One More Time: Atheism is NOT a Religion

13 comments:

Mark Plus said...

Eh, that obfuscation again. In practice, atheism promotes an agenda analogous to veganism's. Vegans don't just not believe in eating and exploiting animals; the vegan firebrands go further to argue for the advantages of their life style, and against the evils of its opposite, because carnivory poisons everything.

In other words, atheism implies the criticism of religion much like veganism implies the criticism of animal exploitation.

Wes Widner said...

It may not be. Formally anyway. But I still don't have enough faith to believe in it.

Anonymous said...

It's definitely a cult of somesort. Atheists are not able to think for themselves. They repeat the same things over and over as they try to intimidate those who disagree with them by calling them names and by mocking them and making fun of them.

The Blogger Formerly Known As Lvka said...

It's a religion with 0 gods, and with a very brief statement of faith (i.e., 'there is no God').


I know that as former Protestants you were indoctrinated to believe that the term (i.e., 'religion') is 'bad', and that Christianity is "not a religion", etc. but I think you have to outgrow that stage: Christianity is very much a religion - and so is atheism! (The former has many denominations, and so does the latter, but that's a different thing altogether).

Old habbits die hard, I guess..

Anonymous said...

Too few freethinkers responding. C'mon, choir, sing it with me: Atheism is a religion the way "bald" is a hair color.

Ramen!

Anonymous said...

Lvka,

Wrong again.

Atheist Statement of Non-faith: "After careful consideration, I see no convincing evidence of a god, either physical or philosophical. Until such evidence is forthcoming, I will assume there is no god, and live my life accordingly.

The Blogger Formerly Known As Lvka said...

It's just the way I view it, that's all. (As a mathematician, I have an inclination towards uniformity and generalizations).

Anonymous said...

@Ray,

A "cult"? Lol! I am not in any cult. I escaped the cult of the christianities less than an year ago. When you finally wake up you will realize that your statements are not accurate.

Peace.

Gandolf said...

Atheism is a religion ,like interest in Rugby ,football , baseball ,Netball ,community crime watch , save the dolphins and whales is religion also.

Ramen`y

Michael said...

Lvka, since you're a mathematician, consider it in terms of set theory/propositional logic. Let a be the proposition, "A deity exists." Then ~a denotes its negation "No deities exist." If theism is S = {a}, atheism is the empty set {}, NOT the set T = {~a}.

The Blogger Formerly Known As Lvka said...

Sounds meaningless to me. The empty set (0), as well as the set that contains the empty set ({0}) are both sets. The set that has "a", as well as the set that has "~a" are also both sets. Each way you turn it, the conclusion stays the same. (Just like zero is also a number).

The Other BG said...

Lvka, I'm with you. Also a mathematician, I have a hard time convincing people that, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever for or against the existence of something, the "default" is not to assign a low probability of that existence, but instead to refuse to assign a probability at all. I don't want to argue semantics, but a purely scientific viewpoint would lead to a perspective closer to agnosticism than to atheism (though I admit those definitions aren't always well-defined).

Steven said...

The Other BG:

I don't want to argue semantics, but a purely scientific viewpoint would lead to a perspective closer to agnosticism than to atheism (though I admit those definitions aren't always well-defined).

Then you haven't been paying attention. John calls himself an agnostic atheist, and that description is accurate for me as well, and it is actually a fairly accurate description of the vast majority of atheists, even the great boogeyman Dawkins has said as much.

I do not say that there is no God or that than can be no God. What I do say is that all religions make enough claims that are either too incredible to be believed, outright falsified, or just too improbable/implausible based on what we know about human psychology, sociology, and general science to allow us to conclude that they are highly likely to be wrong (even in the unlikely event that a god in some form really does exist). Atheism does indeed tend towards agnosticism, but we have no qualms with also pointing out that it is highly likely that your religion is wrong regardless of whether or not there is a god.