There are some people that like to claim the lack of belief, or absence of belief, definition of atheism is the most common one. I contest that, whilst it is common on social media due to political parties like the American Atheists and American YouTube shows like The Atheist Experience, it isn’t that common outside of the internet and certain circles in America. Ways to Discuss Atheism Atheism is polysemous. That means there are many definitions. With the way language…
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It’s come to my attention in the last year or so, that many are conflating the classical/philosophical definition of atheism with antitheism (sometimes spelt anti-theism). Regardless of your preferred use of atheism and atheist, over the centuries and still today atheism is the belief/proposition/claim there are no gods, with the atheist accepting (believing) this is true. There are other definitions, of course, Flew famously tried changing the definition in 72 to ignore the agnostic label for a “positive atheist” –…
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One of the common objections I hear from both theists and atheists about the distinction of the various ontological positions held by non-theists is that they all live as atheists, so they may as well be regarded as one anyway. In fact, when I was writing Etymology vs Use/Definition: Atheism there were some that used atheist in a derogatory way in regards to theists that were immoral, or didn’t act in accordance with the bible. They were regarded as ‘practical…
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Etymology is the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history. The etymology of a word is not exactly the same as the use or definition. Consider how a direct translation of a phrase from French to English might not always make sense, but we would translate it into a form of English that did make sense. The same can be said for the etymology of a word. They quite often…
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It is very common to hear folks use the term agnostic atheist to describe themselves, and others. Let me say that you are free to identify how you like, though I would suggest you don’t be prescriptive with your identification on to others. If you wonder why; consider if you are the sort to tell others what their gender is. Yes, gender is a more sensitive topic, but we are speaking about identity here. That said, I think it is…
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I’ve been trying to think of another way to explain beliefs as I still hear folks saying they are ‘absent of belief in regards to x’ or ‘have no beliefs’. Whilst I am sure they believe what they are saying, it makes me feel I have failed in my explanations. Rather than spray out the propositional logic or all the different definitions of a belief, I started thinking about how something like this might be represented in a database, perhaps…
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Introduction When it comes to asking questions about atheism, there are many malformed questions that the theist may put forward. Anyone who has been an atheist and active on any social media platform will have come across such questions. Those questions that make us kind of tilt our heads and go ‘huh?’. Two of those questions that often make some atheists go ‘huh?’ are ‘If atheism is true…?’ and ‘Can you prove atheism?’. When these two questions are posed by…
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Introduction An argument that I often hear is that ‘lack of belief in God’ and ‘do not believe God exists’ are the same thing. Or the argument that ‘Just because I do not believe Y does not mean that I believe X’. I will say outright now that I tend to agree with this, with some caveats. You see, it is not always the case that these statements are true. It all depends on the conversation being had, and the…
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Language can be confusing. Words mean particular things and then because they have similar meanings to other words they take on those meanings and then words become so interchangeable it can be hard to know what people mean when they use these words/phrases. One of the common words that gets stretched so thin is belief. What is a Belief? A belief is a positive attitude towards a proposition, something accepted as true, something perceived as most likely etc. I discuss…
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Introduction In the previous two parts of this series we covered why prescribing words for others does not work, and had a brief look at various definitions of atheism. This part will cover, in brief, the history of atheism and atheists in Ancient Greece. It is not uncommon for some atheists to argue that they are using the ‘original’ definition of atheism based on its Greek root, atheos (ἄθεος). We see this in Aron Ra’s argument for atheism being defined…
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