Satanism and Atheism

[robvalue]

That's like me saying if you don't believe in holy unicorns, you must be an evil-unicorn cultist.

It's just propaganda put out there by the church who is obviously afraid of atheism. You have come to the right place to ask this question, the mistake most religious people make is going to other religious people to ask questions about the truth of religious claims, only to receive more propaganda and spin.

As has been said, atheism is in no way a religion. It's not a belief, it's not a world view. All it includes is the lack of belief (rejection) of any and all theistic claims.

But to be clear, by rejecting the claim, "A god exists with properties x,y,z" all we are saying is that we don't have enough evidence or a good reason to agree and say "Yes, I believe that god exists too." We are not saying "No god does or could ever exist". This is a common confusion. Some atheists adhere to the latter statement, referred to as hard or strong atheism. But that, as everything else, is down to the atheist and not a requirement at all. Atheism is just saying that we don't have a good reason to believe that a god exists, until such time convincing evidence is presented.

Let me give another example to show how the claim rejection thing works:

Bill and I come across a sealed box. Bill says to me, "There are diamonds in this box." I ask Bill for his evidence or justification for this statement, and he offers none. He says, "I just know it."

My reaction to this claim is to reject it. I don't accept that there is a good reason to believe that it is true that diamonds are in the box. I am not saying that there is no way diamonds can be in the box. I am saying that until there is a good reason to think that there are diamonds in the box beyond a reasonable doubt, that there is no merit in stating or believing that to be the case. Now if Bill had brought along some sort of diamond detecting device, which had reliably shown accurate results before in diamond detection, he could give me good evidence with a reading from that. Otherwise, he's just guessing.

This does not make me closed minded. I am perfectly happy to accept the claim, once I have a good reason to do so. What I'm not happy to do is accept claims with no evidence to back them up. This also does not make me an anti-diamondist, or someone who is afraid of or hates diamonds.

However, if Bill said there was an invisible snooker ball in the box, I would not only reject that claim, but would require much more evidence and reasoning to ever believe such a statement. Again, I wouldn't be saying 100% that invisible snooker balls can't exist, I'm just saying I have no good reason to believe they do exist. As this is a more extraordinary claim, the evidence needs to be similarly extraordinary to back it up, because it is much more outside the realms of what I have experienced so far in reality.