I seek a better title for my kind.you see, “atheist” is not an independent word, it concedes the presence of theism, almost thereby offering it validation. “Agnostic” is in a similar boat, though that is generally a term of concession (“I do not reject out-of-hand the possible existence of a deity”).
“Absurdist” is a pretty good one, but again, it rests on the fact of the absurdity of the pursuit of meaning in a meaningless universe, so, again, it becomes a negative.
The best I have been able to come up with so far is “Stoic”, which is a nice word that expresses a sort of absolute indifference to metaphysics and has the added advantage of being, in English at least, both a noun and an adjective (just like “agnostic”). There is some questionable baggage related to determinism, but placed into a modern context, stoicism seems like the best way to describe the broadest range of non-believers in a way that evades the negative connotations of atheism this culture carries forth. The baggage of determinism might just drop away (there would be a silent “neo-” prefix, just as with modern pagans).
Could there be any traction for this to catch on? If not, might there be some other word that could supplant “atheist”, leaving its baggage behind?
(As there may ultimately be no actual religious debate in this thread, it might get moved to IMHO.)
Well, since you’re essentially denouncing religion, I don’t think you can really do it without acknowledging it to begin with.
If it’s any help, I’ve very rarely called myself an ‘atheist’ when talking to people. I usually just say I’m ‘not religious’. Oddly, I choose to use that phrase because I think it’s easier for others to hear. I feel that, to them, ‘not religious’ means ‘oh, he doesn’t go to church’ or he must just be a non-practicing Christian. Frankly, I don’t really care what they think it means as long as the conversation goes elsewhere at that point. But, the phrase might work for you since ‘not religious’ doesn’t really mean that you deny the existence of a deity, it just means “religion? yeah, what about it” or “Religion? so what?” But that’s kind of my attitude, I really just don’t care one way or the other about it. Technically, I am an atheist, but I guess I’m a ‘non practicing atheist’ or better yet, to refer to another thread, I’m a non-arrogant atheist. If you’re religious, that’s fine, I’m not going to tell you what to or not to believe in and hopefully you’ll give me the same respect.
Anyways, I’m going to go with ‘non-religious’. It kinda puts the right spin on your stoic word.
I’ve read threads before where people look for a better word than atheist to describe the absence of belief in deities and I’ve never witnessed anyone come up with a better word. The word works perfectly.
You say you’re not too happy with agnostic or atheist, because they’re both tied to denying or questioning the existence of a deity. Darn that Heisenberg…
You also don’t really say what you are, or what your beliefs are, or what they’re based on. For me, Stoic sounds kind of boring.
I’m an agnatheist, I’m not sure whether or not I don’t believe in a deity. But that’s only when I’m not a Last Thursdayist. I’m beginning to think that one’s wrong too, and the universe was actually created Next Thursday. I’ll let you know if I’m right in a week or so.
Now that I’ve given it more thought, I think you’re backing yourself into a corner that doesn’t exist.
You’re making this over complicated.
It’s like if I tell you that I have brown hair and you say you don’t believe me, that’s really as far as you have to go with it. You don’t have to come up with a new word for it because you feel that saying you don’t believe me means you actually do believe me a little bit. In fact, writing that out makes me think two things.
1)A new word is just that, it’s going to be a new word that means Atheist. BFD.
2)It sounds like you’re questioning your atheism, or at least might be having some doubts and looking for a way to over compensate by going even farther the other way. Maybe agnostic is the word your looking for.
Either that or your just being insulting to the people that do believe by going out of your way to not give any merit to their belief system. But keep in mind, whatever word your come up with, will still mean ‘atheist’ and you’ll have to explain it as such each time it comes up in conversation.
hominostic from homin (latin for human) and gnosis (greek for knowledge) - a believer in only what is humanly knowable (in the sense of what is immediately knowable via reason and the senses)
I consider myself ignostic, which is basically saying the whole concept of “god” doesn’t really make any sense, so how the heck could I have an opinion on it? Does god exist? What is god? What do these words even mean? How am I supposed to know?
That almost sound (IM very HO) like agnosticism. Like, if you don’t have your mind made up, you’re agnostic. But if you get into ‘what is god’ or ‘what do these words even mean’ then (again, to me) you’re looking for a ‘man made’ definition, so to speak, and if god is a man made thing, you’d be atheist and there would be a question.
Looking at wiki for ignostic, a term I hadn’t heard before, it seems that this view on ignostic is one of the popular views of it. Yours being the other.
The thing that I always find funny is that, assuming there’s no god, at some point, thousands of years ago, someone, somewhere…made it up. Maybe it was a philosopher pondering the mysteries of the universe, maybe it was a parent telling their kid where dead grandparents went or maybe it was just someone making shit up and it went viral. Ya know, like how you can unlock a car door with a tennis ball cut in half and for the rest of time there will always be that little bit of doubt in everyone’s* minds (one way or the other).
“Frankly, I had not even described myself as an atheist, but I suppose I am one. I don’t live my life under the assumption there is a god, so I guess that makes me an atheist. Atheist. Non-theist. But I like the word ‘naturalist’ more. To me, the word atheist describes me on religious turf. I believe in a wholly natural universe and that makes religious people, in my mind, anaturalists.” Julia Sweeney.
Technically, I am an atheist but technically I’m also an agnomist and an anunicornist and an adwarfist. I don’t spend a lot of time defining myself by what I am not.
In those days, there was enough lack of knowledge that a deity was an almost intractable necessity in philosophy. It is not obvious that the classical stoics were ascribing some sort of lifeform quality, will or agenda to the universe/god.
The more I learn about stoicism, the more appropriate it seems to me as a way to describe the broader “leave me the fuck alone with your god-droppings” class of unbelievers.
I was going to mention that there are other aspects of Stoicism that may or may not be - suitable, desirable, etc. The one I was going to highlight related to emotions. I always thought of Stoicism as striving to be emotionless, to be free of both positive and negative emotion. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to agree with me though. In particular the quote from Epictetus below
So at this point, IDK. I’ll just share that and trundle off.
Contemporary English uses “stoic” and its derivatives to mean emotionless, because stoicism is not recognized as a modern discipline/ethos/whatever. It looks to me like stoicism was evolving somewhat in those days, so there is no reason it should not be seen as continuing to do so, to the point that it is in concert with the broader spectrum modern unbelief. In fact, it is religion that clings unchangingly to outdated, outmoded thought patterns, stoicism as a synonym for unbelief would be not-religion in that respect, as it never really was much like religion in the first place.
I think what is perceived as lack of emotion would more correctly be described with the word “sanguine”. The universe will do what it does to us, we need to just pick up the pieces and get on. Viewed from a modern context, emotion is a natural consequence of existence, a true stoic would embrace it, feel it, express it, because suppressing emotion is considered not to be good for your health.
IDK if you’re interested, or maybe these are too entry level for you - if so, just ignore. But I did a search on Amazon under philosophy for stoics and sorted by user rating and at the top of the list was what I thought was an oddly titled book “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.” Although now i see, maybe not so odd.
I also thought it was interesting that the next 3 top picks were by Marcus Aurelius.
edit: ok, not “by” exactly, at least not all of them
It’s not that my mind isn’t made up- that would imply there is some meaningful concept that I haven’t picked a side for. . It’s that I don’t know what the question means. When people say “Is there a God,” I hear something like “is there a deciduous blue?” The words are there, but they don’t seem to actually mean anything coherent.
I like this definition from theological non-cognitism (which is closely related, if not the same thing):
God doesn’t refer to anything that exists
God doesn’t refer to anything that does not exist
God doesn’t refer to anything that may or may not exist
God does not have literal significance, in the same way that “fod” does not have any literal significance.
Every one of the (many, inconstantly applied, vastly different from each other) definitions of “God” that I’ve heard either rely heavily on indefinable attributes, or are so vague as to be meaningless. I just don’t see enough here to really talk about it in any real way.