What's in a name?
Offline Why do we call ourselves by names others invented for us to further their own propaganda? Atheist, godless, faithless etc are such names. They imply an irregularity about so named. The churches are great in inventing new words for concepts they invent and then whoever says they're crazy get stamped with a variation of same concept.
I could go into a whole list of this ( holy, sinful, blessed etc) but it would be like shooting pheasants in a supermarket.
My point now is we are not atheists. We are a bunch of folk who probably don't have much in common except perhaps an annoyance at some very childish bunch of humanoids (best case scenario) who decide to affix a strange word to those who don't share their "extra chromosome."
What interested me lately is what kind of survival value can this delusion have for they are surviving and multiplying nicely.
I would suspect it's similar to the survival value folk dancing may have...
But what do I know...
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I think Sam Harris addressed this. The word atheist is unneeded. We don't have a word for people who don't believe astrology or UFO abductions, and so it should be with religion. For now though, we are stuck with atheist.
For my part, I like the word. It has a air of class and intelligence about it. I see no reason to call ourselves anything else, like the(in my opinion) awful Bright campaign.
It is true that atheists are largely diverse and our critisism of religion may be all we have in common.What more do we need though. As long as we are united in a common goal our individual differences are minor.
I choose to be proud of the name atheist until we can get to a point where it's redundant.
Psalm 14:1 "the fool hath said in his heart there is a God"-From a 1763 misprinted edition of the bible
Argument from Sadism: Theist presents argument in a wall of text with no punctuation and wrong spelling. Atheist cannot read and is forced to concede.
Yes! How dare my parents name me 'renee'....it means REborn! Geesh!
And as for attaching names to describe things, could you imagine walking around grunting and pointing and waving your arms to make a point or communicate? Just watch a group of chimpanzees and you will see what we would all look like.
I for one am proud to say ' I am Atheist ' The word itself has a mysterious tone to it...and it is quite delightful to see peoples facial expressions when it is expressed...anything from horror to no recognition of the word at all.
Try to deliver your point without words to describe your feelings and you have nothing.
By the way: Welcome to the forums!
Have fun!
Slowly building a blog at ~
http://obsidianwords.wordpress.com/
I don't disagree with you, but I do.
Ideally the word atheist wouldn't exist, but I think there is a need for it right now. The problem for a long time now has been that atheists get discriminated against, labeled, and stories told about how horrible atheists are and how important god belief is. The problem with avoiding the label has been that the political influence has been exclusively in the hands of religious organizations to drive our supposed secular nations. I don't trust them.
Though I am not American, it has been clear that America's political leaders have failed in their commitment to secularism. They have been allowed to do so on the backs of their religion because the opposition that they have faced has been non-existent. By coming together under the term atheist we are able to better demonstrate our numbers as a whole. So that when atheist / humanist / whatever organizations speak up about issues on a political front, they will have numbers to back them up in their defence of secularism.
I hope the word, someday, does stop existing. In the short term, I believe it to be critically important that there is a social movement away from religion and I believe that embracing the word "atheist" is the way to do that.
I think most of us feel that having a special word for what is basically a small facet of what we are as human beings is silly. I don't believe in bigfoot, but no one calls me an Antisasquatchian...
I don't believe that a god exists, simple enough. But I rankle at being defined by a word that does not actually define ME.
Here is a case in point; Hitchens, I respect him as an atheist, he does a good job of representing the hard line non belief to which I personally aspire. However, politically, I think he's a world class boob.
Being labled is something with which we are stuck, we don't have to like it.
LC >;-}>
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
There's something in the human mind that demands an explanation, no matter how poor. It's a good question, but it's a hard one to answer.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence