(December 10, 2018 at 11:08 pm)Amarok Wrote:(December 10, 2018 at 10:53 pm)T0 Th3 M4X Wrote: Merriam Webster Dictionarya·the·ism
Atheism 2b - : a philosophical or religious position characterized by disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods
/ˈāTHēˌizəm/
noun
noun: atheism
- disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
Atheism, in general, the critique and denial of metaphysical in God or spiritual beings.
And by the way your definition does not actually state that atheism is a religion or a philosophy which is good as it would make no sense
Why am I not surprised you didn't post the whole bit they had up on atheism?
Anyway, here's a fuller explanation of atheism, especially in regard to the origination of the term. This is from encyclopedia.com
Early modern Christian writers often failed to distinguish between non-belief in "the true God" and non-belief in a supreme being per se, and atheism usually meant the assertion of the non-existence of the Judeo-Christian God. Strictly speaking, however, atheism is the denial of the existence of a divinity. As such, it is different from agnosticism (a suspension of belief on the question of God's existence) or simple theological heterodoxy. In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, however, the term atheist was used without great precision, even carelessly. The epithet was applied to religious dissidents, political enemies, and debauched libertines, usually with little concern for a person's real beliefs on the question of God's existence. Thus, when the sixteenth-century French cleric and writer François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) was accused of being an atheist because of the fun had at religion's expense in his comic novels Gargantua and Pantagruel, he lost no time in returning the charge at his sectarian opponents. Agnostics and religious skeptics; rationalists, deists, pantheists, materialists, members of dissenting religious sects, or those belonging to no recognized confessional religion; moral, religious, and political subversives; and general non-conformists as well as true unbelievers were all called atheists. In this respect, the early modern period was no different from earlier historical eras. As Socrates himself had discovered, "atheist" was a convenient label for any person who did not believe what everyone else believed and who showed independent, critical, and iconoclastic tendencies.
