An Atheist By Any Other Name . . .

I'm honestly impressed by the amount of arguing that can be generated by what, at its heart, is an irrelevant semantic triviality. I even got sucked into it at first with the "Atheist Manifesto."The words mean what the words mean, and the negative connotations that have grown around terms like "Atheist" grew because of cultural stigma associated with what the word means. Change the word, and the same cultural stigma will follow those who were already accurately described in the first place.Attempts to shirk the negative connotations of non-belief in deities (that such people cannot be moral, are bad, are going to Hell, are somehow less, are defiant against God, are deceived, are lying to themselves, are unenlightened, etc) are merely yet more attempts to treat the symptoms, not the disease, and as such are doomed to failure from the start.The entire debate strongly resembles a sports team deciding what to name themselves, rather than actual people identifying their beliefs based on the actual definitions of words. I am an Atheist, regardless what anyone chooses to call me, because I have no belief in gods and that's what the word means. This strange desire to label "ourselves" is just more tribalistic nonsense, playing into the human instinct to identify a clear "us" and "them" so that "we" can all know the "enemy."The real problem is not a word. The real problem is not even that a word carries inaccurate negative connotations, or even that people are religious in a world where the evidence clearly does not support such philosophies - these are symptoms of the true disease.The real problem is that humanity is, by default, insane. We don't think rationally on a consistent basis. We tie ourselves to solutions before seriously considering alternatives. We cling to beliefs out of a sense of comfort and fear of shame at some sort of betrayal of our tribe should we consider believing differently. When outraged, we enter into disgusting contests to see who can be more angry and propose the most unhinged retribution. We look to confirm what we already believe, rather than checking to see if there's actually a reason to change our minds to the point of ignoring contradictory evidence. We worship our own ignorance, impressing ourselves with unanswered questions rather than actually seeking the answers.I am a Rationalist. I hold the truth (meaning an accurate internal model of objective reality) to be sacred, and I use real methods for discerning objective fact to attempt to become more sane, and less insane, than my mammalian brain tends to do by default. I try to shed false beliefs, and embrace ones that are more likely to reflect reality, even though this requires hardship when admitting that something I've believed in was false all along, or when forcing myself to accept that something is true when I really, really don't want it to be.As a consequence of my goal to be sane and think rationally, I do not believe in gods or anything else that requires the strange fault in human cognition called "faith." This qualifies me as an Atheist, even though many others identify themselves as Atheists who have arrived at a lack of belief in gods through entirely different means. That all those who don;t believe in gods are Atheists is simple fact, and it's irrelevant if some Atheists hold beliefs or use reasoning that I find abhorrent. This isn't a fandom where we determine who is or isn't a "true" Atheist, this isn't a soccer match where we all take sides and oppose the other simply because they exist. The word Atheist has a definition, and if you fit that definition, you're an Atheist, whether you also choose or prefer to identify yourself as a Heathen or a Skeptic or a Bright. Perhaps next we can argue over whether to call ourselves the Unified Atheist League or the Allied Atheist Alliance; clearly the latter is preferable because it has three A's, right?What word we use is irrelevant. The meaning represented by the word "Atheist" will remain. I don't believe in gods. Why bother trying to obfuscate that simple fact? To appeal to a segment of the population that irrationally hates and despises us? Why would we want to appeal to the insane, when we should be simply trying to combat the insanity itself? If not irrational thinking, then at least we could fight one simple aspect of irrationality and work to diminish the bigotry and stereotypes that cause inaccurate "negative connotations" in the first place!Call me whatever you want; I've never been much of a sports fan anyway, so I don't really care what "team" someone decides to think that I'm on.

So what?We are who we are, we believe what we believe, and a name doesn't alter any of that.Does the identity of the namer alter the accuracy of the name? I understand that language changes over time and so meanings and definitions also change, but the basic meaning of Atheist certainly seems to fit.People often bring up the lack of a term for "non-racist" when discussing the need for a term like "Atheist," but these people have forgotten that there did exist terms for people who were not racist back when such positions were held by the minority. We simply prefer not to remember them, because they were abhorrent. But terms like "nigger-lover" or "race-traitor" are still sometimes (though thankfully more rarely) used today as derisive terms for one who was not racist as the majority was.The term Atheist exists to identify a subset of the population as distinct from the majority. Walking down the street, most of the people you meet are in fact Theists, and so the distinction is at least relevant; if someone asks your religion, what are you to reply? Remain silent? You'll have to reply using the term Atheist or something that means the same, like "I'm not religious" or "I don't believe in gods."I see no rational reason to complain about the word itself. I find plenty of reason to oppose the inaccurate negative connotations people like to apply...but I don't think that racists think differently about people of African descent whether they self-identify as Black, African, Colored, or any other term, and I don't think that a random person on the street will be somehow convinced to cast aside the "negative connotations" of the term "Atheist" simply because we try to use a different word. People are irrational, they're insane, they're usually not (that) stupid.

