Tuesday, June 30, 2009

It's a-theism, not athe-ism

If I have to hear one more time about how "atheism" is a religion, I'm going to start throwing tires at people's faces.

Seriously. Atheism is simply the absence of theism. An atheist is someone who is stating that theism is not part of their worldview. People who claim that atheism is some kind of coherent doctrine piss me off, because if pressed they can never seem to actually name what that doctrine is. At least, not consistently.

Of all the dumb goddamned things. I have a religion, you stupid motherfuckers. And it isn't atheism. I'm religiously Neo-Pagan, and my practice is non-theist. So the fuck what. Just because you can't imagine having opinions without them being fed to you through a dogma G-tube doesn't mean that other people can't have worldviews arrived at through different means.

I don't care how many times people use this example, because clearly some folk need to hear it one more time. If atheism is a religion, then "not collecting stamps" is a hobby.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been researching the true use of the word "atheism" and the original greek points towards it being "athe-ism". I'm open to being peruaded it is "a-theism" but sadly most people holding this also swear and rant in their blogs, like you do, so this view is undermined in my opinion.

Cobalt said...

I fail to see what swearing has to do with my linguistic assertions. Perhaps you can explain how the prefix "a-" works in Greek as well as why people who use profanity ought to be automatically dismissed (since I'm open to being persuaded that lots of theists look for any reason to dismiss what an atheist tells them about themselves, but lots of people holding your evident opinion also comment with half-assed and half-thought-out ill-explained trolling comments on other people's journals, so this view is undermined in my opinion).