(April 23, 2018 at 5:52 pm)Tizheruk Wrote: I'm more talking about deities and deification both are beliefs and all eastern religions . But Huggies already tried this tactic and after i listed off deities he tried to say only creator deities count . I don't buy this . If your telling me Guan Yu is a god of war he still counts as a god . Thus your not an atheist .
Yeah, the line between god and spirit is really nonexistent in a lot of Eastern religions. Like Shinto has spirits for almost everything (really, it's a lot like Khem's idea of targeted marketing gods in another thread). Taoism, like a lot of other Eastern religions, talks about Yin and Yang, as well as other spiritual entities. They're not necessarily creator deities, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck. And, again, Buddha seems to sit squarely on the godhood boundary, to the extent that any distinction is meaningless in practice.
So, that's why the idea of atheistic religions - at least, those that aren't openly and perhaps mockingly aping Christianity - is fuzzy. Because atheists, by definition, don't believe in any god, and a lot of other flavors of divinity are close enough to at least be considered godlike.
In any case, the entire point by theists on this matter is to attempt a really weak tu quoque in order to paint us either as being hypocrites, or, at the very least, just as bad as the theists we criticize. I'm sure that Huggy still thinks that Stalin's Russia is an example of atheistic dogma rather than a totalitarian dogma that violently imposed atheism on the masses as a means of controlling them.
