“Atheism” has been appropriated by people with a grudge against religion who wants to destroy it at all costs, and convert all practitionerd of religion to atheism. So, armchair crusaders.
It’s a religion (or a cult, really) because of its faith-based (as opposed to evidence-based) argumentation, the use of shame, etc… not so much because of how others react to it. Also, atheism is not the same thing as woke.
Some replace various religions with a worship of money. Usually they are better at managing it. How much has the ‘X’ formerly known as Twitter lost, btw?
Wait what’s the difference between Atheist, No response, and Nothing?
Also why is there a generic Christian but then also Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox? But then they just Muslim and not it’s different denominations? Why even have different denominations when you have the generic catch all and the Other category?
Atheism are people who are activly against religion. Nothing are Irreligious people I assume. No Response are those who’s religious identity are unknown. Could be any of the others or none of them.
Atheist is literally “not theist” which would include nothing, none, agnostic (the belief that it’s impossible to determine the existence or absence of, in this context, God). It could even be argued that people who believe in God but do not participate in theistic practices (eg lapsed Catholics) are atheists. It does not require or even imply some position against religion.
This isn’t accurate though. In the most semantic, etymological sense perhaps. But atheism is widely understood to be the disbelief in deities. Agnosticism and atheism are very different. One is a position of belief (I cannot prove god doesn’t exist, but I don’t believe it to be so) and one is a position of ignorance (I cannot prove god does exist or doesn’t exist). Words, meanings and definitions are defined by who is interpreting them. This therefore means that the definition is whatever the majority believes it to be. You may as well be looking at a field of flowers and describing them as gay. It may have been the appropriate term once, but it is not now. And we live now. The etymology of the term is not the same as the meaning of the term. Sitting there and prescribing that your interpretation of the term is the correct interpretation reminds me a lot of the tale of King cnut.
Positive/strong atheism is the subvariant of atheism that actively asserts there is no deity. Many atheists are negative atheists and are better defined by their lack of focus on religion - whether for, against, or otherwise - in their daily lives.
In my experience negative atheism is popular where the culture is not predominantly religious, whereas positive atheism is more common in fundamentally religious societies (although it is not necessarily publicly expressed) where secular thought is in the minority.
You can be atheist agnostic - you don’t actively participate in religion or worship but believe it is fundamentally unknowable if there is or is not a god, you can also be theistic agnostic (though this is rare in the modern lexicon) which would be where you do participate in religion (or religious practices) but still believe it to be unanswerable. To be gnostic is to believe it is knowable (and perhaps that one does know), it too can be either theist or atheist in nature.
Am atheist. Am not actively against religion. If it makes your life better and is also benefiting others (or at least its not a negative), have at it. I do not give a shit.
Yeah, I don’t find any religion I’ve ever run across appealing, but I have no beef with those who do good under the umbrella of their religion and don’t try to beat on others with it.
Generally: atheists are those that say there are no gods and no goddesses. Agnostics tend to be more on the fence about it, making no claim either way.
But, as a rule, neither requires that someone is “against religion”.
In the late 00s there was a New Atheism movement which was more than just not being religious, sometimes called “capital-A atheism.” People conflate that with normal atheism sometimes. That movement split in the 2010s as culture war became more of a thing.
Just so you’re aware, agnosticism and gnosticism are not the same. Wouldn’t go calling anyone semi-educated and then use the wrong term, if I were you.
Agnosticism is the opposite of gnosticism. It’s “not knowing” vs “knowing”. Theism and atheism is “belief” or “not believing”. Take me for instance, I’m an Agnostic Thiest. I believe there is a God, but I don’t claim to know.
Also unfair in the questioning. From my own experience im going to assume the person speaking at the campus is someone yelling how all are damned and calling women whores. Sadly, very few people other than atheists speak up.
Also why is there a generic Christian but then also Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox? But then they just Muslim and not it’s different denominations? Why even have different denominations when you have the generic catch all and the Other category?
