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Atheism : a definition

2011-12-30T10:43:00.001-08:00

Many theists think that the existence of god is a priori, hence the reason they often ask atheists to "disprove" his existence, not realising that there is no need to disprove something for which no evidence exists in the first place. This is possibly why they often define an atheist as "One who denies the existence of God" - clearly absurd as one would have to believe in God in the first place to be able to then deny his existence.

Atheism actually has a very simple definition:

a [without] theism [belief in a deity]

Atheism is not a religion or a system of belief; it is merely the absence of a belief. The term "agnostic" is therefore meaningless, and anyone who does not actively believe in a deity can be called an atheist.

Of course many atheists go further than this and make positive statements like "there is no God". Such people are generally referred to as "strong" rather than "weak" atheists.

As a definition, the above should more than suffice. Unfortunately atheism seems to imply rather more than this to certain groups of people. I have written about this, along with some personal thoughts on the subject, in the next section (in which you can post comments).

Written by Tim Sellers

Polls show that the ranks of atheists in the United States may be increasing

2011-12-30T10:37:00.000-08:00

Athiest Dating and Social Network

The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released in March 2009, found that those who claimed "no religion" were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years.

Nationally, the "nones" in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent. (Not all the "nones" are necessarily committed atheists or agnostics.)

Local and national atheist organizations have flourished in recent years, fed by outrage over the Bush administration's embrace of the religious right. A spate of best-selling books on atheism - including "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens, "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins and "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris - have also popularized the notion that nonbelief is not just an argument but a cause.

The atheists and their organizations are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.

Ten national organizations that variously identify themselves as atheists, humanists, freethinkers and others who go without God have recently united to form the Secular Coalition for America. These groups, once rivals, are now pooling resources to lobby in Washington for separation of church and state. A wave of donations, some in the millions of dollars, has enabled the hiring of more paid professional organizers.

The organizations liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.

Part of what is giving the movement momentum is the proliferation of groups on college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance now has 146 chapters, up from 42 in 2003.

Despite changing attitudes, though, polls continue to show that atheists are ranked lower than any other minority or religious group when Americans are asked whether they would vote for or approve of their child marrying a member of that group.

In England, the Atheist Bus Campaign, an effort to disseminate a godless message to the greater public, proved very popular. It all began when Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer, saw an advertisement on a bus. The ad was fairly mild, just a passage from the Bible and the address of a Christian Web site. But when Ms. Sherine looked on the Web site, she was startled to learn that she and her nonbelieving friends were headed straight to hell, to "spend all eternity in torment."

She thought, how about putting some atheist messages on the bus, as a corrective to the religious ones? And so were planted the seeds of the bus campaign.

When the organizers announced the effort in October 2008, they said they hoped to raise a modest $8,000 or so. But something seized people's imagination. Supported by Mr. Dawkins, the scientist and author; the philosopher A. C. Grayling; and the British Humanist Association, among others, the campaign raised nearly $150,000 in four days, and had more than $200,000 by January 2009, when it unveiled its advertisements on 800 buses across Britain.

"There's probably no God," the advertisements said. "Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

God Is A Sinner

2011-08-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

God Is a Human Invention!

I cannot remember a moment in time since i gained awareness on this planet a moment in time,when i have not heard of death and destruction in one place or another around this globe that we inhabit. Why would an all knowing god allow such devastation and waste of human life. Why does a god allow his own creation to kill and maime at will,not only amongst his own image creation,the human species but also the other species of his creation. Why create and also allow destruction.

If god is all that mighty,why does he allow it to happen,why does god allow evil to be part of his domain.Why does god demand that we be his faithfull sheep while at the same time allow this same herd to partake in evil doing. God must be toying with his own creation,god must be full of mischief enjoying and watching as his creation destroys itself,god must maintain a games condition that he alone enjoys. God must be a sinner since as a creator why let death and destruction by the hand of his creation happen.Why allow hiscreation to destroy all that he has created.

If i have a god then my god is one of creation and he does not destroy or allow the destruction of anything that is within his domain. My god is the creator that does not destroy.My god's beingness is one of good and not of evil and evil is not in my god's being and he will not entertain evil as part of his domain.A god of creation does not destroy or allow destruction and does not allow his herd to destroy itself or his creation.An almighty god would not alow that to happen because he is not a sinner.

