Theism is the belief that at least one deity exists, Atheism is the belief that there are no gods. If you have a religion without a strict deity (say, Buddhism, where it has heaps of supernatural and spiritual elements, but doesn’t define the Buddhas as deities, except by proxy and syncretism through Hindu and Shinto), then you can be a religious atheist. This is in technical terms though, atheist in popular parlance is more of a synonym for “irreligious” or “skeptic” just like “agnostic” is a synonym for “not positively atheist or theist” even though the terms are symbiotic and not at all mutually exclusive. Just like atheists can believe in ghosts, they may not believe gods exist, but they CAN believe that somehow people can stick around after death, just like a Christian can not believe in ghosts. Nothing is stopping them, it’s just that all these definitions sort of get lumped together due to (what I assume is) low correlation between atheism and belief in other supernatural phenomena.
One does not need to believe that there are no gods to be an atheist; all that is required is the lack of any belief that there are.
Sounds reasonable.
Also, most religions in the West do in fact either require a belief in a god, or are strongly correlated with a belief in a god, so one could be forgiven for using the terms “atheism” and “religion” as incompatible in common parlance. It is only on more careful analysis that it becomes clear that they are not.
Sorry, that’s what I meant, slip of the… fingers. I knew there was something off about the way I was phrasing it. Though I suppose it also depends whether or not your default definition of atheist is strong or weak.
I’m pretty sure Greek atheists have very similar ethics as Christian Greeks. The ethics rules one follows are determined mostly by the culture in which you were brought up, and you keep most of them even if you reject the religion of the majority of the people in your culture.
So, I would attribute the ethics specific to the Greek people to be a product of that culture.
Unless you want to claim that all the rules in that culture come from the religion (Christianity), and therefore atheists who follow those rules are religious (Christian).
-XT
Yeah, I used to be an adherent of “Atheist Buddhism is my religion”, now, I don’t know, I’m veering away from calling Buddhism, as I practice it, a religion at all. So I guess yeah, I think religion has to have *some *supernatural/transcendant element in it *somewhere *to be really a religion for me. Doesn’t mean I think atheism itself is incompatible with religion, but broader physicalims/materialism/falsificationism kind of is.
But what about Buddhism?
What makes you think that there is a unified, coherent and comprehensive concept denominated by the word religion? That’s not how language works. I’ll make you a deal. Define salad in a way that includes garden salad, tuna salad, taco salad, German potato salad, Jello salad, fruit salad, and pasta salad, but excludes tuna casserole, nachos, ice cream sundaes, and salsa. If you do, I promise to define religion in a way that includes Shintoism, Presbyterianism, Unitarianism, Catholicism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, tribal animism, Norse paganism, Reconstructionist Judaism, Wahabbi Islam, and Zoroastrianism, but excludes Nazism, pragmatism, liberalism, humanism, consumerism, patriotism, and Star Trek.
For the record, I was a theistic Christian at one time without holding any supernatural beliefs. I believed that God was an abstract concept akin to goodness, that the stories of Jesus were semi-historical myths, that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were fictions, that it was reasonable and appropriate to ritually organize one’s life and morality around those myths regardless of their historical truth, that it was morally good to live one’s life as if they were true, that Christian prayer would benefit one through psychological and other naturalistic means, that Jesus and God as presented in the Bible were the appropriate recipients of prayer, that receiving Communion put one in a psychological state conducive to moral goodness, et cetera. Eventually I realized that these beliefs were unfounded and in many ways internally inconsistent, but while I held them I was active in the Methodist church and attended seminary with the intention of becoming a minister, and no one ever told me I wasn’t a Christian or didn’t belong in ministry because of these beliefs.
Sure, just because it’s hard to come up with a definition of ‘salad’ that covers all types of salad, let’s just accept anything as religion, and while we’re at it, let’s accept anyone’s self-identification.
For example, I’m a vegetarian, even though I eat beef, pork, chicken, and lamb. No one from my friends ever told me I’m not a vegetarian or that I shouldn’t claim to be a vegetarian just because of my habit of eating meat. That surely is proof that I am a vegetarian.
