On Sun, 28 Mar 2004 10:14:03 +0000 (UTC), Steve Mading
<stevem@tetra.bmrb.wisc.edu> wrote:
In talk.atheism Lawrence Hyde <revolutionarian@earthlink.net> wrote:
I agree. I wasn't suggesting that we stike it from our vocabulary.
Just that it has a far too narrow a definition for any nonreligious
person to soley identify themselves by.
Acutually, the problem is the other way around. The term 'atheist'
is not too narrow. It's too WIDE. Knowing someone is an atheist
doesn't tell you a whole lot about what they think. It just tells
you what they DON'T think, leaving open a number of other possiblities
that are not necessarily compatable. (For example, I've got a friend
that is a very staunch Libertarian, to an extreme degree, and he's
also an atheist. Josef Stalin was an atheist. I doubt my
Libertarian friend could find a whole lot of moral issues with
which he'd be in agreement with Josef Stalin.)
It's not a problem - it's merely a demographic label for what we're
not, that only has any meaning in the specific context of the absent
property: we're not theist.
When people do something, you have to look at what they are, not what
they aren't - in spite of the drooling nastiness of theists who can
grasp neither this simple point nor the fact that being atheist
doesn't match what they imagine.
I have to admit that, before
my origional post, I didn't have a complete understanding of what
Humanism was. I was only familiar with the term and that it was
associated with atheism. I guess I was trying to reinventing an old
and well established wheel.
.
