(December 10, 2018 at 11:46 pm)Amarok Wrote:Quote:Why am I not surprised you didn't post the whole bit they had up on atheism?I feel the need too
Anyway, here's a fuller explanation of atheism, especially in regard to the origination of the term. This is from encyclopedia.com
Quote: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 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.None of this challenges my point nor do I see how think it does .
It's a loosely used term. Get it? You keep saying it has to be something, and it doesn't. It applies to more things than are even being suggested by me and has been for many years. You just define it differently to fit whatever it is you want to believe, and it's fine, but your beliefs don't apply to everyone. There, now you don't have to deny scientific journals and accuse people of being in cults being they were singing.