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Beliefs are not of objects, they are of prepositions. It is possible to believe that a given proposition is true and it is also possible to believe that the negation of that proposition is true. Also, it is possible to not hold a belief regarding a given proposition, either because you are withholding assent or because you haven't considered the proposition in question. Thus, all of the following are possible mental states regarding religion:

(1) I believe that 'There is a God' is true. (Theism)
(2) I believe that 'There is not a God' is true. (Strong Atheism)
(3) I have no belief regarding the proposition 'There is a God'. (Weak atheism)
(4) I believe that 'The truth value of "There is a God"' is not knowable. (Strong agnosticism)
(5) I believe that 'There is a God' and 'There is not a God' are equally likely and thus endorse neither. (Weak agnosticism)

As an atheist, I find that this statement is actually extremely offensive, not to mention misguided.

Atheism is a religious belief in that it is a belief regarding spirituality and man's place in the universe. I do not wish to start a pedantic semantic argument, but one definition of religion is "[a] cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion." I would say that as an atheist I am conscientiously devoted to the notion that there is no god and that a moral or ethical system must therefore be derived by humans for themselves. I further strongly believe that organised religion represents nothing more than an attempt to organise such a system but is frequently, perhaps universally, rendered ineffective by superstition, dogma and human ambition.

Let me put it another way: belief in nothing is not no belief. It merely means that I don't believe there is a being 'out there' or 'up there' to which I am answerable or by which I am controlled, created or otherwise influenced. Does this mean I have no morals? Am I an inherently bad, or amoral, or otherwise non-spiritual person? Not in the least. I believe (note the use of the word) very strongly in the capacity of human intelligence to allow us to produce something greater than the sum of our parts. Love is an excellent example of this capacity in action.

The parent, and many of the responses to it, are perhaps mistaking the issue of fundamentalism vs tolerance for the issue of atheism vs theism. A fundamentalist atheist is no different to any other fundamentalist. This does not justify lumping all atheists together, being dismissive, or otherwise belittling another person's belief system.

"Absence of proof is not the proof of absence."
This is the core fallacy of atheism. It requires just as much a leap of faith as religion: believing in the absence or presence of a supreme being require similar facilities, and are different than believing nothing at all.

Thus, it is wrong to say that atheists don't believe in God(s), as atheists specifically believe that Gods do not exist. In essence, Agnostics are completely without dogma; atheists are not.

Disclaimer: It's the atheists' right to make the leap of faith, even though it's a pretty short and easy leap, from believing in nothing to believing there is nothing, but I believe differently.

Cute, but Pastafarianism *is* ID. The question is whether they should teach theism, since they are (arguably) teaching atheism, to cancel out religious involvement by the state.

"If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."

Taking every opportunity to try to convince others to not collect stamps and to ridicule people who do to the point of inventing tales about flying spaghett monsters and invisible unicorns is an obsession.

I don't know if there's a silent majority of atheists, but on Slashdot there's several who don't merely disbelief in the existence of supernatural, but disbelief it with conviction and passion and feel the need to preach their views and try to offend and/or ridicule every theist at every opportunity. It is rather difficult to avoid drawing parallels between such people and religious fundamentalists.

Now lets see how many flames I'll get, and how many of them claims that atheism is more scientific than theism (it isn't; supernatural is outside the scope of science, so science can't say anything about the existence of nonexistence of any supernatural entity), and how many make references to invisible one-horned spaghett monsters and imagine that it makes a valid argument (it doesn't; it's both a strawman argument and an appeal to ridicule).

There is a way of proving something doesn't exist: assume it does exist, draw conclusions from that, and if they lead to a contradiction, either the assumption is false, or your logic is flawed. In the rather simple case of invisible pink unicorns, you could say for example that invisible means it reflects no light, pink means it reflects some light, and as these contradict, either invisible pink unicorns cannot exist, or there's a flaw in my reasoning. And if you were to take out either the "invisible" or the "pink" part, no, I have no reason to believe they exist, but I'm not about to claim I'm sure they don't unless you want to get more specific.

CNN is reporting that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III has ruled that Intelligent Design cannot be discussed in Dover, Pennsylvania biology classes.

And of course Intelligent Design is science. The very point of the Darwin tautology (i.e. about the fit to survive surviving) was to come up with a way to explain why a biological world that seems intelligently designed isn't. Evolution exists not to explain the evidence, but to deny it with the sorts of over-reaching, explain-all-with-one-idea theories that were so popular in the 19th century. Marx is dead and Freud is dying. Only Darwin lingers on, long past his time, defended by an intolerant priesthood that will tolerate no dissent.

Recall Galileo muttering, "Nevertheless it moves," and you'll taste the humor of all this.

--Mike Perry, editor of Theism and Humanism by Arthur Balfour

actually i can recall several fundamentalist rants that directly attacked
'secular humanism' as a force of evil. which i could never understand,
there are so few people who would all themselves that. they dont prostyletize.
they beleive much of what christians are supposed to beleive, they just dont
give money to any church. i would love for a beleiver to try to explain why
these people are so damn nasty.

