Because, apparently, some strong atheists aren’t aware of the words antitheist and antitheism (hell, my spell-checker doesn’t know them either).
We would then have;
Theism: Someone who has an active belief in god
Atheism: Someone who has no belief in god - so called “weak atheists”', coffee cups, and babies
Antitheism: Someone who has an active disbelief in god - so called “strong atheism”
Apathiesm: Someone who is not interested in any claims about god.
(And we still haven’t run out of “theisms” there’s Misotheism, Dystheism, Maltheism, Nontheism, and any number of other "Xtheisms we may need too!)
Their are folks who think that root beer, ginger ale, and orange are types of “Coke” . . . it’s not just a regionalism, they are WRONG and misusing a word!
If agnostic means atheist then what word do we use for someone that doesn’t think we can know if a “god” exists? (Whether they believe in “god” - theistic agnosticism or not atheistic agnosticism.)
and
If agnostic means atheist then what word do we use for the strong agnostics who believe that it is impossible for humans to know whether or not any deities exist?
and
If agnostic means atheist then what word do we use for the weak agnostics who believe that the existence or nonexistence of any deities is unknown but not necessarily unknowable?
I have rarely heard this term, and never have I encountered it used in this sense. Generally antitheism refers to someone who opposes god. Googling it, it can also refer to someone who opposes organized religion, and it can also be used for strong atheism.
Given the fact that the word “agnostic” is available for someone who neither believes in God nor believes in an absence of God, I’m not sure it makes sense to commandeer “atheist” for this purpose.
Apatheism is a very useful word in this context. If we really need to describe the religious stance of babies and coffee mugs, that’s the word to use. If folks had answered my question about how many gods there are with “who gives a shit?” I had that word in my back pocket to show them :).
And that bit about people misusing the word Coke just earned you a penance of reading The Language Instinct.
I was in the best bookstore of anywhere a while back – a city block in size, 3 stories high. In the Purple room, they had 4 full aisles on religious topics. There was a section of one side of an aisle devoted to comparative religion.
So, if atheism is a religion, where is its aisle? Where even is its section of an aisle? In Portland Freaking Oregon, where religion is viewed largely as meh, if atheism was a religion, you would expect their monster of a bookstore to have a decent showing of books on it.
It has already been demonstrated that the court’s opinion was simply invoked to guarantee that atheists enjoy all the same rights and freedoms as religious people and the OP has long since been shown to be in error. So for that you offer as a counter-example that some retailer did not lump atheist works with religious ones?
Fail.
(For that matter, you should really name the bookstore so that someone can verify that your observation was correct. When I was managing a B. Dalton Bookseller some 30+ years ago, I always put the “atheist” books in the same set of shelves as the religious works–and that was following the guidelines that B. Dalton set to identify product placement. You might just have missed them; it is not as though Dawkins, Hitchens, and a few other authors have pumped out quite as many titles as the far more numerous religious and spirituality authors.)
Yup, it’s Powell’s City of Books. A quick online search on the term “atheism” pulls up 513 hits, largely in the Philosophy section, while the term “christianity” hits over 200,000 times. For what that’s worth.
One would think putting a book on atheism (a serious book, not a ‘athiest turned christian’ title) in the religous studies section would be problematic - its a fine line - almost as bad as trying to seperate science fiction from fantasy!