Rejection of All that is Holy

[Esquilax]

My discomfort stems from my belief that ideas have consequences. The simple act of defining something places it in relationship with other meanings within the cultural context of the definer. That is a basic principle of semiotics. Dictionary definitions are fine in themselves as long as we remember that they are cultural artifacts that enforce homogeny under the pretense objectivity. As it relates specifically to atheism, I believe that in Western culture it is impossible to disentangle the lack of belief in god(s) from the realization of that idea as the rejection of the spiritual experiences of the divine in oneself and others.

You're right, of course; ideas do have consequences. Where you err is in the types of consequences you ascribe to atheism, the strength with which those consequences impact our beliefs, and in some sense the way human minds work.

The first and second are fairly easy to explain, in that you're still trying to categorize atheism as a rejection of a proposition (it isn't) that necessarily entails an additional rejection of supernatural beliefs (it doesn't.) But the third is, I think, perhaps more important. To be blunt, people aren't these perfectly rational idea machines that can determine the consequences of their beliefs with total clarity. People special plead, they make exceptions for beliefs they'd prefer to be true, they have biases. Atheism doesn't exempt you from that. Even if what you are saying is exactly true, it still wouldn't be true in practice simply because of this fact; we are great at making room in our heads for cognitive dissonance. You could be one hundred percent correct and still have to approach every atheist on an individual basis, because the actual definition of an atheist and what you perceive the consequences of that to be don't necessarily match up as a matter of course.

I still disagree with you about what you think atheism entails, for reasons I'll make clear below, I just felt that needed to be pointed out.

What I am saying is that within Western culture there is no conceptual vacuum in which atheism is the default position; atheism will always be a positive act of rejection of spiritual experiences as divine.

No, not really. I doubt you'd find an atheist here who, when presented with a clear, unambiguous divinely inspired spiritual experience, for which no more likely explanation can be found, would actually reject it. Disagreement is not rejection, Chad; atheism simply disagrees with the claim that currently observed spiritual experiences are divine, mostly owing to their vague and subjective nature. But that disagreement withers and dies in the face of a divine experience that has all of those mitigating circumstances stripped away. The absolute best you could say, if you really wanted to push your case as strongly as you could, is that atheism is a rejection of all currently claimed spiritual experiences as divine, and even that's not entirely true as this "rejection" would also vanish if new evidence came to light that proved a past spiritual experience to be divine.

Can it really be called a rejection at all, if the threshold for acceptance is "must be really divine"?