(December 5, 2017 at 10:30 am)Khemikal Wrote:(December 5, 2017 at 10:25 am)Whateverist Wrote: Looks like you're not going to let me hang an "evangelical skeptic" moniker on you to differentiate what you are as an anti-theist over and above what I am as a simple atheist.Only because it doesn't fit. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who mobilize their objections. Hitchens comes to mind as a vocal and evangelizing anti-theist. Plenty of atheists reference his material with regards to the abrahamic god..but miss, I think, the thrust of his contention that the abrahamic god is just one expression of why -theism- is abhorrent.
Quote:I'm sure there are varieties of theistic ideologies which we all hold strong objections to. Everybody hates the ideology of the Westboro baptists. For that matter, most of the theists we meet here are anti-theist in regard to denominations that aren't their own. Christians tend to hate what mormons believe. I hate scientology; if I could, I'd have everyone who has profited from that church thrown in jail.The term is pretty explicit in that regard, don;t you think? Anti-theism. Not anti-christianism, anti-hinduism, anti-islamism....etc. The examples some person are willing to toss under the bus aren't theism gone wrong..they're theism done right...and that's the problem with theism -all of it-.
So would you say an anti-theist would be someone who holds strong objections to every form of theistic ideology, or just most of them?
Might we unearth Sam Harris's argument involving Jainism in regard to the question of anti-theism? If Hitchens' criticism of the Abrahamic god "is just one expression of why -theism- is abhorrent," don't the Jains count as theists who lack any of these aberrations. Being a bit of a peacenik, I admire Jains (though my love of bacon and tendency to imbibe a variety of intoxicants makes the religion personally unattractive). What kind of beef would a reasonable person have against the Jains? How do Hitchen's remarks about Yahweh apply to them in the slightest?
Due to an unfortunate post on this forum, I have had the misfortune of looking up the Church of the Creator. Now, I have a soft spot for pantheism. I think that it is indistinguishable from atheism on most important matters. With Creativity, we have an organization that has all the trappings of a Southern Baptist church without the theism. And with the Jains, we have theism without ANY of the trappings of the Southern Baptists. My point is that theism itself isn't necessarily the problem. After all, most of the things discussed in God is not Great do NOT apply the the Jains but probably do apply to Creativity.
Anyway, I guess I kind of drifted away from the "definition of anti-theism" part of the discussion to offer the point that theism isn't necessarily the biggest problem with religion.