RE: Atheist extremism is bad... mkay?
September 27, 2010 at 11:14 am
(This post was last modified: September 27, 2010 at 11:21 am by Edwardo Piet.)
Well, if I could get away with it honestly I wouldn't even label myself an atheist because of the very fact atheism is so often misunderstood.
I wish I could honestly follow Sam Harris' idea of not calling myself anything. But I can't honestly do that because if someone asks me if I believe in God and I honestly answer "No" and they then say something like "Oh, so you're an atheist then" for instance, I couldn't honestly say "No" because I really am, properly, an atheist by definition. If I don't label myself as an atheist, others will do it for me. And I'd rather openly and honestly take the initiative.
So I call myself an atheist out of honesty because I really am one. I see it as merely unfortunate that atheism is quite widely misunderstood. I see it as merely unfortunate because no misunderstandings of atheism actually represent me or what atheism actually is.
Sam Harris talks of how the word "atheist" isn't really needed because it's as useless as a word as "non-astrologer". But my counter argument to that is, used in combination with my example above, if someone asked if I believed in astrology and I said "No", they wouldn't say "Oh, so you're a non-astrologer then" and label me as that, since such a term is certainly not wildly used. And it's a whole other story with "atheist" and "atheism". So I counter Sam Harris in short by, I hope, explaining how his analogy is not sufficiently accurate (as I hope I've explained now).
I wish I could honestly follow Sam Harris' idea of not calling myself anything. But I can't honestly do that because if someone asks me if I believe in God and I honestly answer "No" and they then say something like "Oh, so you're an atheist then" for instance, I couldn't honestly say "No" because I really am, properly, an atheist by definition. If I don't label myself as an atheist, others will do it for me. And I'd rather openly and honestly take the initiative.
So I call myself an atheist out of honesty because I really am one. I see it as merely unfortunate that atheism is quite widely misunderstood. I see it as merely unfortunate because no misunderstandings of atheism actually represent me or what atheism actually is.
Sam Harris talks of how the word "atheist" isn't really needed because it's as useless as a word as "non-astrologer". But my counter argument to that is, used in combination with my example above, if someone asked if I believed in astrology and I said "No", they wouldn't say "Oh, so you're a non-astrologer then" and label me as that, since such a term is certainly not wildly used. And it's a whole other story with "atheist" and "atheism". So I counter Sam Harris in short by, I hope, explaining how his analogy is not sufficiently accurate (as I hope I've explained now).
