thehowe_v7.1

In a comment on my last post, Chris disagreed with my rather snarky aside that Atheism is a religion. I think the disagreement lies in a difference in our definition of what constitutes Atheism. It's a blurry line, so I thought I'd talk a little about it.

First, I'll give you the short version: I was wrong. Now, the long version:

When I used the term Atheism in that post, I was using my understanding of the term, which was basically "I believe there is no god". That is actually a flavor of Atheism known as Strong Atheism (Wikipedia article). Strong Atheism, I still maintain, is essentially a religion (maybe I'll argue why some other time). However, Atheism is actually more general.

A more correct definition of Atheism is, almost exactly as Chris stated it in his comment, "I do not believe in god". Under that definition, which appears to be more correct than my original understanding (at least according to some sources; the Wikipedia article isn't entirely clear), I agree with Chris that I was wrong. Under this definition, Atheism is a perfectly logical conclusion based upon observed scientific fact (assuming, you know, you believe in science).

In fact, under this definition Atheism is not too different from Agnosticism, which I subscribe to (which actually is closer to being a religion than Atheism is, but that's another post entirely).