You cannot prove a negative from particulars. I'd have to point to everything that can exist and show you none of those corresponded to a given definition of God for me to prove there is no God. I would have to do the same thing regarding invisible pink unicorns.

Are you suddenly going to adopt a neutral position with regard to invisible pink unicorns too?

What makes someone atheist is not believing in God(s). As it happens this is the default position of someone who is not religious, as without observed evidence of logical proof, it is irrational to believe in God(s).

I think you're confusing atheist and agnostic, the latter being the logical default position, since there's no proof God doesn't exist either.

Not TECHNICALLY true. Since "atheist" literally means "non-theist", or a person who rejects or doesn't believe in a system of dogmatic faith.

Here is where you are mistaken. To be theist is not just to be dogmatic or religious. It is to believe in God(s). That was my entire point of my post, that "religious" does not equal "theist" (see Buddhism for an example), and therefore, "non-religious" does not equal "atheist".

Blindly believing in [whatever], and [for some reason] believing in God(s) , are not the same thing. It just so happens that most people who believe in God(s) do so blindly.

The opposite of "a religious person" is not "an atheist".

Not TECHNICALLY true. Since "atheist" literally means "non-theist", or a person who rejects or doesn't believe in a system of dogmatic faith. Technically "atheist" is in fact the opposite of "religious". Of course, reality is never as clear cut as labels we humans come up with, and it's true that you can, for example, consider yourself to be both an atheist and a, say, Unitarian at the same time, with really provoking much in the way of contradiction. That's why I tend to use the word 'atheist' more in a manner of "one who rejects religious dogma/religion" rather than "one who does not believe in god or a higher power or currently unknown levels of existence". I also tend to use "Secular Humanist" a lot, as it's a (marginally) less "loaded word" among those trying to demonize people who don't share their beliefs.

I agree with most of the rest of what you say.

The opposite of "a religious person" is not "an atheist".

What makes someone religious is their blind acceptance of some dogma. Faith defines religion - belief without or even contrary to evidence or reason. Many Buddhists are atheists and yet still religious people because they follow the doctrine of their religion without question.

What makes someone atheist is not believing in God(s). As it happens this is the default position of someone who is not religious, as without observed evidence of logical proof, it is irrational to believe in God(s). I myself held this position for the majority of my life. But it's possible to be a non-religious theist, if you've got a sound argument for the existence of God.

Myself, I find that speaking of God makes perfect sense if you see it as speaking of the universe anthropomorphically. My beliefs are not fundamentally different from an atheist's, but suddenly I can understand theists statements about God in a way which not only means something, but quite often produces true statements on the theists parts. Seen in this way, a proof of God's existence is just a proof of the universe's existence, which is trivial as the universe is "all that which exists".

It's about belief, or lack thereof. Period. If you persist in misunderstanding what it means, then you will be unable to communicate meaningfully with the people you talk to. You'll be just like someone looking at a red apple, and calling it salty. People will immediately be misled into talking about taste, when originally, you were talking about color. If you want to talk about beleif in a god or gods, then atheism and theism define the territory. If you want to talk about knowledge, then theism and atheism are irrelevant. They both contain people that know things, and that don't know things. When you assume that an atheist says they "know" something, but that atheist has never done any such thing, you have screwed up. If you want to be a screwup, I can't help you. If you can't get it right from what you've read in this thread, and not only from me, then you're probably never going to get it right -- you're a victim of your own dogma, and it's gone and run over your karma. :-)

I am saying that the word "atheism" encompasses both weak atheism and strong atheism, and as such is too broad.

But... that's ridiculous.

Look here. Theism encompasses theist A who believes only in a god or gods but disbelieves in UFOs, theist B who beleives in a god or gods but refuses to take a stand on UFOs, and theist C who believes in both a god or gods and in UFOs. Should we now say that only thiest C "is" a theist, because his outlook encompasses belief systems and no disbelief systems?

Clearly not, because being theist is about belief in a god or gods. And nothing else!

Being atheist only defines the state of being without belief in a god or gods. That's it. Nothing else. That means that the only definitive element in determining atheism is lack of belief in a god or gods. That's it.

The term atheist isn't "too broad" in fact, it is as narrow as theist is. It only depends on one issue: lack of belief.

The words theism and atheism are opposite sides of the same coin, and they work perfectly well.

You said that the problem was the lack of appearance of a belief system. That's not a problem; I am an atheist, and I don't have a belief system of either stripe -- I don't even fractionally believe in a god or gods, nor do I indulge in the conceit that I know anything about any imaginary subject.

The reason, as I said, that atheism appears as the lack of a belief system is because atheists lack belief in a god or gods. Period. That's all you can say about them as an entire group. As soon as you presume they hold some other belief system, you're talking about something else already, and you're entirely out of the domain where theist / atheist is the question you're asking.

It is a safe bet that most atheists, like most theists, adhere to many belief systems. This does not make an atheist into a theist. That's what you're trying to do: Make the state of non-belief in a god or gods stand for a different belief entirely, one that you have absolutely no business assigning to all atheists.