There are kinds of Christian that don’t fall under Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox by their own measure (which doesn’t care how the Big Three want to categorize them). Perhaps this was why? (Probably not.) Graph should have just lumped them all together as “Christian”.
The word woke lost all meaning due to far-right wingers constantly using it as a catch-all term for everything they don’t like.
Also, I love how they made it so the top 3 bad guys are atheists, agnostics (which are pretty much the same thing) and the jewish. They’re not even trying to be covert with propaganda.
I mean they both don’t have a definitive belief there is a god, one is just more certain than the other. But for classification purposes I would say they are different.
I mean, it’s been proven that humans have a psychological need for religion, but…
Wokeness? A religion?
Eh at worst you have companies overcompensating to avoid seeming racist or sexist… and you have tankies taking it too far and claiming everything is imperialist bullshit, but that’s hardly a new phenomenon… Hippies of yesteryear did similar.
But again, worst case scenarios.
There’s nothing wrong with saying “Maybe you shouldn’t speak here, or, anywhere really?” if a guy is literally going to Colleges to give seminars on how “Hitler did nothing wrong, and maybe transpeople, and not the constantly crashing economy and the blatant failure of trickle down… are to blame for all of your problems.”
I remember when being “Woke” had positive connotations, but the Right Wing ruins everything.
It’s why you see a shrinking number of people going to church, yet seemingly paradoxical more cases of atheists going to church “For the sense of community”
Evolutionary speaking, If there really isn’t a god, that’s terrible news for human race. In fact the only thing keeping me believing that there might be is being fully Lucid of the horror of a Godless universe.
It makes me proud that humanity clawed our way through stages of evolution and was capable of getting where we are now without the need of some overseeing being controlling us like puppets.
If you see someone do good, it means they themselves did that. They chose to help, and not because some authority told them to, but because they are good inside.
Of course, if the fear of being punished is the only thing keeping you from doing harm, then please stay a believer. But the big majority of people do not need that to stay a decent human being.
I believe I already told you that I am agnostic, I do not claim to know for certain if God does or does not exist. However I doubt that he does. And I consider a universe without God to be terrifying more so than being punished by God for failure to act in a certain way. The problem with they’re not being a god, is that mean this world is all we get, it is our one chance to do anything, and nothing we do will ever be remembered not even by us. Because in a world without the Supernatural death does not mean that it just goes black, it doesn’t go anything. You just stop existing.
Not really now the connotation is more connected to the kind of out of touch corporation that thinks progress is just calling yourself “they/them” and trying to appeal to minorities and lgbt persons in ways more offense than just using slurs. (Remember Q Force?)
Or the kind of weekend warrior who thinks cancelling people over Twitter because every other word is a dog whistle. When if they really wanted to be part of the solution and not the problem they’d have abandoned twitter in favor of Mastodon by now.
Btw Hexbear is FULL of the latter… had a gang cherry picking my posts to claim I was a pedo and a Nazi by warping a few out of context and connecting unrelated posts… so unpleasant
Basically if you’re woke now it means you’re an out of touch white guy getting offended on behalf of minorities who weren’t even slightly offended to begin with.
It used to mean that you were aware that society’s problems are caused by the blatant greed of the rich, not the perceived laziness of the poor.
These things happen. They call it the euphemism treadmill, sometimes the meanings of words shift and what was a compliment becomes an insult and vice versa
Kind of like how “Person of Color” and “Queer” used to be slurs, the R word used to be a medical term, and the three letter F word used to be a schoolyard insult instead of “The N Word for gays”
Well, it seems the same ding-a-lings claiming agnosticism and atheism are religions are also prone to claiming science is a “religion”, following evidence is a “religion”, and so on…
New Atheism is insanely dogmatic, but it’s not the same as Atheism, and has been criticized by Atheists who classify “New Atheism” as being akin to a hate-group
and Scientism is a school of philosophy, albeit one that’s mocked relentlessly (Basically, the philosophy that everything that is real can be measured, and if it can’t be measured it isn’t real)
But… that’s as close as I’d get to describing Science or Atheism as religions…
I’d like to understand what the definition of what “New Atheism” is. I know there have been a few tempest in a teapots over certain individuals [1] and their behavior; nothing about atheism - new or otherwise - seems to require them to behave like some individuals have, as far as I know. I also have no idea how this set of (non) beliefs would make them a hate group.
