That God is the only saviour, but since he doesn’t exist we are all screwed.
Irony?
It sounds like an odd form of nihilism. Or a joke. Can you give us some more context for this belief? (That is, who mentioned it to you (assuming you didn’t just make it up) and whether they seemed serious at the time.)
That’s all they said. I think he went from not believing in God and hating Christians to thinking “Gee, it’d be nice if there actually was a God, too bad huh.” I wonder if I’m not going along the same path (minus the Christian-hating) which is why I asked. If I do actually end up like that in a few years’ time I’d like a label for it please.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by “screwed”, and what it is that God could save you from, if He did exist. If you mean something like “when you’re dead, it’s all over” then it’s atheism. If you mean “life has no purpose, no meaning”, then it’s nihilism.
I don’t know how I would characterize a belief that everyone is going to Hell - that an afterlife exists, that it’s a place of torment and suffering, that everyone has to undergo it, and that there’s no possible escape. There are quite a few conceptions of the next world as a rather boring existence as a disembodied spirit with nothing much to do (Hades, Sheol, Niflheim), but those mythologies which adopt that view still have an escape route for the most virtuous, and the normal existence in such a land of the dead can’t really be described as damnation.
I’m thinking most people would call him an atheist and be done with it.
*Merriam-Webster defines atheism:
*“1 archaic : UNGODLINESS, WICKEDNESS
*2 a : a disbelief in the existence of deity b : the doctrine that there is no deity”
*http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/atheism
The definition doesn’t care whether or not you think Og would be spiffy if he did exist, just whether or not you believe in Og(s).
There may be some term for this specific to academics in the fields of comparative religion, sociology of religion or psychology of religion. It wasn’t mentioned in the undergraduate sociology of religion textbook I read circa 1997.
If I were to make something up of conventional terms, I’d go with “regretful atheism”.
For the bling, I’d call it “fo’ shizzle mizzing the bigbizzle atheizzle”.
The positive belief that God does not exist is atheistic, period., but I have to wonder what is meant by “saviour” and “screwed.” What do we need to be “saved” from if God does not exist?
I wonder what you have to be “saved” from if you think gods do exist. Do gods imply saving? From what, the gods’ own whiles? That kind of logic is why there are atheist.
This reminds me of the purported Deist prayer.
“May God, if there is one, save my soul, if I have one.”
I don’t know, that’s the thing. I’ll ask. For me it means being saved from being human.
Sounds as though you might want to check out Buddhism. No need for a personal God down that path. 
The sentence “God is the only saviour, but since he doesn’t exist we are all screwed” is simply inconsistent. First if you assert a sentence like “x is true, and y is true” or “x is true, but y is true” you’re asserting in either case both the proposition “x is true” and the proposition “y is true.” So let’s go through each of the propositions “God is the only saviour” and “Since he [God] doesn’t exist, we are all screwed” and see what each of them asserts (or at least presupposes).
O.K., the sentence “God is the only saviour” has a presupposition. A presupposition is a statement that a sentence isn’t exactly asserting, but the sentence doesn’t even start to make sense if the presupposition isn’t true. In this sentence, it is presupposed that God exists. If God doesn’t exist, the sentence isn’t making a statement about anything. So this sentence presupposes the proposition “God exists” and it asserts the proposition “God is the only saviour”.
The sentence “Since he [God] doesn’t exist, we are all screwed” also has a presupposition. The presupposition is “God doesn’t exist”. It has an assertion. The assertion is “If God doesn’t exist, then we are all screwed.”
So then the whole sentence you give has the presuppositions “God exists” and “God doesn’t exist.” It has the assertions “God is the only saviour” and “If God doesn’t exist, then we are all screwed.” The two presuppositions are contradictory, so the statement doesn’t make any sense. It’s not necessary to go on to try to figure out what a saviour is, whether God is the only saviour, whether we are all screwed if there is no saviour, or anything else. Just from the fact that the two presuppositions of the sentence are contradictory, we can say that the sentence makes no sense.
Although the position is logically inconsistent, I propose we call it “apocalyptic atheism.”
A close belief is that of predestination, where the unswcrewed people are chosen in advance, and the rest of us can just sod off in Hell.
I would disagree with the posters who say the position is logically inconsistent. Compare the argument:
The only way to live forever is to drink dragon’s blood.
Dragons don’t exist.
Therefore, nobody can live forever.
The first premise may not be true, but the argument is still valid and logically consistent.
Tevildo writes:
> The first premise may not be true, but the argument is still valid and logically
> consistent.
This isn’t a comparable example. It’s possible to imagine a consistent world in which dragons exist and drinking them causes one to live forever. It’s not possible to image a consistent world in which God exists and God doesn’t exist. The sentence “God is the only saviour, but since he doesn’t exist we are all screwed” has problems not because it is or isn’t true in our world, but because it can’t be true in any consistent world.
I wrote:
> . . . possible to image a consistent world . . .
I meant:
> . . . possible to imagine a consistent world . . .
I would disagree with your argument that “God is the only saviour” implies “God exists” - I would also consider “exists” to be a genunie predicate, although I know many philosophers disagree with this. That being said, I think we can rephrase the argument to make it consistent with your system:
- In any world where salvation is possible, God is the agent of salvation.
- God does not exist in this world.
- Therefore, this world is not a world in which salvation is possible.
A-hem. s/genunie/genuine.
Telvido writes:
> I would disagree with your argument that “God is the only saviour” implies "God
> exists . . .
My claim was that it presupposes that God exist, not that it asserts it.
> 1. In any world where salvation is possible, God is the agent of salvation.
> 2. God does not exist in this world.
> 3. Therefore, this world is not a world in which salvation is possible.
This is a major re-write of the statement in the OP, but’s it’s probably as close as you can get to restating it in a way that makes it not logically inconsistent. There’s still something funny in statement 1. This makes it sound like someone has defined the concept of salvation without first having to define God. They then work out that salvation only comes from God. Why would someone even talk about salvation if they hadn’t decided whether God exists?