The meaning of Atheism.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

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.

It's not OK as a principle if you want to communicate effectively. It's merely arrogant and stubborn ;unattractive and unproductive attitudes.

[Shell B]

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.

That's not a good idea. How about we discard the word existentialism and call you a library anarchist? Fuck it, let's just throw away the dictionary all together because one person thinks that changing the meaning of words means he's challenging the "system." *A yawn smiley would work well right here.*

[Existentialist]

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.

It's not OK as a principle if you want to communicate effectively. It's merely arrogant and stubborn ;unattractive and unproductive attitudes.

"effectively" - would that mean efficiently, quickly, like a well-run production line in a competitively successful factory producing a good product? I don't want my communicating to be like that. I'd rather linger around concepts inefficiently musing on their multi-faceted possibilities, occasionally inhaling from a metaphorical joint and then asking my fellow debaters "do you mean this", while they muse for a while and say "no, I don't think I do" and take another afternoon to decide what they do mean - rather than have people say I'm arrogant, stubborn and unattractive - that's not how I make friends!

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Fuck it, let's just throw away the dictionary all together

I may be wrong, but I detect anger - the sort that comes from fear, from anxiety. It tends to make me think I might have touched a nerve, that it has been noticed that a fragile set of constructs is under threat from a potentially more intellectually demanding ethical framework. We will have to see how this pans out.

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Sorry Adrian I wasn't ignoring your questions, just dealing with the points I found most interesting first. I'll come back to any questions I don't answer in this post.

a) Strong and weak cannot help but borrow patriarchal inferences of masculine and feminine: macho and cowardly and therefore unnecessarily introduce the risk of attempts to humiliate, which isn't helpful to a rational debate.

Erm, how is that relevant? You asked for the words that describe the statements you presented. I gave you them. A "strong atheist" is someone who believes that there is no God. Your objections are merely your opinion; your dislike of certain words. You don't understand the words in the context they are in; you put your own context on top of them. To explain, there is nothing better about a "strong" atheist than a "weak" atheist. The word "strong" is to signify the strength of the belief in comparative terms; the strong atheist believes (actively) that there is no God, and the weak atheist has a more passive disbelief.

I'm afraid I think you are being extremely unrealistic about the way that the words strong and weak are perceived. I think that the statement "Your objections are merely your opinion" falls into the category of dismissiveness, which is far from being the objective stance you are claiming. I think I have put forward legitimate cultural concerns about the use of a particular set of polar opposites. I really do not think that dismissing it as mere opinion is respectful of another's right to hold an opinion. It's a shame.

c) There is an emerging section of campaigning that says that a strong atheist is someone who actively opposes religion and a weak atheist is someone who says we shouldn't be too hard on religion.

No...there are words for that too. "anti-theism" and "anti-religious". Strong atheism is connected to neither. You can be a strong atheist and not be an anti-theist.

Well hang on. If anti-theism is a word for anti-religion then that means theism is religion, which confirms my critique of your later statement that Theism and Atheism are the only "strictly" possible beliefs in relation to belief in god.

d) Strong atheist is two words, not one word.

...and when was the rule is written that only one word is needed to accurately describe a statement?

Well that's a straw man if ever there was one. My position is that belief or non-belief in the non-existence of god is an extremely important concept, important enough to have their own unique, exclusive nouns which do not require any adjectives to explain them. Not any statement. In this context, just this one. I think that's reasonable.

Like I said, there are perfectly good words that exist already;

Perfection? Scary.

[Tiberius]

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.

I'm not telling you to conform to a dictionary. I'm telling you that the very purpose of dictionaries is to record what words mean in our language. That way, when we come across and unfamiliar word, instead of inventing a meaning for it, we look to see what the meaning is already (assuming it already has one). These meanings are invented by the people who create the words, and are modified to remove ambiguity. In many cases, the same word may have multiple meanings, all depending on the context the word is in. Dictionaries help us to understand which meaning should apply. It isn't cultural totalitarianism, so you can quit with the hyperbole; it's just a way of making conversation easier to understand. If we let people define their terms on a personal level, then you might be able to hold a conversation with people you are familiar with, but when you meet new people, conversing becomes impossible. If we have standards for what words mean, and we can get people to use those standards, then everyone can converse with everyone else.