[1] thunderf00t, for example. I also know plenty of people that go crazy over the mere mention of, say, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens. Not sure if those guys are who we are talking about here.
Basically anyone who tries to militarize rationalism as a movement or tries to use science as a religion… very often these turn into misogyny, bigotry, and pseudoscience
Those three are specifically infamous as Sam Harris uses pseudoscience to justify a lack of belief in free will as straight up fact and white washes Buddhism to be “Like Atheism, but you meditate!”… but his open hostility to the religious is concerning as he literally writes in his book The End of Faith that the world would only be safe if a preemptive nuke was dropped on the middle east.
Sam Harris also parrots the talking points of Jordan Peterson and features him regularly on his podcast
Richard Dawkins is a transphobic asshole who compared transpeople to black face, shrugged off a woman being sexually assaulted at his conference as “She should be grateful, a muslim would have done worse” (a scandal known as Elevatorgate) also engages in pseudoscience to push his “Memetics” nonsense
Hitchens is the least horrible of the three, but that’s only because he was dead long before Dawkins and Harris went fully radical.
Christopher Hitchens mainly wrote a bunch of books painting Christianity in a bad light… that itself is fine… the issue is he’d often fabricate evidence. One well known case of this; claiming Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher famous for coming up with what many theist still believe is the best evidence for god, was a “man of one book” and using cherry picked qoutes to justify it… even though Aquinas actually warned against zealots and the full version of the original qoute was actually telling people to be wary of men of “only one book” for there was more to understand the world and God than simply the bible.
Hitchens is also responsible for the clickbait articles claiming Mother Theresa was a monster, making various accusations of her laundering money from charity with no evidence, taking quotes from her on suffering out of context to make her look like a masochist, berating her for refusing to use morphine (despite operating in India, a
ountry where morphine was illegal even for medical use) and bizzarely claimed her hospices were actually hospitals. When not only were they hospices but she basically invented the concept at a time when bedside manner was basically unheard of in professional medicine.
Many of these bogus and heavily debunked claims are from the book “Hell’s Angel” which Hitchens wrote.
The cherry on top was Hitchens actually claimed the Catholic Church was trying to stop him from bad-mouthing Mother Theresa out of fear he would “give away their game”… when the opposite was true, they literally invited him to the Vatican to speak out against her canonization as it is tradition that critics and skeptics of potiential saints be given a chance to make their case before anything final is decided.
While there are many great arguments for not believing in God or really any supernatural phenomena of any kind… these three are infamous for fabricating and weaponizing such arguments for personal gain.
What are the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) that require someone advocate for any of these things, though? You are saying these individuals behaved/are behaving badly - okay, let’s assume that is true. What about irreligion would lead to any of that?
When you say they “militarize” rationalism, how have any of these people done that? All of them are still proponents of liberal democracies.
I was a new monasticist Christian who deconstructed during this whole atheism thing and can vouch for all of this. We read some of these atheism books in Bible studies because they were both prevalent and quite lazily written, like these “four horsemen” just didn’t have a good grasp on philosophy. I even had an agnostic philosophy prof come to a Christian Bible study and explain some of the mainstream and competing views in philosophy about these subjects and it kind of validated how they weren’t serious as philosophers. After I lost my whole social group when I lost my faith I decided to check out an atheist group, which I attended for a time, but there were always these people who loved these terrible arguments for atheism and even wanted to go evangelize door to door about atheism. The group split in to culture war factions and died shortly after I stopped attending in 2012. It was worth it because I met a few very dear friends from this endeavor, but we all agreed this whole thing was trash.
