Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by LeaT on October 10, 2008 at 11:49am

Looks good to me.

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Permalink Reply by Daley on October 10, 2008 at 11:49am

It makes perfect sense to me...especially from an agnostic atheist point of view.
I'm bookmarking it :D

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Permalink Reply by Anath on October 10, 2008 at 11:54am

At the core it is correct, but the format feels a bit awkward.

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Permalink Reply by James on October 13, 2008 at 2:23pm

I suppose I am a weak (or agnostic) atheist in the sense that I cannot disprove that there is a god, yet while I do not say "There are no gods", I still feel very strongly that such entities are very, very unlikely.

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Permalink Reply by dasdsa das dasdas on October 13, 2008 at 2:35pm

This is atheism de facto, not weak atheism or agnosticism.

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Permalink Reply by Фелч Гроган on October 15, 2008 at 4:28am

There is a category that is absent, but one that has always been on my mind, and is in fact the route by which I arrived here -

Atheist on Principle

Effectively it is a deist, theist or agnostic expressing disgust that any kind of god that would want to have anything to do with any kind of organised religion that has ever existed and is therefore not a god you want to have anything to do with. It is being on strike. Being a conscientious objector. It is rejection of god for ethical reasons.

As far as the process of de-conversion goes, this is a useful intermediary step and much more likely to yield results than the brute force deconversion efforts of atheisms more luminous voices.

Just my $0.02

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Permalink Reply by Chrys Stevenson on October 15, 2008 at 6:44am

Felch wrote: "any kind of god that would want to have anything to do with any kind of organised religion that has ever existed and is therefore not a god you want to have anything to do with"

Reminds me of Groucho Marx: "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. "

Maybe God is Groucho Marx!

Now there's a god I could believe in. ;-)

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Permalink Reply by Kyuuketsuki on October 15, 2008 at 1:21pm

Well ... since everyone else agrees I'm gonna have to be leery and not :)

I'm afraid I don't accept all these strong/weak/explicit/non-explicit things ... the meaning of "atheist" depends on the definition of "theist" which is to say that "theism" (based on the Greek) means to be "with God" so "atheism" (with it's grammatic reversal "a" prefix) means "not with god". As far as I'm concerned, this means that you are an atheist if you don't accept current claims to the existence of deity so that includes agnostics. To my mind people with an active disbelief in deity do so without evidence so risk making themselves look as silly as the theists.

I tend to view the various styles of atheism as value added and indeed view theism in much the same way though I suppose that's more value detracted.

Kyu

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Permalink Reply by dasdsa das dasdas on October 26, 2008 at 1:56pm

I wouldn't say de facto atheism is an active or positive disbelief, there's for cases such as this people have invented some of the terms I've listed.

If i understand your point correctly, you are asserting that atheism would have to require some sort of faith as the person can't judge by empirical evidence that there is absence of a deity, it would require some sort of faith to draw that conclusion. However, this is not de facto atheism - rather positive/strong atheism, which is the reason people have invented these sub-terms. Originally, and primarily; atheism is only absence of faith.

Agnosticism is not a third way or middle-ground between theism and atheism, but an agnostic can still be partly theist or atheist. Agnosticism is about knowledge, it can be used with absence or presence of belief.

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