Is atheism a belief?

[T0 Th3 M4X]

I'm pretty sure the Romans were using it to describe people who didn't pay deference to the Roman gods before Christianity was even around much.

Don't get him started you will be bashing your head against his insistence atheism is loosey goosey term forever .

We went through this yesterday.  Oh, I know though. You still believe Encyclopedia.com is making it up.


Atheism - 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.

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