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.

I didn't deny that words change, or that you can't figure out what people mean when they use strange definitions, but it isn't helpful if everyone does this. It only makes conversing harder in the long run. I'd also point out that your anecdote doesn't show itself as the rule, only something that you have observed withint your own family. I could relate similar anecdotes where words used in a non-standard way are not understood at all, sometimes within families, but very often between subcultures.

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.

Yes, but that doesn't mean the standard of language didn't exist. People have kept records of what words mean in their heads longer than dictionaries came around. With the spread of civilisation, it helps to keep track of language; dictionaries made that job easier, and they put the standard by which people spoke into a record that could survive the ages.

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.

By all means, have your own definitions for words. However, in a public forum; in a place where there are multiple people, it is considered *polite* to use words which everyone can relate to...in this case, the standard for the English language, which is neatly recorded in the dictionary. I don't care to learn your personal definitions, or anyone else's on this forum, when it is far easier to just make everyone use the meanings that are set out as a standard. If you don't do that, you are going to find yourself ignored.

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.

By all means debate the logicalities of the concepts; I'm not opposed to that. What I am opposed is to you going around making arguments with words that already have meanings that are accepted by the people here, and using them to make confusing statements like "theism and atheism are not mutually exclusive".

My point was about tautologies and logical impossibilities in their use ("reddish rouge", "piano drumbeat", "agnostic atheist")

You still haven't explained how "agnostic atheist" is a tautology / logical impossibility.

Actually, I'm not complaining. I'm putting forward rational alternatives to your point of view. That is ok, isn't it?

Sure...though they are far from rational.

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.

"theos" means "God" in Greek; "atheos" means "without God". atheos only carries a particular statement about a person's stance on the existence of God if you apply it to their stance. Saying someone is "atheos" doesn't automatically make them an atheist. Christians would say we have been without God since the fall. Both words carry a particular statement if you apply them to a stance on the existence of God. "theos" meaning God being present, and "atheos" meaning God not being present (in their beliefs).

In English, the words are both the stem of the words theism and atheism respectively. Theism means the belief in God; atheism means the non-belief in God. Why you insist on looking at the stems of words in order to tell something about their usage today is most amusing though, and of course, completely irrelevant to the discussion. Please stop. If you want to have a rational discussion, make rational arguments. Atheism and Theism have meanings; I've given you the meanings for them. Now tell me how they are not mutually exclusive (oh, and answer my challenge regarding agnosticism too).

[Tiberius]

Well hang on. If anti-theism is a word for anti-religion then that means theism is religion, which confirms my critique of your later statement that Theism and Atheism are the only "strictly" possible beliefs in relation to belief in god.

No, they are two separate words, with two separate meanings. I only put them together there because they are both words that are against theism in some way. Anti-theism is against the belief of theism; anti-religious is against religion (of which some contain theism).

My mistake for including anti-theism there if you didn't get my point correctly.

[Shell B]

Fuck it, let's just throw away the dictionary all together

I may be wrong, but I detect anger - the sort that comes from fear, from anxiety.

Why? Because I said fuck?

It tends to make me think I might have touched a nerve, that it has been noticed that a fragile set of constructs is under threat from a potentially more intellectually demanding ethical framework.

I leave my nerves at home when I'm on the internet, but thank you for your concern. You are not threatening, nor were we discussing your "intellectually demanding ethical framework." Of course, you could be just making up new meanings for intellectually demanding and ethical framework. Does intellectually demanding now mean definition changing and does ethical framework mean weak internet argument?

We will have to see how this pans out.

I hope I don't need a xanax by the time you are done flexing your superior intellect and making me feel immoral with your like totally amazing ethical framework.