My god is not a sinner and thus will not let us destroy or allow evil to thrive in his domain and let the following occur,for in definition my god would not allow the following evil to occur in his domain.

God will not let his people be morally bad or commit wrongfull things on others or themselves and wickedness would never be there.

God will not allow anything that causes harm, misfortune, or destruction may it be an individual or nature at large and would not be part of a world that will let a leader's power to do both good and evil. All leaders would only be made to be good and the bad eradicated.

An evil force, power, or personification does not exist in my gods domain.

All cause effect or source of suffering, injury, or destruction has no place in his domain and the social evils of poverty and injustice are nowhere to be seen.

Freethought

2009-09-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any other dogma. The cognitive application of freethought is known as freethinking, and practitioners of freethought are known as freethinkers.

Overview

Freethought holds that individuals should neither accept nor reject ideas proposed as truth without recourse to knowledge and reason. Thus, freethinkers strive to build their opinions on the basis of facts, scientific inquiry, and logical principles, independent of any factual/logical fallacies or the intellectually-limiting effects of authority, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, popular culture, prejudice, sectarianism, tradition, urban legend, and all other dogmatic or otherwise fallacious principles. Applied to religion, freethinkers have generally held that, given presently-known facts, established scientific theories, and logical principles, there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena.

A line from "Clifford's Credo" by the 19th Century British mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford perhaps best describes the premise of freethought: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

Symbol

The pansy is the long-established and enduring symbol of freethought; its usage inaugurated in the literature of the American Secular Union in the late 1800s. The reasoning behind the pansy being the symbol of freethought lies in both the flower's name and appearance. The pansy derives its name from the French word pensée, which means "thought"; it was so named because the flower resembles a human face, and in the month of August it nods forward as if deep in thought.

History

Origins

In Buddhism a type of freethought was advocated by Gautama Buddha, most notably in the Kalama Sutta:

"It is proper for you, Kalamas [the people of the village of Kesaputta], to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher.' Kalamas, when you yourselves know: 'These things are bad; these things are blameable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill, abandon them. "...Do not accept anything by mere tradition... Do not accept anything just because it accords with your scriptures... Do not accept anything merely because it agrees with your pre-conceived notions... But when you know for yourselves—these things are moral, these things are blameless, these things are praised by the wise, these things, when performed and undertaken, conduce to well-being and happiness—then do you live acting accordingly."

The web of transmissions and re-inventions of critical thought meanders from the Hellenistic Mediterranean, through repositories of knowledge and wisdom in Ireland and the Muslim civilizations (e.g. Khayyam and his unorthodox sufi Rubaiyat poems), and in other civilizations, as the Chinese, (e.g. the seafaring Southern Sòng's renaissance), and on through heretical thinkers of esoteric alchemy or astrology, to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.

French physician and writer Rabelais celebrated "rabelaisian" freedom as well as good feasting and drinking (an expression and a symbol of freedom of the mind) in defiance of the hypocrisies of conformist orthodoxy in his utopian Thelema Abbey (from θέλημα: free "will"), the devise of which was Do What Thou Wilt:

"So had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; because free people ... act virtuously and avoid vice. They call this honor."

When the hero of his book, Pantagruel, journeys to the "Oracle of The Div(in)e Bottle", he learns the lesson of life in one simple word: "Trinch!", Drink! Enjoy the simple life, learn wisdom and knowledge, as a free human. Beyond puns, irony, and satire, Gargantua's prologue metaphor instructs the reader to "break the bone and suck out the substance-full marrow" ("la substantifique moëlle"), the core of wisdom. For more visit here!

Other typologies of atheism

2009-09-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

We need to distinguish between a biographical or sociological enquiry into why some people have believed or disbelieved in God, and an epistemological enquiry into whether there are any good reasons for either belief or unbelief... We are interested in the question of what good reasons there are for or against God's existence, and no light is thrown on that question by discovering people who hold their beliefs without having good reasons for them.

So, in philosophy, atheism is commonly defined along the lines of "rejection of theistic belief". This is often misunderstood to mean only the view that there is no God, but it is conventional to distinguish between two or three main sub-types of atheism in this sense. However, writers differ in their characterization of this distinction, and in the labels they use for these positions.

The terms weak atheism and strong atheism (or negative atheism and positive atheism) are often used as synonyms of Smith's less-well-known implicit and explicit categories. However, the original and technical meanings of implicit and explicit atheism are quite different and distinct from weak and strong atheism, having to do with conscious rejection and unconscious rejection of theism rather than with positive belief and negative belief.