I agree, but the difference seems to be less the term "Atheist" and more the inclusion of the "lol" and your smarmy artwork.When I identify myself as an Atheist, I tend not to make such faces, nor do I laugh. In fact, such disclosure bears a striking similarity to when I used to tell people I was Christian, or when I tell people that I work in IT - a simple communication of a fact, unattached from the 4chan-level of discourse you seem to imply.Why such a caricature from you, I wonder? Do you feel like all Atheists are "shoving it down your throat" every time they identify themselves, or that all Atheists are in fact stupid little 4channers who think they're somehow better than you?Certainly your representation describes no Atheist I've ever met. But I couldn't care less about "reclaiming" a word. It's not "our" word, nor is it "your" word or "their" word. It's a word. In English. It has a definition meaning "one who does not have any belief in gods." When I identify myself as an Atheist, I feel exactly the same as when I identify myself as male - the term describes one true aspect about me, and that's all.People have irrational connotations associated with all sorts of words. We have stereotypes for men, for women, for police, for IT workers, for Whites, Blacks, Asians, Chrisitans, Democrats, and just about any other "tribe." I don't see the point in trying to change the word - the word isn't the problem, it's just a word. The problem is the irrational thought that adds additional, inaccurate information to the word.I'm an Atheist, because I have no belief in gods and that's what the word means. I'm male, because I identify as male and have a Y chromosome, and that's what the word means. Why all the semantic games to avoid a word that accurately describes a group of people when used by people who are at least slightly sane and have an IQ above 70?

Not really. We just don't find any convincing reason to believe in the supernatural.There's a difference.

Define "accept." For example, I fully accept the fact that you genuinely believe what you say you believe.That's not the same as thinking that your reasoning is sound, or that I think you're right. I can still think you're "deluded" in your heartfelt and honest belief. It's a well known trait of people to be wrong you know. Many theists have told me that I'm "deluded" (well, usually it has something to do with deceit from the devil, or that I'm a fool, that sort of thing).If two people start with the same evidence and reach mutually exclusive conclusions on a matter of fact (like whether the sky is blue, as opposed to a matter of opinion like whether blue is better than pink), one of them has to be "deluded" in that at least one of them must have arrived at a false conclusion.I accept that you have your beliefs, and that you genuinely believe them. I accept that you have every right to believe whatever you find to be convincing, and that whether your beliefs are accurate or not should have no bearing on whether or not it's "okay" for you to have them (in a social sense; having accurate beliefs should be encouraged, but restricting belief and thought leads to social stagnation and intolerance and a lot of other negative consequences).I just don;t necessarily accept that your beliefs are correct, or that those beliefs are rational.

And that's perfectly fine. We're dealing with a question of fact, not opinion, and at least one of us has to be wrong because the positions are mutually exclusive. Clearly, each of us believes that we are right and the other wrong. We either have different sets of evidence (which can lead to different perfectly rational conclusions), or one or both of us are being irrational.The question, then, if we want to resolve which of us has beliefs that accurately reflect reality, is how to test them.

Because the term "atheist" refers to a specific subset of the population, just as "theist" refers to a much larger subset. It's an identifier. There is a useful distinction between those who do believe in gods and those who do not.If 90% of the world's population were stamp collectors, there would be a term for non-stamp-collectors, because such a designation would be useful.I have absolutely no problem with being labelled by a term that accurately reflects my beliefs, and while "atheist" might not be complete, it's still entirely accurate. I don't believe in gods. I don't think they exist. I'm roughly as certain that gods do not exist as I am that we don't live in the Matrix. And I think trying to avoid an accurate term on preferential grounds is silly.

The "problem" is not with the terminology, which remains accurate. "Atheist" describes one's position on the existence of gods, but does not for example describe one's position on national politics or the color blue or whether the Earth is flat.The problem is that people have the insane tendency to try to describe others (though not usually themselves and rarely people they know well and interact with frequently) with single terms, as if a single word could encapsulate all of what describes a person.Our knowledge of others, especially those we don't know well, is limited, yet our brains try to describe others just as completely based on that small amount of information as if we knew the person well.It's like the cognitive fault that causes us to attribute the actions of others to enduring personality traits, while attributing our own actions to circumstances. If you see a coworker storming around looking all angry, you'll instinctually label him an "angry person," even though (unbeknownst to you) some asshole backed into his car and drove off an hour ago; your coworker is angry because his car was damaged, and anyone would be angry about that.I'm an atheist, and that term accurately describes my position on whether or not gods exist...but I'm a complete person, and my position on whether gods exist or not does not define in totality who I am, just as a person who self-identifies as "Christian" cannot be defined totally by that particular allegiance.

shadow71, this basically means that every single person who believes in a global Flood myth or does not believe that evolution is the driving force behind biodiversity is, in fact, delusional. Creationism is a set of fixed false beliefs typically held even after exposure to facts which falsify them.