Sure, go ahead. And I have heard that argument made, as I mentioned, especially about the Crusades and the European colonization of the Americas.
But as I mentioned, if you do make that argument, then the counter-argument follows - that it doesn’t prove that theism is a bad thing unless the much greater number of murders committed by atheist regimes like the USSR and Cambodia and Red China and so forth proves that atheism is worse.
Sure, if you want to count them that way. It is sort of an extension of the notion that “atheists just believe in one less God than do theists”. Which is a fine point as far as it goes, it just doesn’t affect much. Atheists have the same number of religions as theists, if you want to put it that way, just that one of their religions is atheism, just as one of theists religions is theism (or some variant thereof).
I’m sure you mean “atheists do not make a positive assertion that God does not exist”. As to the logical level of the denial, that depends on what they deny. If you say, “the existence of God is unproven or unprovable”, then you are an agnostic. The “dogmatic, fundamentalist atheist” makes the positive assertion that “God does not exist - and anyone who thinks so is a deluded idiot who wants to keep women barefoot and pregnant and revoke the First Amendment and shoot abortionists” and so on and so on.
And occasionally, goes on to murder millions of people.
It’s not whether I want to count them that way. It’s your definition. I assume that you are Christian. (Correct me if I am wrong.) In your mind, is “Disbelief in Zeus” a religion in the same way that Christianity is a religion? Should it have the same currency in law? In the public sector? Would you feel the same way about a person who said “I am a Zeus denier” as you would about one who said “I am an Orthodox Jew?”
What if a child is raised by parents, say, of a mixed religion. They decide not to raise the child in any religion. He reads stories of many religions, but only as stories, and has no belief in any gods, any more than he does of Gandalf or Tom Sawyer.
Thank you, yes I did leave out a word. That’s what I get for posting in haste.
As for your following comments: no. An atheist simply states that you (people who assert the existence of god) have not proven your case that god exists, and that lacking such proof the atheist does not see any reason to follow you in your belief. An agnostic is someone who listens to both sides and can’t make up his mind, or doesn’t care enough to think about it.
As far as the “dogmatic, fundamentalist atheist” is concerned, this is completely a straw man that you have made up yourself. There may be dogmatic atheists, if that’s what you want to call those who spend time trying to convince the religious of the error of their ways (a complete waste of time, in my view), but using the word “fundamentalist” in that string of words doesn’t even make sense.
Of course, I don’t expect anything I say to convince you. Your arguments are very telling about your own insecurity when someone asserts that your belief system is illogical. Well it is illogical. You shouldn’t be forcing it on me by putting “In God We Trust” on our money. You shouldn’t be forcing on children by making them say “under god” in the pledge of allegiance. But I got over those things a long time ago. It doesn’t make your belief system any more logical that millions of people share it. If I thought it would do any good, I would be out there trying to convince people of these points. But most of them would rather have comfortable myths rather than the cold hard truth.
This fails on two levels. First, it’s a fraudulent definition of religion. Not all religions are theistic. Secondly, atheism is not “a set of beliefs about God” but the absence of any beliefs about gods. Absence of belief is not belief and belief, in itself, is not religion anyway.
Stalin and Mao killed in the service of a non-theistic religion called Communism. They did not kill in the name of atheism. This tired attempt by religionists to pretend that Communism was an “atheist” movement has never been as clever as they think it is and it’s completely irrelevant to the question of whether atheism is a religion. The fact that a functionally religious movement incorporated atheism as part of its ideology does not make atheism itself a religion.
Word to the OP, by the way. I get tired of the “atheism is a religion” canard as well. It’s the same with those who use words ike “Darwinist” or “evolutionist” as a tactic to paint scientific conclusions as merely ideological and there fore equivalent to faith beliefs. There are also some who will try to draw an epistemological equivalency between empiricism and faith (“How do you know that your sensory oservations are really true?”). It’s like they know they can’t compete on a level playing field so they try to deny that the playing field exists.
I’ve never really like the term “Brights.” I think it sounds unnecessarily smug and antagonistic (it implies that we’re the smart ones and the theists are stupid). “Freethinkers” is not quite as bad but still carries some of the same implications. “Skeptics” sounds too negative and too narrow.
Personally, I like to call myself an “empiricist.” It gets the job done without being gratuitously self-congratulatory or polemic.
Personally, I dislike the term “materialist.” It makes it sound like my goal is to accumulate wealth. Anyone who saw my checkbook register would conclude that I’m positively Franciscan.
Shodan, you bandy about the terms atheist and agnostic as if the definitions of those terms have long since been settled and set in stone. You are mistaken in that (to your credit, you are far from alone). Even atheists and agnostics can’t come to any sort of concensus on what to call themselves.
Thank you, Diogenes, you have the patience to say things on this topic much better than I. And I admire your willingness to keep plugging away at setting the record straight.
I did go on to say that many dogmatic, fundamentalist atheists enjoy ranting at those who disagree with them, which is what much of the rest of your post consists of, so give me credit for at least a bit of insight.
I’m not happy with it either. I agree that it is too “in your face” to use. As tdn says, “materialist” is also out. It makes me sound like some kind of Madonna clone. Of all the terms I’ve thought about, I’d prefer “naturalist.” Unfortunately, it makes my sound like someone in puttees and a pith helmet running through the jungle with a butterfly net.
It’s a subset of atheism, as Christianity is a subset of theism. But again, I am not sure of your point.
OK, say it is a religion. Therefore…?
What currency in law or the public sector do you think theism has? If someone wanted to get together with his friends and deny the existence of Zeus once a week, that would be fine with me. If he wanted to found a charity and feed the poor in the name of non-Zeus, I guess that would be a trifle weird, but fine with me.
If you are talking about putting “in Zeus We Don’t Trust” on the money, I would prefer taking the current motto off rather than increasing the size of our currency to that of a bedsheet listing all the gods and goddesses we don’t currently believe in.
Well, it isn’t a very descriptive term, so I am not sure how I would feel that is much different from someone who didn’t bother listing all the religions he disbelieved in. But I never met anyone who seriously worshipped Zeus, so I guess I would feel a bit more nervous about someone who announced that he didn’t consider the Greek gods real than I would an Orthodox Jew, some of whom I have met and who weren’t given to telling me that they specifically rejected Ashteroth and Ba’al.
Like I say, I never met someone who felt the need to announce that he didn’t believe in Zeus. I had a friend in college who claimed to worship the Egyptian gods, but he was a little strange anyway, so that might skew my perceptions.
I would like to point out that both of these phrases were introduced in the 1950’s under McCarthyism. “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and the national motto “E Pluribus Unum” [out of many, one] was changed to “In God We Trust” in 1956. cite
People and organizations involved with removing these specific god references from what are supposed to be secular arenas are simply trying to reverse decisions that were made during the hysteria of the “red scare.” It’s not an atheist movement. Our constitution clearly tried to separate church and state, and anyone that doesn’t want our government to endorse a Judeo-Christian worldview would want these god references removed, not just atheists.
There are no subsets to atheism unless you want to count “weak” and “strong” atheism as subsets. All atheists lack belief in all gods. Lack of belief in Zeus is not a sub-category of atheism, it’s encompassed by the definition. All atheists necessarily lack a belief in the existence of Zeus or their not atheists. Anything which applies necessarily and definitionally to an entire set cannot be called a subset.
It’s not a subset of atheism. ALL atheists disbelieve in Zeus, as do most theists. Atheism is a subset of “A-Zeusism”. Christianity is also a subset of “A-Zeusism”. “A-Zeusism” as a “religion” is CLEARLY a far more universal creed than Islam or Christianity. :rolleyes:
