Adjective or Noun?

[Ben Davis]

---

I find it drives me crazy when I see "atheist" used as an adjective. Like, "I'm atheist" instead of "I'm an atheist".

I'm pretty sure the word "atheist" is exclusively a noun, and "atheistic" would be the correlated adjective, but have things changed? Is "atheist" an acceptable adjective now?

It also drives me crazy when people capitalize "atheist" or "theist" in the middle of sentences without either being a part of a title, but that's a subject for another day.

Thoughts?

---

I'm guilty of this. You're correct, the adjective is 'atheistic' (e.g. 'his value-systems are atheistic') but I've used 'atheist' in its place before, when talking with theists. I've only done this to draw specific attention to the fact that 'atheist' is an almost redundant label; it's erroneously conflated with a ton of values when it doesn't tell you anything about a person other than their beliefs on one specific subject.