Sorry, Polaris, but you’re falling victim to the fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because there isn’t a single definition of religion (or salad) that covers all its referents, doesn’t mean that words have no meaning and anything goes. The alternative is that there is a “family resemblance” among the things that a word refers to: a set of traits that typify members of a class, but that may be found together in only some or even none of the members of the class and may also be found outside the class.
IOW, we don’t have a clearcut definition of “salad” because one doesn’t exist. We don’t look at a food and match it to a definition to see what it’s called. Instead we compare it to existing foods and see what category it has the most in common with. (Taking into account as well numberless other factors such as convenience, marketing, culture, fashion, whim, etc.)
Likewise, we can say that most religions have an elements of supernatural belief, worship, ritual, common gathering, meditation, and morality, or we can point to the things that are commonly considered religions and say “Religion is what those things are, and those other things are not. If you want to know if X is a religion, see what category it fits in best.” What we cannot do is come up with a list of traits that all religions have and that no non-religions have, because that doesn’t exist.
And WRT your vegetarian thing, let me remind you that I was in the process of being ordained. That means that the groups responsible for defining and maintaining the doctrine of the United Methodist Church were busy examining me to determine whether I conformed to those doctrines to such a degree that I might be officially invited to join those groups myself and be tasked with teaching and examining others. If you were invited to membership in the Vegetarian Council and tasked with promoting and maintaining vegetarianism due to your exemplification of the ideals of Vegetarianism, while openly and publicly eating meat, I might be forced to consider that “vegetarianism” might mean something other than what I thought.
Not really. I was using a little concept called “hyperbole”.
I agree that some concepts don’t have hard-and-fast rules about what belongs under that category and what doesn’t.
But just because some concepts don’t have hard-and-fast rules, doesn’t mean that no concepts have hard-and-fast rules.
Being a vegetarian is one such concept. If you eat meat, you are not a vegetarian, period.
Being pregnant is another one. If you don’t have a live fetus growing inside you, you are not pregnant, period.
And I think a similar thing applies to religion. If it doesn’t involve some supernatural explanation of how the world works, it’s not a religion. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, it’s just that it’s not a religion, it’s something else. It’s a club, a culture, a fraternal organization, a philosophy, a life manual, etc.
Even if I was the best promoter of vegetarianism in the world, and the Vegetarian Council hired me and benefited from my skills, if I ate meat I would not be a vegetarian. Some things (not everything) are black and white.
It is important to remember that the term atheist was not a creation of the irreligious as a self defining label it was placed on them by Theists.
It comes from the greek word atheos which is roughly “godless”
There have been attempts to clarify by breaking atheists into more groups.
I am most familiar with the terms Positive Atheist and Negative Atheist.
Richard Dawkins would be a Positive Atheist because he explicitly states that there is no god.
The term “negative atheist” covers those who either just do not claim a belief in gods or have beliefs that do not include gods. Several types of Buddhists would be in this bucket.
Some non-theists have chosen to self identify as “atheists” in a way as other groups have with the various pejorative terms placed on them by others.
To clarify a little further:
I’ve thought about starting a thread on my experiences in seminary, but I never have. I might as well expound on them here.
In order to be ordained, I was expected to be able to affirm, honestly and sincerely, my belief in the doctrines of the United Methodist Church, including the Nicene and Apostles Creeds, the Wesleyan “Articles of Religion,” etc. I was expected to discuss them at length and to demonstrate my honesty and sincerity in affirming them. I was quite free to state publicly and privately, both in the course of these examinations and outside them, that what I meant when I affirmed these various doctrines and creeds was not what the plain meaning of the words would imply. I was free to advocate for my interpretation of them and (within limits) to disparage other interpretations. As a lay person, these freedoms were virtually unlimited. If I wanted to be ordained, I had to convince the requisite proportion of members of various committees that my understanding of the meaning was reasonable, even if not correct, and that I was otherwise well suited for ministry.
Lots of people at all levels of authority within the UMC expressed similar beliefs. I was probably on the fringe in terms of my insistance on naturalism, but I was hardly the most liberal in my willingness to reinterpret the meaning of the traditional affirmations, and none of my specific beliefs was in any way outside the theological mainstream. If anything, I was less willing than many to dismiss or modify the traditional understanding of most of the formulas. I had plenty of friends at seminary who were more liberal than I was.
