[ExI] Tolerance

jameschoate at austin.rr.com jameschoate at austin.rr.com
Fri Dec 11 07:41:10 UTC 2009


---- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote: 


> This idea that atheism is just another religion is beginning to shit
> me. It's wrong.

Atheism is nothing more than faith, that makes it a religion. This is irrespective of how the practitioners may wish to distinguish themselves from all others.

This desire of separation is a weakness, not a strength.
 
> Atheism has no shared culture, ritual, tradition.
> It doesn't even have metaphysical belief, it has a lack of
> metaphysical belief. Unless you think that not believing in Santa
> Claus is a religion, you cannot also call not believing in
> supernatural entities a religion.

Irrelevant, religion has nothing to do with some conceptual metric of distance in a religious phase space. Whether one believes in Santa Clause is irrelevant, you are confusing the the with the name for the thing. A serious conceptual error.

 
> Science is probably rightly called a world view or philosophy.
> Materialism, or a naturalistic world view, similar. But Atheism?
> There's just not enough to it, to call it a philosophy, let alone a
> religion.

That's probably the silliest conceptual construct I've seen in a while. You're basically saying atheism isn't a religion because it consist of a set of ideals that are asymptotic to nothing. How do you measure this 'something' you're using to compare?

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James Choate
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