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setsunatenshi on 25 August 2011
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kitler53 said:
setsunatenshi said:
kitler53 said:

my grip about this study is it seems to confuse the term atheist with non-religious.  just because you haven't aligned yourself with one of the other relgions of the world does not make you an atheist.

an atheist believes that there is no god.

a non-religious (in the way they are using it here) means you aren't associated with any church/whatever.

 

as far as i'm concerned, atheisism is a religion.  if you haven't given serious thought to your choice to not believe in god you are more agnostic then athiest imo.


the word belief does not equate to religious belief. i believe you are a person writing that post, not a bot. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty convinced I'm right in my belief. Is this a religious belief?

There are several god claims made by several religions and all that atheism does is say 'sorry, I don't believe your claims are fundamented'. that's it. there's no positive claim being made, it's just a response to the positive claims of religions.

Ateism doesn't exist unless religious people make claims about supernatural things. So how can you call it a religion? (atheism is as much of a religion as bald is a hair color) ;)

on a side note, agnosticism is the positive claim that 'we don't know if a god exists until it proves itself'. you can be agnostic atheist (i don't know if a god exists, but I believe it doesn't) or agnostic theist (i don't know if a god exists, but I believe it does).

so being agnostic doesn't stop you from being atheist :)

religion as a word is rooted to the 12th century and at the time the meaning was more of a "conciece awareness of the greater influences to which we are tied to".  it wasn't until around the 18th century that the word morphed into what you are defining it as today.  i prefer the older definition in part because i want to qualify athiest as a religion because i view it as my religion.

the non-religious are the ones that are not conscientious of the "bigger picture".  of those that are conscientious, most believe in some sort of a god.  some, as i do, don't believe in an external influence such as god and only believe in the world as i see it now.  some don't know which belief, if any, is true. 

my point is only this:  there is a huge distiction between not giving religion any thought and giving religion thought and coming to the conclusion that there is no god. 

Well, if we don't want to be debating semantics on an internet forum, it would be better for all if we stuck with the more familiar meaning of words and how the huge amount of people understands them.

I believe you will only be causing yourself a problem when mixing atheism as your 'religion'. I say this because then you will be viewed as the person with the positive claim that there are no gods and therefore you will have the burden of proof on this one. On the otherhand if you say you are (for example) a secular humanist and a rationalist, then you would probably still be stating your 'religious' view of the reality and atheism would simply be a consequence of your rationalistic view. Therefore when someone would ask you to prove a god doesn't exist, you can reply 'define your god and I will tell you if I believe in it or not'.

to make it simple, simply saying you're an atheist is meaningless. to be an atheist you need to be in respect to a certain claim that someone will put (like YHWH created the world in 7 days and heaven exists somewhere in the sky) and then you can be an atheist to that god claim.

 

(i hope i could explain myself well, sorry if i didn't)