The problem here is not the definition of theism or atheism; the problem is your lack of understanding what they mean. I'm just trying to help you out. :-)

See the rest of the thread to learn more about these issues. If you want to understand atheism, you have to drop the incorrect definition that the fundamentalists use. Atheism is definitely not completely specified by "belief that there is no God or Gods." Some atheists take that position, some don't.

And here is where we get to the real crux of the matter. We are all talking about things that are fundamentally pre-rational. There are (simplifying greatly) three epistemologies at loggerheads here:

1. The worldview that includes these axioms: God, science. [theism]
2. The worldview that includes these axioms: science. [rationalism]
3. The worldview that includes these axioms: nothing. [postmodernism]

(To be more precise, the word "science" here should be replaced with "logic" or "reason.")

Nope.

Unfortunately it isn't as simple or as comfortable as that. While huge amounts of rubbish are written by half-arsed thinkers in the name of post modernism, 'logic' and 'reason' are not (or at least, not primarily) in the science camp. They are, unfortunately, in the post-modern (or, more strictly, relativist) camp.

Arguing from first principles is not, of course, new. Descartes famously tried to do it. But before you can start doing 'science' about the physical world, you have to assert first that there is a physical world, second that we have access to it, and third that we can communicate with one another about it. And, unfortunately, there is no way of proving any of those statements - they have to remain axiomatic.

And in fact they're highly problematic. When you start thinking about how you would go about proving that there was a physical world you discover that the concepts get very slippery. There's actually nothing in the least 'modern' let alone 'post-modern' about this - Gorgias had pointed it out ( in 'On Nonexistence') as early as the fourth century BC.

Of course, at some level this doesn't matter. Pragmatically, modern physics works and delivers us lots of benefits, even if its epistemological underpinnings are extremely shakey. The only philosophical doctrine which isn't full of shakey bits and internal contradictions is solipsism, and frankly even if solipsism is true it's too boring for me to take seriously.

But the social scientists on campuses across the world boring on about how modern science has no more solid foundation than the beliefs of witch doctors, may be intellectually lazy, but they're also strictly, technically, right. As far as we can rationally prove.

Theism guarantees you nothing. You take it on faith that you will go to some heaven when you die. By definition, theism/religion in general is not an empircal fact. If it were, it would be science, not religion and it would not require any faith of you.

It goes the other way, too. There are people out there who believe we've never been to the moon. There are people who do not believe in atoms. There are people who do not beleive in evolution.

This conclusively demonstrates that knowledge is not a pre-requisite for belief, and that also, belief can exist despite the availability of knowledge and objective facts to the community. That is why the agnostic position is one that is entirely separate from that of belief in god, or lack of belief in god. Belief is entirely disjoint from knowledge. It is also why the state of knowing if there is a god or god is not another side to the question of belief in a god or god. That question is only about belief, and that is not only its nature, but an inevitable consequence of the question itself.

To illustrate, I would ask you this question:

Do you, in any way or to any degree, believe in a god or gods? If you answer yes, I shall deem you theist. If you answer no, I shall deem you athiest. In this way, I have codified how you answered the question in such a way as to identify your stance on this particular area of superstition. Note I didn't ask why you hold whichever position you hold, I just asked what the position was. The why question comes later, and that is where we get into knowledge, or lack of same.

The fact is, this question does not have three answers, and it never did. Those that want it to have three answers just don't understand what they're being asked (and I suspect that many times, they may not want to understand what they're being asked.)

I am an atheist. I hold not even the tiniest shred of belief in a god or gods. I think the question of knowledge is actually that of the social coward; Of course no one knows. That's the whole point. How can you have any knowledge about something that there is no evidence for?

Is it really neccessary for me, for instance, to make a separate declaration that I don't know if there are little pink unicorns dancing jigs on the dark side of the first planet in the Alpha Centauri system? Or, is it simply intellectually honest for me to say, "I don't believe that this is the case." I have no knowledge of this, but as with any proposition that comes to me entirely without any objective fact to back it up, and in stark contrast with what science tells me the probabilities are, I'm going to discount it as without any characteristic worthy of instilling belief until, or unless, the situation changes. This is a very reasonable and sane approach to take.

Agnosticism is not required. No matter how loudly the religious community shouts their stories, no matter how politically correct it is to say "it's ok to teach children stories that have zero objective facts to back them up as if they were cold, hard truths", a lack of belief is sufficient to carry the day. Do what you want, say what you want, lacking belief is a perfectly valid position that in no way requires or depends upon knowledge.

In fact, the important, no, the critical, question for everyone — no matter what you want to call them — is do you believe..., or to phrase it another way, do you have faith... ...in the god being presented by the religion at hand?

On a more practical level, see the dictionary definition given by bamberg. 1a, as was pointed out. You use the "American Heritage" dictionary and you expect a definition that wasn't biased towards the Christian worldview? How funny is that? The "American Heritage" is superstition. We've a long, long way to go before we can dig out of that hole.