This is one of the best observations in this thread.
Atheism is absence of theism. Theism is a belief, so if you don’t have that belief, you are an atheist. There are surely different reasons why one doesn’t have that belief, ranging from rigid skepticism to indifference; some of those reasons are incompatible* with other types of beliefs that are similar to theism, like ghosts, or esp, or fairies in the garden. Others are not.
*“Incompatible” in the sense of being inconsistent, but of course humans are perfectly capable of being inconsistent on any set of topics at any time.
That is the literal definition, but in reality there are Agnostics, Unitarian Universalism, and certain branches of Buddhism and Jainism. All of whom are neither,
Yeah, that’s kind of mixing things up. Atheism/theism is just one question: do you believe in a god or not. That’s it.
Agnosticism isn’t a third category outside of that. It’s more about whether you think you can know for sure. So you can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist.
And stuff like Unitarian Universalism or Buddhism doesn’t really change that either. Those are religions/philosophies, not answers to the specific “do you believe in a god?” question. Some people in those groups believe in God, some don’t, so they still land somewhere on the theist/atheist line individually.
Things like ignosticism or theological noncognitivism are mostly about the language problem - basically saying the word “God” isn’t clearly defined or isn’t coherent enough to work with in a meaningful way. So it’s less about taking a different stance on belief and more about questioning whether the concept is even well-specified in the first place.
That doesn’t create a third category outside of theism and atheism. Theism and atheism are just about whether someone holds a belief in a god or not. Once you’re talking about belief states, people still end up in one of those two buckets - either they hold that belief or they don’t.
Those “third positions” are more about how someone is defining or interpreting the term “God,” rather than a separate category of belief outside the theism/atheism split.
Another option yet is nontheism; the stance that theism is irrelevant. This is different to atheism, in that the existence of a god or gods is possible, but the fact of that existence has no consequence. In other words, the existence of god is irrelevant to the human condition.
If God, a god or gods exist, they have no effect on human experience and have no consequence for morals and ethics on a human level.
What meanings “out in society” are very different from what I claimed?
Regardless, I’m responding to someone that claimed that those are the literal definitions yet also claimed Agnostics, Unitarian Universalism, and certain branches of Buddhism and Jainism are neither. So I’m responding to someone that has their own simplistic definition, no? Why not tell that person what you told me? How would it be appropriate to respond in your eyes without denying other definitions out in society to someone claiming Unitarian Universalists are neither atheists or theists?
I know I’ve written about this already, but for what it’s worth I think it’s a tactical mistake to concede the language that’s “out there” that was designed in bad faith to straw man people. You’re letting them win that battle by just accepting the “common use” of atheist – which itself is more complicated than it sounds because people use different incorrect definitions for it.
That’s also relevant the topic at hand because including “skeptical materialist” as being implicit in the term atheist, which it is not, is part of the confusion the OP was detailing.
When I started discussing atheism on line, before even Usenet, it was fairly common for theists to claim that atheism was clearly wrong because we didn’t disprove the existence of all gods. Their definition was atheism was the claim to know that no gods exist.
That strawman is rare these days, but forcing atheism into the stance that we must actively believe there are no gods is equally as invalid. Why am I supposed to actively believe that there is no god living in a teapot circling a planet three galaxies away? Lack of belief does much better.
The problem with ignosticism is that your average theist will indeed have a definition of a god - which is different from that of most other theists. Or deists. Having no gods to point to or study the fuzziness of god definitions is to be expected.
It is fairly common these days for an atheist beginning a discussion with a theist to ask which god they believe in. That saves lots of fruitless discussion.
And their answer is “vague deist god when it’s rhetorically convenient, and the dominant God of my culture when I want to push an agenda, and I pretend those are the same thing when it’s to my advantage”
You are correct, though, to make them define the God up front to avoid that exact sort of rhetorical trick.
On atheism, I think we’re actually on the same page - you’re basically saying the old “atheism = claiming no gods exist” definition is a strawman, and the more accurate one is lack of belief. That’s exactly how I’m using it.
On the ignosticism part, I’m not saying it doesn’t come up in real conversations or that people don’t have different definitions of God. I just don’t see that as creating a separate category outside of the belief question. It feels more like a step you sometimes take before you even get to the belief question like, “okay, what are we even talking about when you say God?”
Once that’s cleared up, you’re still basically back to the same thing: either someone accepts that defined idea or they don’t.
In my experience a lot of people use agnosticism to escape the bad connotations of the word “atheism” in the minds of many. It is harder for a believer to be mad at someone who is just unsure. But you either believe in a god or don’t, so agnosticism is orthogonal to atheism.
I’m not even sure about the definition of agnosticism. Does it mean we don’t currently know - reasonable - or that it is impossible to know. It is certainly impossible to know that no gods exist, since some are unfalsifiable by definition, but I think it is possible to know that a particular god exists. At least as we know anything.
I read a lot of Catholic media (not out of affiliation, but interest), and I noticed that clerics use to talk about “agnostics” when they really mean “atheists”, like the a-word is a dirty one and it’s unthinkable that someone like an atheist can even exist.
