[ExI] Tolerance

[Ben Zaiboc]

<jameschoate at austin.rr.com> declaimed:
> 
> 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.


The whole point of atheism is that it is emphatically *not* a faith.  It's certainly not a 'faith in there being no gods', if that's what you're thinking.  

It's a position of taking nothing on faith.  "I don't believe there are any gods" is a different thing to "I believe there are no gods".  In the first, you are not stating a faith in something, in the second, you are.

The first is atheism, and is simply a result of there being no evidence for gods.  The second is a faith-based stance, a belief (I don't know what you'd call it), and could well persist in the face of any evidence to the contrary.  You might want to call this 'belief in no gods' a religion. I wouldn't object. But it's not atheism.

Ben Zaiboc