Daystar

[Kyuuketsuki]

You say you were an atheist ... at the risk of invoking the NTS fallacy, why were you one? What kind of atheist were you ... I mean me? I'm pretty much a militant atheist, very much a strong atheist using more conventional definitions.

What is the NTS fallacy? I was an atheist because that is the way I was raised. My folks didn't go to church and thought religion and God was a crock of shit. Religious people were nuts who wanted to control small minded people. A view that I think is somewhat shortsighted.

NTS as leo (I think) said is the No True Scotsman fallacy ... theists often use it when they try to claim certain people aren't whatever flavour of theism they are a classic example being Adolph Hitler who claimed he was a theists, his SS troops had "God Be With Us" (in German) on their belts, the Jewish holocaust was anti-Semitic and Jews are the Christ-killers, the RC church proclaimed Hitler "Europe's favourite son" and ... anyway I could go on but the point is that (understandably) Christians don't tend to want links made between Hitler and their religion yet the links are there. IT may well be that Hitler's base motivation was entirely non-theistic but there undoubtedly is some fairly significant evidence to suggest that his motivation was, like many previous religious anti-Semitic pogroms, religious.

The NTS risk for me is that I am using logic that flaws my own view that most theists who claim they were once atheist were not so much atheists but disillusioned believers.

In your case that is obviously not true.

Using the term militant atheist is important because there are atheist who are not militant. Everyone I know are non-militant atheists. I only know 1 theist other than myself. I don't really like to use the term theist. I was a non-militant atheist.

I have to disagree that being an atheist, beyond an observation that we lack a sense of community that often centres around churches and so on, has any cultural connotations at all.

Why not? Or perhaps; do you see that ever changing in the future?

Why should it? "Atheism" (like "theism") is just a label and atheists, like JJ pointed out, can be any colour, any culture, come from all walks of life and typically have very, very little in common ... they also tend (my opinion) to be intelligent and willing buck trends. That doesn't make for a good cultural or community feel especially in a society that is largely theistic to some degree or other.

I don't think atheism will ever carry any philosophical or cultural implications.

Kyu