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.
How do you know you’re not a mutant?
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.
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.
Their point was just that humans existed for a long time before theism was invented. Atheism is just a word to describe a lack of theism. Which there was definitely a lack of before theism existed.
That’s not how isms work and that’s definitely not what atheism means.
A+theosism. No. Atheos+ism. Yes.
It is the ism of being without god. The concept of god must exist in order for the person to think about and decide there isn’t one, ergo atheism. Theism if they decide there’s at least one.
There are other words that exist for what you’re trying to explain.
And my point is that you’re splitting the wrong hairs. Still are.
I had to really consider this, but I agree.
You can’t claim that a person is an atheist of they can’t conceive of a God. “Atheism” is ancient Greek for “without God.” A (without) and theos (God). The “ism” part was added much later.
You wouldn’t call ice cubes “without magma” because you wouldn’t be able to expect there to be magma.
You wouldn’t refer to an infant as “without Alzheimer’s” as it’s a ridiculous thing to clarify. So referring to ancient humans that predate the concept of religion as atheistic is a needless clarification and not a good argument for or against something, regardless.
Though I have to say the argument itself is super pedantic and probably not enriching anyone’s lives.
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.
Hey! I’m not gay. I mean, yeah, I’d do Henry Cavill but that doesn’t count.
So say we all 🙏
Question:
The reasoning in the commenter’s argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it:
A) Incorrectly assumes that atheism is a hereditary trait that can be subject to natural selection and extinction.
B) Fails to acknowledge that the existence of atheists with children contradicts the claim that atheists do not reproduce.
C) Makes a hasty generalization that all atheists share the same sexual orientation and emotional state, without sufficient evidence.
D) Mistakenly treats antinatalism as a universal characteristic of atheists rather than a personal philosophical choice that varies among individuals.
E) Overlooks the possibility that atheism can continue to exist independently of the reproductive choices of current atheists, through the persuasion of others or change of belief over time.
The whole point of the commenter is stupid because if atheists do not reproduce then every atheist is a child of a theist, hence atheism will continue to exist as long as theists exist.
I think they are mostly being anti-gay. Just imagine they didn’t say atheists and it makes sense.
I mean, selection is always against antinatalism - even within early Christianity.
For example:
A woman in the crowd said to him, “Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you.”
He said to [her], “Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.’”
- Gospel of Thomas saying 79
You see the call and response broken up into two separated parts in Luke, but the mirroring indicates they probably went together originally.
The antinatalism isn’t just here, it’s also in surviving fragments of a lost work followers of the above also followed:
Salome saith: Until when shall men continue to die? […] and it is advisedly that the Lord makes an answer: So long as women bear children. […]
And why do not they who walk by anything rather than the true rule of the Gospel go on to quote the rest of that which was said to Salome: for when she had said, ‘I have done well, then, in not bearing children?’ (as if childbearing were not the right thing to accept)
- The Gospel of the Egyptians as preserved in Clem. Alex. Strom. iii. 9. 64 & 66
So there’s a bit of irony in this person making fun of beliefs involving not having kids dying out when there’s a decent chance the original advice of the person they intend to believe over all others was actually saying the same thing and the proponents of that group thinned out over the years since his death leaving cannonical Christianity to thrive due to literal survivorship bias.
Amusingly, this group’s alleged teachings overlap with modern ‘atheism’ in a number of other things too, such as their inclusion of atomism into their beliefs and entertaining the rejection of intelligent design in favor of Lucretius’s naturalism.
Athy, athier, athiest!
Atheist here. Successfully reproduced, still alive, and offspring will probably repeat that feat.
Thirty-nine per cent of Australians now identify as non-religious, up from 30 per cent in 2016 and almost double the 22 per cent of Australians who ticked the “no religion” box a decade ago.
In the mid-1960s, less than 1 per cent of people in Australia identified as having no religion.
A blip indeed. Statistically their grandchildren are likely to be non-religious, good chance of being atheist.
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