Given how I have a habit of irritating atheists over my claim that it *IS* a religion or at the very least a system of beliefs, I should probably be keeping my mouth shut right now. Anyone who knows me is going to laugh at the thought of that happening.
So.
I have a couple atheist blogs that I read daily and I just finished I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist’s Eyes by Hemant Mehta. One of the blogs is by an atheist Yale student who is arguing faith issues with her boyfriend and the other two (Blag Hag and Friendly Atheist) are atheist activists. Friendly Atheist is the blog that grew out of Mehta’s book.) I occasionally comment along the lines of “that’s so not how we Christians are” and I generally keep my mouth shut on other entries because they’ve become “let’s rag on Christians” threads and I have no interest in those.
One thing that seems to be a common thread is how Christians subjugate the rights of atheists and how Christians believe that atheists have no morals. In the next few weeks, I’ll be addressing these two subjects in blog posts.
First, however, I should probably make it clear that I’m a convert to Christianity and that I spent the first part of my life as an atheist/agnostic. My family isn’t religious and my dad can actually be quite anti-religious, especially when it comes to fundamentalism of any kind. If nothing else, I *do* understand how obnoxious it is when people come up to you and try to “win your soul” or “convert” you. In my case, it made me afraid of finding a church after I converted because I was afraid people were going to yell at me about why my family wasn’t there. (The opposite was true — people were chill about it.) Having said that, I’m not going to mock any atheists/agnostics/humanist/freethinkers though I reserve the right to say that the way they are going about things is wrong.
If you think that atheism is a belief system, you are taking a step too far.
Atheism means “lack of belief in god(s)”, and that’s it. That’s like claiming “theism” is a belief system: it isn’t, because all it means is “belief in god(s)”. Both these terms are individual positions on an individual issue.
Now, the reason you aren’t completely off the wall with this line of thinking is because there are fairly large (or vocal) schools of thought within atheism that one tends to think of whenever the word is used – such as the New Atheist movement of the past decade or two which has come out of the woodwork to write books, give talks, make films, etc which do not give religion a polite and neutered response because of it’s traditional position in the world.
However, to be a New Atheist (or a Humanist, or an Objectivist, or whatever non-theistic school of thought one happens to fall into) is to have another, positive claim put over and superceding your atheism because there is no logical way that simply being an atheist is both neccessary and sufficient to come to any conclusion about anything. It’s simply a single-aspect label.
Peter, I argue that it’s a belief system because many of the atheists I encounter very fervently believe that THERE. IS. NO. GOD. which is very much a belief system as they posit rationales for this belief based on science and logic. Agnosticism is not so much one because it’s kind of leaving things as they could be but not believing in one thing or another.
I appreciate you making the distinction between the New Atheist movement and those who basically just don’t believe in a higher power.
I’d like to meet these people you have talked to, because I have very rarely encountered anyone who would say “I believe there is no god/are no gods” rather than saying “I do not believe in god(s)”.
It has unfortunately entered colloqiual thought that there is a linear progression from theist, to agnostic, to atheist (with theism and atheism representing the extremes of the linear progression and agnosticism representing the mid-point or the compromise). As far as philosophy goes, this is incorrect. Gnosticism and agnosticism deal with knowledge claims, whereas theism and atheism deal with belief claims.
For example: I am an agnostic atheist. I lack a belief in god(s), but I do not claim to know that my position is true. There are people on every end of this divide: gnostic and agnostic theists, gnostic and agnostic atheists. The problem is that atheism has become conflated with gnostic atheism, which is infact (at least in my experience) more often that not wrong.