The fact that we actually have peopel trying to “Spread the good word of Atheism” and coming up with arguments so bad it almost makes God sound… likely… shows the problem was never faith, it was always man. If Religion never existed, humans would be just as awful, they’d just find different reasons to be just as horrible.
Yeah basically, concepts like “civil/civic religion” describe this well. It’s like the set of shared beliefs a society uses to justify itself, similar to ideaology, and the best definition of ideaology I know is, “the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest.” Like in one sense partisan politics in the US right now can be summarized as two factions of the same civil religion.
The thing that frustrated me with these atheists is they both view religion as man made and contingent on societies, yet they treated it as this trans-historical essential set of beliefs and practices in the same way the most fundamentalist religious sect would. Like take the dumbest most insane religious sects, that’s how these atheists understood religion too. When you see religion as something actually socially constructed and embodying the time period, then you can actually understand it on a material level. These atheists think you can just take this concept of “religion” and cleave it away, because they think it’s this separate thing. They view western history in this really reductive way like: 1. smart greeks and romans 2. religious bullshit and smart people are killed 3. enlightenment and secular society wins but the battle isn’t yet won. None of them actually liked learning about history either unless it was to find out who the good guys/bad guys were in reference to religion, exact same as how fundamentalist sects understand history.
By lumping them all into the same category, it gives credibility to “religion”.
When you have a panel where “A priest, a rabbi, and a mullah discus spirituality”, it’s a level playing field, everyone is just there to compare notes on their LARPing rules.
If an atheist or a scientist join the panel, you now have an emperors new clothes situation, “Yeah, I don’t have all the answers, but more importantly, neither do they, and I’m not claiming to. Here are the facts and evidence as it is currently understood, and what that might mean”.
When you call atheism or science or woke a religion, they are trying to trap you by saying “ha! Your belief is just as meaningless as I mine is! We’re all equal and subjective rules apply”.
I try to refer to things as simply dogmatic. Some people have replaced religion with other things, but that doesn’t make them a religion. People beg for authority.
I do know many Christians who are all about love and tolerance, the problem is, they aren’t the ones going onto Fox News to declare they’ll be shouting how much “Jesus loves you, but only if you’re straight!” at your local university…
They’re the ones quietly living their lives according to Jesus’ teachings…
A few of these friends have taken to calling the kind of Christians the Alt-Right claims to be 'Xtians", for they have taken the “Christ” out of “Christians”
True. I was raised in a religiously leftist household, and even as a child, when I first came across right wing xtians, I was legitimately confused by how they even exist. Our instruction was pointedly about reading the words of the character of Jesus (or for those too young to read, having it read to you) and boy is there a lot of stuff in there that I have no idea how the hard right xtians explain away.
Of course, there are the later writings from someone who never even MET the character of Jesus, which seem to be more problematic. I think it was RAW that said the people that seem to want to follow Paul more so than Jesus should really be called “Paulian”, not xtians.
Of course, the OT and NT taken as a whole, and then trying to treat it as a cohesive message is a fool’s errand and it quickly falls apart, but…
My dad converted from Christianity to Wicca, but he more or less had the same problem, you saw all of the relatives on his side of the family seemingly refusing to stand by everything they ever taught him.
As for the old and new testament, it really is a fruitless Endeavor to try to make sense of it without the proper background there’s a lot of it requires a historical context or knowledge of alternate translations in order to make much sense. This is why theology is considered a science in and of itself, the science of studying religious texts.
Yeah, I have some extended family that was raised in the more liberal/red letter type of xtianity, only to later “rebel” by veering toward more authoritarian/right wing style of interpretations of “the” bible. Most of them are full maga now and don’t resemble anything I was taught as the core of xtianity.
