you want to throw it into the mix, "fundamentalist" would need its own antonym to pair with it to make more labels along with the theist/atheist and gnostic/agnostic pairs, such as fundamental gnostic theist to describe those who view their holy book as literal truth. Then again, it'd be repetitive due to all fundamentalists being gnostic by nature and the likelihood that all those opposite of fundamentalists would probably be agnostic by nature. I think just using the term for those who are fundamentalists but not having a third tag to pin on non-fundamental gnostics works well enough.

We probably would need just as many labels as the LGBT community if we wanted to give one to every sub-type that exists within each of those four major quadrants of beliefs. :lol