People who do not use the broad definition of atheism as "absence of theism", but instead use the most common definition "disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods", would not recognize mere absence of belief in deities (implicit atheism) as a type of atheism at all, and would tend to use other terms, such as "skeptic" or "agnostic", or even the heavy-handed "non-atheistic non-theism", for this position.
Atheist | Emancipation From Mental Slavery | Nontheist

Critical atheism

2009-09-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

For Smith, explicit atheism is subdivided further according to whether or not the rejection is made on rational grounds. The term critical atheism is used to label the view that belief in god is irrational, and is itself subdivided into:

a) the view usually expressed by the statement "I do not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being";
b) the view usually expressed by the statement "God does not exist" or "the existence of God is impossible"; and
c) the view which "refuses to discuss the existence or nonexistence of a god" because "the concept of a god is unintelligible".

Although Ernest Nagel rejects Smith's definition of atheism as merely "absence of theism", acknowledging only explicit atheism as true "atheism", his tripartite classification of rejectionist atheism—commonly found in the philosophical literature—is identical to Smith's critical atheism typology.

Implicit and explicit atheism

2009-09-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

Implicit atheism and explicit atheism are subcategories of atheism coined by George H. Smith (1979, p.13-18). Implicit atheism is defined by Smith as "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it" (i.e., those who have not thought about the existence of deities, let alone decided against it, are de facto atheists). Explicit atheism is defined as "the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it" (those who have thought about the existence of deities and have purposely decided against it), which, according to Smith, is sometimes characterized as antitheism.

Atheism

2009-09-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

Atheism can be either the rejection of theism, or the position that deities do not exist.In the broadest sense, it is the absence of belief in the existence of deities.

The term atheism originated from the Greek ἄθεος (atheos), meaning "ungodly" or "deserted by the gods," which was derogatively applied to anyone thought to believe in false gods, no gods, or doctrines that stood in conflict with established religions. With the spread of freethought, skeptical inquiry, and subsequent increase in criticism of religion, application of the term narrowed in scope. The first individuals to self-identify as "atheist" appeared in the 18th century. Today, about 2.3% of the world's population describes itself as atheist, while a further 11.9% is described as nontheist.Between 64% and 65% of Japanese describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, or non-believers,and up to 48% in Russia.The percentage of such persons in European Union member states ranges between 6% (Italy) and 85% (Sweden).

Atheism tends towards skepticism regarding supernatural claims, citing a lack of empirical evidence. Common rationales include the problem of evil, the argument from inconsistent revelations, and the argument from nonbelief. Other arguments for atheism range from the philosophical to the social to the historical.

In Western culture, atheists are frequently assumed to be irreligious or unspiritual.However, religious and spiritual belief systems such as forms of Buddhism that do not advocate belief in gods, have also been described as atheistic.Although some atheists tend toward secular philosophies such as humanism, rationalism, and naturalism, there is no one ideology or set of behaviors to which all atheists adhere.

Nontheism

2009-09-02T13:03:00.000-07:00

Nontheism is a term that covers a range of both religious and nonreligious attitudes characterized by the absence of — or the rejection of — theism or any belief in a personal god or gods. It is in use in the fields of Christian apologetics and general liberal theology. "Nontheism" should not be confused with "irreligion".

Non-theism has various types. "Strong atheism" is the positive belief that a god does not exist. Someone who does not think about the existence of a deity may be termed "weakly atheistic", or more specifically implicitly atheist. Other, more qualified types of nontheism are often known as agnosticism, or more specifically explicit atheism. "Strong" or "positive" agnosticism is the belief that it is impossible for humans to know whether or not any deities exist. It is a more precise opinion than weak agnosticism, which is the belief that the existence or nonexistence of any deities is unknown but not necessarily unknowable. Philosopher Anthony Kenny distinguishes between agnostics, who find the claim "God exists" uncertain, and theological noncognitivists, who consider all God-talk to be meaningless.

Other, related, philosophical opinions about the existence of deity are ignosticism and skepticism. Because of variation of the term "god", it is understood that a person could be an atheist in terms of certain portrayals of gods, while remaining agnostic in terms of others.

Invented originally as a synonym for secularism, it has become an umbrella term for summarizing various distinct and even mutually exclusive positions united by a naturalist approach, sometimes in the plural, nontheisms.