When it comes to trying to square the “old” and the “new”, I think it’s mostly in the eye of the beholder. A lot of xtians declare they have a “new covenant”, so therefore, they can selectively decide what is not law and what isn’t, especially when it comes to things like dietary laws being rejected. But there is that “not one jot or tittle” portion, and the position that the OT validates the claims made in the NT, so…not sure how they select what they will and will not follow. I think that’s how absurdist things like voting on what is and what is not canon came about…
I watch all of that with a bit of amusement, I must say, much like I watch right wing Americans claim they want this country to follow xtianity and the Constitution, when right off the bat, the First Amendment and first commandment are in obvious conflict with one another…the First Amendment clearly lays out a secular country and the first commandment demonstrates that the god of “the” bible is a jealous god that won’t tolerate anything else but complete devotion. No real way to square that circle without changing this country to something other than its intent, which means they will not be following the Constitution…
Well these are the same crowd that likes to chant keep Christ in christmas, because they are offended by Xmas and for some reason Santa claus, even though Saint Nicholas was a real person canonized by the Catholic Church
I think calling Atheism a religion does degrade its value. It brings atheism into the same category as religion, it promotes the idea that atheists need just as much faith as religious people, it basically turns science into a religion.
Just to be clear, I define Atheism as “without belief in a God”, that would include anyone saying they are agnostic.
At least among most Atheists it’s defined as lack of belief. It’s also arguably the most correct definition based on the parts of the word itself.
Theist is usually defined as “with belief”, so it makes sense that A-theist means without belief. Adding that A to another word usually means without, like asymptomatic (without symptoms) or amoral (without morals).
The same thing can be said with Agnostic, Gnostic is with knowledge, A-gnostic is without knowledge.
Agnostic/Gnostic answers the question of “do you have knowledge that a God exists”. Atheist/Theist answers the question of “do you have belief that a God exists”.
No problem, It’s interesting how differently the terms are used within and outside of the atheist community. I think it’s also important to realize that most Atheists are going to have more certainty when it comes to a specific God not existing, compared to the general concept of a God. It’s much more likely that some kind of God exists than the specific one of a given religion exists. Like I would personally put the general idea of a God existing at maybe 50% (like a God who created the universe and let nature take its course), but the specific God of a given religion that listens to your prayers at near 0%.
Antitheist is one term, I think the more common one in the same area would be Gnostic Atheist, which given my definitions from before would claim knowledge that gods don’t exist.
As with anything there are always more sub categories, some go as far as to say knowledge of God is unknowable, or that no form of a God exists, but most seem to stick with Agnostic Atheist, or just Atheist.
Or, another way of looking at it is, they’re embrace of deceit and delusion means they periodically have to fabricate new imaginary dragons to slay. The problem with turning victimhood and grievance into a cult is that you need persecution for it to work. Hence, fabricating opposition. Wokeness is just a way for the elder elite to heap hate on the youth that will inevitably replace them. Constantly reminding everyone that you are a patriotic Christian is just a means to try to seize the higher ground for cultural warfare.
Wokeness is the new “politically correct” - just pure unadulterated nonsense to rile up the conspiracy theorists and Republicans (but I repeat myself). And they use it much like people were using “thanks Obama”. If one of the cult stubs their toe, they can blame it on “wokeness” and also probably yell “thanks Obama!” now probably also followed up by “Let’s Go Brandon!”.
I originally perceived this as if the religion of the speaker was x, results were how likely they’d be essentially boo’d. I don’t get much shit for being an atheist lately, but depending on the peer group it can get a little…dicey.
Religion is harmful to people and atheism isn’t. Do these people complain when someone shuts down a speaker who advocates having sex with young children? No? Then shut the hell up and let us kill religion like it should have been centuries ago.
I mean if it was literally Hitler come back to life, sure.
They shouldn’t have grouped “always” and “sometimes”.
It means that people who are hard line anti religion and would yell at someone if they dared to express the tiniest support for a religion to people who would protest or yell at someone who is widely accepted as bad.
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