[Existentialist]

I'm not telling you to conform to a dictionary. I'm telling you that the very purpose of dictionaries is to record what words mean in our language. That way, when we come across and unfamiliar word, instead of inventing a meaning for it, we look to see what the meaning is already (assuming it already has one). These meanings are invented by the people who create the words, and are modified to remove ambiguity. In many cases, the same word may have multiple meanings, all depending on the context the word is in. Dictionaries help us to understand which meaning should apply. It isn't cultural totalitarianism, so you can quit with the hyperbole; it's just a way of making conversation easier to understand. If we let people define their terms on a personal level, then you might be able to hold a conversation with people you are familiar with, but when you meet new people, conversing becomes impossible. If we have standards for what words mean, and we can get people to use those standards, then everyone can converse with everyone else.

That would be entirely valid if you were talking to a class of 8-year-old English pupils in a French class as an introduction to the concept of language. But come on, we're grown ups, we have autonomy. We don't have to play by those rules. (Please, don't let's go down the tangent of comparing me to an 8-year-old, really, there's no need)

I didn't deny that words change, or that you can't figure out what people mean when they use strange definitions, but it isn't helpful if everyone does this.

We are not talking about everyone doing this all the time. We are talking about the need to invent one word for people who believe there is no god, and another word for people who don't believe in god, rather than using the same word. Really, I'm not talking about going around jabbering in total nonsense. Just tweaking a couple of words. What's unhelpful about that?

It only makes conversing harder in the long run.

easier

I'd also point out that your anecdote doesn't show itself as the rule, only something that you have observed withint your own family. I could relate similar anecdotes where words used in a non-standard way are not understood at all, sometimes within families, but very often between subcultures.

True, but if people are determined to understand each other, often they don't need words at all. The willingness to try to understand is the key.

Yes, but that doesn't mean the standard of language didn't exist. People have kept records of what words mean in their heads

"In their heads" Exactly the same definition? Millions of people? Come on, back down - you have arrived at exactly the position I am arguing from. At that time, language would surely have been a far more fluid thing than you are allowing it to be.

longer than dictionaries came around. With the spread of civilisation, it helps to keep track of language; dictionaries made that job easier, and they put the standard by which people spoke into a record that could survive the ages.

Totally disagree. Ideas can only exist in the minds of living people. No meaning about human understanding of ideas can survive the "ages". That's theistic thinking.

By all means, have your own definitions for words. However, in a public forum; in a place where there are multiple people, it is considered *polite* to use words which everyone can relate to...in this case, the standard for the English language, which is neatly recorded in the dictionary. I don't care to learn your personal definitions,

"I don't care to learn your personal definitions," dismissiveness again. This is worrying in someone who is making a plea for others to be *polite* in a public forum. I have "cared" to study your personal definitions - I took some note of the Hayter-Braeloch scale before I rejected it. My personal definitions are considerably less complicated.

or anyone else's on this forum, when it is far easier to just make everyone use the meanings that are set out as a standard. If you don't do that, you are going to find yourself ignored.

Threats will get you nowhere!

By all means debate the logicalities of the concepts; I'm not opposed to that. What I am opposed is to you going around making arguments with words that already have meanings that are accepted by the people here, and using them to make confusing statements like "theism and atheism are not mutually exclusive".

"accepted by the people here" Would that be an appeal to the dictatorship of the majority? No - hyperbole - sorry. We are talking about just a couple of words. I'm even prepared to abandon them - give them up. Why are you so attached to just 2 words?

You still haven't explained how "agnostic atheist" is a tautology / logical impossibility.

Usage.

I said,

Actually, I'm not complaining. I'm putting forward rational alternatives to your point of view. That is ok, isn't it?

Sure...though they are far from rational.

Oh, now, that was cheap. (And incorrect)

"theos" means "God" in Greek; "atheos" means "without God". atheos only carries a particular statement about a person's stance on the existence of God if you apply it to their stance.

er... yes, we're talking about their stance, not their puddings, their cars, their houses, their mountains, their debts... yes, it's their stance that it is being applied to!

