Oh shit, I’ll be right back, got to go tell my wife and kid they’re not real and it turns out I’m gay.
Not to mention, all of us atheists most likely came from religious backgrounds. Atheism isn’t fuckin genetic.
You are a blip in history
Atheists are as old as time and predate religion as we know it
In order to have atheism, the concept of theos must first exist. You can’t have an ism if no one knows what the thing is that its suffixed to. So there’s no atheism before religion or at least one theos.
Just like Tinklipism. What is that? Who knows? No one’s invented the idea of a Tinklip yet, whatever that may be. Definitely no Atinklipism yet either.
That’s just how isms be.
This is like saying you can’t not collect stamps if stamps haven’t been invented yet. Before stamps are invented, it’s impossible to collect stamps, which makes everyone… Not a stamp collector.
You’re thinking “antitheism”?
It’s mostly semantic but the usage of atheism as the absence of theism is quite new and not really used in philosophy in that manner. In the end it shouldn’t really matter. It mostly matters for the religious that want to define you themselves instead of listening.
It matters a lot to atheists that don’t want people to be confused. It’s also a bit hard to be taken seriously when a small portion of your mob doesn’t even understand what atheism is and then tries to tackle the bigger concept of deities with someone. Breeds the idea that atheists are idiots and don’t understand what they’re talking about.
No. Atheism is not defined as opposition to religion, it’s absence of religion. That means that before religion, there was only atheism.
Before humans, the concept of “human” didn’t exist. Yet we can still say that the animals living before humans were non-humans, just like non-human animals today are.
No. Atheism is not defined as opposition to religion,
Reply to the wrong comment? I literally said nothing even close that that.
And before religion there was no atheism or theism or any other ism involving.divinity.
Atheism does not mean “without theism”.
No, I replied to the right comment. Which definition of atheism do you go by that requires “the concept of theos” existing? I’ve seen you repeatedly stating your position, but no formal definition or actual argument.
Would you then say that all animals before humans can’t be described as non-human?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-ism
I don’t know what to say. We haven’t changed the language, the construction of Greek morphemes within Greek etymology, made a recent exception, or changed the meaning of Atheism to suit a collective of people recently misunderstanding fundamentals of philosophical and/or psychological stances on topics.
I don’t want to sound patronising, but I really did not think this needed sources.
If you can think of any other word—just one of the thousands—ending with ism that breaks any of these common understandings, where ism isn’t a suffix to the thing that precedes it, rather is attached to an existing ism and the prefix morpheme is actually the defining stance of the word, please, share. To my understanding, it simply doesn’t exist and one ism has never been nor suddenly is an exception.
Could you please cite the part of the Wikipedia article that supports your point? I looked through it and couldn’t identify it.
It seems to me that you’re arguing from a linguistic point of view, and missing the forest for the trees. Again I pose my question - are animals that existed before humans non-human?
What you’re asking has no relevance to positions of belief. It has relevance to physical things. These aren’t isms.
Did humanism exist before humans? No.
Did non-human things exist before humans? Yes.
If you’re saying atheism is a lack of theism, that’s fine—loosely. But it will be confusing to other people if you don’t clarify that stance. people with English as secondary language, other atheists or theists, people that delve into atheism, or people that are curious about how their stance fits in etc.
Deism is without theism, that doesn’t make it atheism. The article is quite clear. Being a position of belief is indicated by the ism. The part before it defines the position of belief. Whether disbelief/lack of belief of the gods, or belief in no gods. It is not being without the belief of the belief in gods. That’s just anything that’s without theism which is soooo many things.
