[quote]Cockney Blue wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
[quote]Cockney Blue wrote:
OK so recap.
Atheism is not a religion or a belief system. To be a belief system it would have to be the beleif in something. It is not. It is the lack of belief in a god. You can be an atheist and a communist. Communism would be your belief system. The atheism just denotes that you don’t believe in a god. You can also be an atheist Capitalist.
Of course you can be a Catholic Communist (at certain points of his life Stalin was this, he was also clearly nuts) you can also be a Christian Socialist (Hitler, though his beliefs seem to have changed throughout his life, he clearly states in many documented conversations and writings that he believes in God.)
The one common theme for Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin is that they were all raised and educated within a religion. Could they have turned out differently were they raised to think more critically? Of course I don’t know, it would be purely speculation but it makes as much sense to blame their later killing sprees on their religious education as it does to blame it on their atheism.
@Brother Chris - Sorry, got my consonants mixed up. YHW. By the way, the whole G-D thing, do you think he really cares?
@anyone who thinks Mother Teresa was a really good woman. Read the book I linked in the other post then get back to me.[/quote]
You need to specify positive or negative atheism. Commonly we are talking about positive atheism. This is a belief that there is no god. Negative atheism is no belief in god (commonly referred to as agnostic). Typical atheists do have a specific belief and generally structure their morals around that belief.[/quote]
No, no no no no no and again no.
Atheism means a lack of belief in any god. Simple as that. It is not like Christianity that has a million flavours all claiming to be the one true path. Atheism means a lack of belief in any god.
A = without
Theos = god
Now in addition to being Atheist I might also believe that there is definitely no god (which I don’t) or believe that it is unlikely that there is a god based on the evidence available (my position) but that does not change the definition of atheism.[/quote]
Yes yes yes yes yes and yes.
Atheism is a broad term and not all atheists share a common belief about god. There are lots of ways to define atheism. I don’t believe in god and I believe there is no god are entirely philosophically distinct AND that distinction is critical to the discussion. YET they both fall into the broad definition of atheism. You cannot say atheism is exactly “Atheism means a lack of belief in any god” and you cannot prove this by word structure. It is much more complex. I was only asking you to be more specific. You are a negative atheist and as such I agree, it’s not much like a religion. However, whether you chose to acknowledge it or not there are a lot of positive atheists out there, and they are not much different than a theist.
[i]Positive vs. negative
Main article: Negative and positive atheism
Philosophers such as Antony Flew,[38] and Michael Martin,[30] have contrasted positive (strong/hard) atheism with negative (weak/soft) atheism. Positive atheism is the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist. Negative atheism includes all other forms of non-theism. According to this categorization, anyone who is not a theist is either a negative or a positive atheist.[39] The terms weak and strong are relatively recent, while the terms negative and positive atheism are of older origin, having been used (in slightly different ways) in the philosophical literature[38] and in Catholic apologetics[40] since at least 1813.[41][42] Under this demarcation of atheism, most agnostics qualify as negative atheists.
Main Entry: athe·ism
Pronunciation: \Ë?Ä?-thÄ?-Ë?i-zÉ?m
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
Date: 1546
1 archaic : ungodliness, wickedness
2 a : a disbelief in the existence of deity b : the doctrine that there is no deity
- Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
- The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
[/i]
est.