Saying someone is "atheos" doesn't automatically make them an atheist.

Well I can't imagine why an english speaker would lapse into greek. I was talking about introducing a couple of new words, not changing english into a foreign language.

Christians would say we have been without God since the fall. Both words carry a particular statement if you apply them to a stance on the existence of God. "theos" meaning God being present, and "atheos" meaning God not being present (in their beliefs).
In English, the words are both the stem of the words theism and atheism respectively. Theism means the belief in God; atheism means the non-belief in God.

Atheism, to me, means the belief that there is no God. I'm sorry, but I think the situation we have come across here is popularly known as "disagreeing". I hope this is ok. Please don't dismiss me! Please don't ignore me! I respect your opinion, Adrian, I just disagree with it. I am sure we can deal with this situation in a mature manner. Well, I'm not sure actually but I think I can anyway.

Why you insist on looking at the stems of words in order to tell something about their usage today is most amusing though, and of course, completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Because I think all words have many influences, popular usage is often related to underlying levels of meaning which are themselves frequently closely related to the word stem. I don't see what's so funny about that.

Please stop.

With your repeated dismissiveness, your threat to ignore me and now a request for me to cease expressing my ideas thinly coated in a gloss of sarcastic politeness I am really getting quite worried about the level of irrational anger that is leaking out through your post at the moment. Don't worry, I'm used to this!

If you want to have a rational discussion, make rational arguments.

Now that is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I have made rational arguments. All my arguments have a chain of reasoning backing them up. Your arguments have also been rational, but because our respective reasoning is taking a different course at different times is no excuse for one of us to accuse the other of irrationality. It is the basis of disagreement. A forum should be able to sustain this. It's what it's set up for.

Atheism and Theism have meanings; I've given you the meanings for them.

Your meanings; your opinions. Not the meanings. Or do you really see yourself as a guardian of objective truth on this subject? Will you swear to that on your dictionary?

Now tell me how they are not mutually exclusive (oh, and answer my challenge regarding agnosticism too).

I think atheism is the state of not believing in God. Theism is the following of religion. An atheist can follow a religion. These are my meanings; I see they cause a lot of anger, I am prepared to give them up if we can find alternative words - no, not the same words with a different meaning - different words. We are emerging from a long period of religious domination in our civilisation. The words we have been handed down are inadequate for our needs. We need new ones.

Agnosticism is the state of not having a belief about the existence of God. Therefore a person cannot be an agnostic and an atheist at the same time. Burn me as a witch if you want.

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My mistake for including anti-theism there if you didn't get my point correctly.

No, really, it was my mistake that you failed to explain yourself correctly.

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I hope I don't need a xanax by the time you are done flexing your superior intellect and making me feel immoral with your like totally amazing ethical framework.

Well done on recovering your poise there - and without using a single expletive! Glad you've calmed down, welcome back.

[Entropist]

I oppose cultural totalitarianism in all its forms.

Oh please. You aren't going to get thrown into a gulag because you prefer using words outside their customary usage.

[Existentialist]

Oh please. You aren't going to get thrown into a gulag because you prefer using words outside their customary usage.

Oh please. I never mentioned a gulag.

[Shell B]

Well done on recovering your poise there - and without using a single expletive! Glad you've calmed down, welcome back.

Well shit, I sure am fucking glad to be "poised" again. Oh for Christ's sake, did I just lose my temper again? I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm using friggin' expletives (whatever that big ole word means)!

For future reference, fuck is an adjective, verb and noun. For example, "I'm so fucking happy." "I like fucking." and "You are a fuck." Only the last one indicates anger. If you could find it in yourself to read the words in context, we may be able to avoid these emotional misunderstandings. I know it's hard, what with you being so smart and me being so ignorant and all.

Back to the point. I find that arguing the meaning of words does not make for stimulating conversation, as you suggested. Dictionaries were made so that we no longer had to have such frivolous conversations. We can now use those words to have bigger, better conversations.