I eventually realized that a lot of my interpretations were so at odds with the plain meaning of the words, that I was deceiving myself in saying that I was honestly affirming them. And as I said, I was hardly the most extreme in my willingness to interpret the words loosely. I ended up deciding that if the meaning of the various affirmations wasn’t what mattered, then the words couldn’t matter either, and in fact, therefore, nothing about them mattered. (The counterargument would be that the shared process of discerning the meaning and the shared commitment to live out that meaning honestly was what mattered.)
There was little question in seminary that things like the existence of God could be understood symbolically. (Though I began to question whether I was really a Christian when a professor mentioned in a lecture that many stories in the Bible needed to be understood non-historically “…but not the Resurrection. That’s crucial.”) There was a lot of debate about whether doing so was wise, appropriate, honest, or correct, but almost no argument about whether it should be permitted, or whether doing so made one apostate. (Nearly anyone who felt that way would have joined another denomination–and there were many such denominations represented at the seminary.)
I was pretty vocal about deciding that I could no longer honestly say I believed in God (at which point I withdrew from candidacy for ordination, but continued taking classes). Even then, almost no one seemed inclined to judge. They simply counseled patience and and open mind while I decided what that meant for me. After about a year of being “out” as an atheist, while continuing to search for some way of reconciling my naturalistic tendencies with the demands of religion, a fellow student finally suggested to me that I belonged somewhere other than seminary.
I stopped questioning and accepted my atheism when I realized that I was silly to spend so much energy trying to make the meanings I wanted fit the words that were given to me. I realized that no one goes through such contortions to make the Democratic platform, for example, mean something they agree with–they just join another political party. It hit home for me when after more than two years of struggling, I finally read a book by a liberal theologian who both outlined a theology compatible with naturalism and made a convincing case that it was fair to call that theology Christian. (It had been easy to find theologians who could do one and attempt the other, but not who succeeded at both.) “That’s wonderful,” I thought. “Finally I can say honestly that I’m a Christian! That means. . . .” What? Did it change what I really believed? Did it give me special moral insights? Did it make me more honest in saying I believe in God when I knew that the person hearing me would think I meant something totally different than what I meant, just because I finally had a complex and not terribly compelling but totally consistant way of showing that I really did mean something?
No. It didn’t do any of those things. And if I decided that I didn’t want to say I believed in God anymore, and didn’t want to call myself a Christian anymore, it didn’t make any difference to my life whatsoever, except that I wouldn’t be ordained, something I’d given up on long before.
Even then, I coud have been a Unitarian. Plenty of Unitarians are avowed and outspoken atheists. But I couldn’t see the appeal. I’d already decided that if there was no shared meaning behind the words and rituals, the words and rituals themselves are empty.
You think that’s what “religion” should mean, or you think that’s what it does mean? Because I can find plenty of cites for people using the word “religion” to refer to systems of belief that lack any reference to the supernatural.
Again, that’s not quite the same thing. If being trained for ministry by a major, mainstream denomination of Christianity and being explicitly told that my belief system was compatible with that religion and that I was a member of the church and suitable for ordination doesn’t show that I was a Christian, I don’t know what would.
It is clear that you think this is what religion ought to mean, but it is also clear that this is not how it is always used, as there are numerous counter-examples, such as Buddhism, Taoism, some forms of Judaism, some forms of Christianity, etc.
So far, you have advanced no arguments in favour of your interpretation, other than assertion.
And no, I do not think that Greek atheists and Greek Orthodox Christians share the same set of ethics, derived simply from being Greek! 
My atheist Greek secretary’s personal life is a source of dismay for her Greek Orthodox parents, to give a cogent example of a clash of ethics …
An organized system with the goals of a) accumulation of wealth and b) achieving power and control over the adherents to the religion. These goals are accomplished by exploiting the human fear of death.
A system of philosophies shared by a subculture.
What are you basing this assertion on other than “the way you think the world should work”?
Malthus:
Is that true? Do all denominations that call themselves some variant of “Jewish” agree on what ethical values are important, which myths are significant (let’s say for now that the use of the word “myth” does not preclude a belief that the story in question is true), and what the lifestyle includes?
How are you defining supernatural? Just because something happens and we do not have a cast-iron scientific explanation for it doesn’t mean it’s a supernatural event. Evolution, anyone?