RE: Antitheism
February 3, 2016 at 11:10 pm
(This post was last modified: February 3, 2016 at 11:32 pm by Excited Penguin.)
(February 3, 2016 at 1:50 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:Rightfully pointing out that theism is a form of religion is not the same as saying all religions are theistic. I've said countless times I do not think that.Meandering Atheist Wrote:Can someone help me out here... Antitheist just means that I don't want theism to be true, correct? I've seen Hitchens say this a bunch of times (in videos) but I don't think people are on the same page as me.
An antitheist actively opposes theism. It may refer to being opposed to organized religion or it may be opposition to any belief in any deity. It's a little ambiguous, Excited Penguin seems to take it in the sense of being opposed to any religion, but not all religions are theistic, so anti-religionist would seem to be the more appropriate term for that. For instance I could see a religious humanist being an anti-theist in the sense of being actively opposed to people believing in any version of a God or gods while still technically being religious themselves without any contradiction.
The only claims I made countless times in this thread that I now realize are wrong are that 1)the notion of God originated in theism and that 2)deism doesn't make any sense. It has been pointed out to me that there's no reason to believe 1) is true. As for 2), I gave it some thought myself and reached the conclusion that every idea has to make some sense.
People believe in any God by conflating notions like authority, goodness, love and/or the concept of creation, etc. This creates an illusion in our minds where we consider the notion of God as describing something on its own - when it really doesn't. God describes a multitude of already existent things which are not miraculous at all - certainly not having the properties people generally attribute to God- in the minds of believers.