The meaning of Atheism.

[Existentialist]

I think the fundamental problem is that you want to wage war on the dictionary.

War? I think not. But when people start telling me that I must conform to a dictionary, that I am "wrong" if I don't conform, it automatically causes me to feel rebellious. I think that's ok. I oppose cultural totalitarianism in all its forms. Apart from anything else, I am well aware of two sets of people in my family, one very old and one very young, who use words in a way that would not be recognised in any dictionary, but who, with a little patience by the listener, are fully able to get their meanings across using their nonconformist definitions. Whether god exists or not is just as relevant to them as it is to me, so I include them in the debate. Words are not the sole domain of educated, compos mentis adults.

I think the problem is that dictionaries were only invented in the 18th Century. Were people able to function before then without dictionaries? I suspect so. Your stance is that words in the language must broadly retain a static, unchanging meaning and that any dispute can be solved objectively by a dictionary, and there is no need for us to spend time and effort getting to know each other's definitions. (I say broadly, I imagine even you would make some allowance for a proportion of words in the dictionary to change their meanings according to need - say 1% per decade?). The view that words must remain broadly static is actually a bit sad and rather dictatorial, especially if your class allegiances are to the power stratum that produces dictionaries and swears by them to impose concepts like "the government has run out of money" or "redundancies are inevitable". I'm not saying you are, by the way, just that there is an ideological level on which this debate is relevant and I want to make it quite clear that I am aware of that. From where I stand, there is no right or wrong when it comes to the definitions of words. Dictionaries simply add to the debate. We're not playing Scrabble. I see logicalities and illogicalities in the concepts that words represent, but I'm keen on personal linguistics - the way people use the same words to describe things that are subtly or even not very subtly different.

Do you want there to be separate words for "blue car", "red car", and "yellow car"? I think not. We use adjectives to add descriptive power to the noun; it's a literary technique, not a problem.

Oh please, I was not disputing the need for adjectives in language. My point was about tautologies and logical impossibilities in their use ("reddish rouge", "piano drumbeat", "agnostic atheist")

Actually, if you want to be accurate, there are only two positions on the subject of "belief in God". Theism and Atheism. You have to be one or the other; however much you want to complain. However, when you dive more into the different types of atheist and theist you have, you need to add more descriptors, like agnostic, ignostic, strong, weak, etc.

Actually, I'm not complaining. I'm putting forward rational alternatives to your point of view. That is ok, isn't it? Theism and Atheism are not mutually exclusive concepts. Not in my mind. The term atheos already has a presence in the ancient greek form of expression which means a set of ideas specifically around the non-worship of a particular set of deities. English adds -ism to this pre-existing word. The word theos in greek simply means god (but feel free to dispute my use of the word "simply" in this context I am not profoundly wedded to it). Theos does not carry any particular statement of a person's stance on the existence of god, atheos definitely does. The two words have profoundly different provenance and different masses of meanings behind them right up to the way we are using them now. Intuitively most people would not use the words as opposites, and far from being an argument arrived at by popularity, I think most people would rightly be tapping into the very different histories that attach to both words.

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It's the same thing, unless you don't want it to be. Therefore, if your problem is the wording of the phrase, your problem ends here, unless you simply want to have a problem. Same thing=no more ad infinitum discussion. You want to change the definition of atheism, you're screwed.

Here's a good idea. Let's just discard the word atheism and the word agnostic and only talk in terms of people who don't believe in god on the one hand, and people who believe there is no god on the other.