RE: Is Lack of Belief the Best You Can Do?
March 19, 2016 at 1:51 pm
(This post was last modified: March 19, 2016 at 2:02 pm by Esquilax.)
Regarding this "ooh, under the 'lack of belief' definition, rocks and cabbages are atheists!" claim that Chad seems to like so much, I don't see why that bothers anyone too much, because I don't particularly take the fact that word definitions can be stretched to absurd lengths if you use simplistic, overly literal terminology to be a weakness of the definition, instead of just a willingness of certain people to ignore context and nuance when it serves their purposes. But, for the sake of argument, I'm willing to concede that perhaps the definition could be changed, because it doesn't matter.
What I'm not willing to do is go with Wooters and others' absurd alternative, that we should define atheism as active disbelief, because why would we ever do that? It doesn't match what we actually believe, for one, and Wooters, if you truly think that you're exposing the true beliefs of atheists with that schtick, rather than just playing silly word games as a rhetorical stunt, then you've got another thing coming. We're not all going to suddenly alter what we believe simply because you've found a problem with how a word is defined.
The most sensible thing to do would simply be to append the definition to specify that we're talking about thinking agents, and not literally everything. I thought that would be obvious, given that we're talking about beliefs and thinking agents are the only things that can have those, but apparently some people smugly think that, because a definition doesn't automatically spell everything out in painstaking, simplistic terms for them, it must actually mean what ridiculous thing they can twist it to mean, or that people under that label secretly are something else, or some shit. This thing about the rocks is roughly the same as if I were to say "theism is defined as belief in a god. But that's so vague, and a god could be a cabbage god. That sounds silly, therefore the definition is wrong, or theists secretly believe something else, or all theists are cabbages."
What I'm not willing to do is go with Wooters and others' absurd alternative, that we should define atheism as active disbelief, because why would we ever do that? It doesn't match what we actually believe, for one, and Wooters, if you truly think that you're exposing the true beliefs of atheists with that schtick, rather than just playing silly word games as a rhetorical stunt, then you've got another thing coming. We're not all going to suddenly alter what we believe simply because you've found a problem with how a word is defined.
The most sensible thing to do would simply be to append the definition to specify that we're talking about thinking agents, and not literally everything. I thought that would be obvious, given that we're talking about beliefs and thinking agents are the only things that can have those, but apparently some people smugly think that, because a definition doesn't automatically spell everything out in painstaking, simplistic terms for them, it must actually mean what ridiculous thing they can twist it to mean, or that people under that label secretly are something else, or some shit. This thing about the rocks is roughly the same as if I were to say "theism is defined as belief in a god. But that's so vague, and a god could be a cabbage god. That sounds silly, therefore the definition is wrong, or theists secretly believe something else, or all theists are cabbages."
