atheism is a religion

[Kött]

Atheistic means not religious at all, therefore it is anything but a religion.
If you are an atheist you just take life as it comes and you don't really try to answer those big questions but just accept that there is no answer to these man could ever find and prove.

[Shida]

"calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color" - Don Hirschberg


just thought it was relevant.

[trent bortknob]

regardless of what class or teacher you got it from and how enlightened they may be, you\\\'re still not addressing the fact that atheism doesn\\\'t fit the widely accepted guidelines of religion, nor is it even a worldview

i\\\'ve already addressed both of those issues and kian has found that the definition i posted is an accepted definition in a dictionary. there are just different definitions but it definitely is a worldview. atheists view the world differently than a theist or anybody else with a different lifestyle/views. there is no set amount of information that you need to have a worldview, so even if you deny that you need science to be an atheist, you still have a worldview of someone who doesn\\\'t believe in a god. but really, you need science and rational thought as an atheist or else it\\\'s completely irrational to be an atheist

Atheistic means not religious at all, therefore it is anything but a religion.
If you are an atheist you just take life as it comes and you don\\\'t really try to answer those big questions but just accept that there is no answer to these man could ever find and prove.

no, atheism means "belief that god doesn\\\'t exist"

if atheists didnt try to answer big questions, they wouldnt be atheists

in fact if no groups/worldviews/religions answered big questions, there wouldn\\\'t be any religions or anything

atheism HAS to state why it\\\'s not necessary to believe in god, which is that science makes perfectly good sense without god. and even though you have to admit science is not perfect, it is definitely more convincing than god is, because we can experience it. either way, if you don\\\'t have rational, logic though and science, you would haev to turn to god or gods to answer big questions, which is what people have beliefs in

"calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color" - Don Hirschberg


just thought it was relevant.

it\\\'s not

[emanhattan]

"calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color" - Don Hirschberg


just thought it was relevant.

[billy]

"calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color" - Don Hirschberg


just thought it was relevant.

[tmk]

you might not think its relevant taylor but can you provide any witty one-liners to supplement your view?

[jebxz]

it just depends how you look at it. don't argue about it.

[billy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezAJeaCySV4

[Jeinu]

i have this feeling you haven't actually studied any religions, because your definition you listed is more like that of philosophy itself rather than religion. please refer to this post i made here, which you never answered (if you did i skipped over it oops):

well everything i know about religions is by studying the philosphy of religion not the history or their practices or anything. i just get a general idea of their beliefs and attack them but still

i've never heard of that definition and it doesn't fit with any of the philosophy texts that i've read OR what we've learned in class

i don't really know where you got it but it seems from it's coming from a relgious study class rather than a philosophy of religion class

it's a definition i've gotten several times from multiple religions' studies. it sounds like you're studying the philosophies of religions rather than the religions themselves. also, regardless of the definition argument, you didn't address the logical point i made in my last post.

the definition of philosophy is:

the application of reason to the construction and evaluation of answers to life's big questions

here is another definition i found in my philosophy notes

religion - a set of answers to life's big questions

really i think either you guys are coming from a completely different field of study, or one of us is wrong. all i'm talking about i learned in a class so it's not like i'm pulling this shit randomly out of my mind or anything

you and your teacher just contradicted yourselves

"religion - a set of answers to life's big questions"

atheism makes no attempt to answer life's big questions, nor does it even ask them.

[rtil]

atheism makes no attempt to answer life's big questions, nor does it even ask them.

this is what i keep telling you over and over taylor. an atheist may very well have a different worldview than a theist, but his worldview is not defined by atheism, because atheism is not a worldview. atheism is the lack of a belief in a god, gods or the supernatural. that is it. that is not a worldview, it is a denial of the supernatural.

[MarcK]

a lot of atheists are evolutionists, which explains the origin of life. Of course peanut butter dismembers darwin's decades of research but it's still a worldview.
edit: shit never mind, I was just rethinking: "that says nothing about atheism, it says something about the usual background of reasoning."

[rtil]

a lot of atheists are evolutionists, which explains the origin of life.

WRONG. evolution explains the diversity of life, not its origins.

[emanhattan]

rtil you would have been a great lawyer

[zhicago]

i trudged through the mounds of old rotten boots, decapitated heads, and leaky sewage that is this thread and noticed no one has pointed out yet that
[size=]the word atheist itself MEANS 'without religion'.[/size]

a- sans, without
theism- religion, gods



























just thought id throw that out there

[rtil]

i figured that was obvious enough that it didn't have to be mentioned

taylor is trying to argue that the supernatural or belief in gods is not a qualifier for religion anyway

[jebxz]

ahem

Listen:

In a far off land, not too long ago, we find two creatures; a rabbit and a deer. The rabbit believes and knows that there must be someone in the sky that put him in this place for a reason. The deer disagrees, he believes that the idea of someone in the sky is outrageous! Now, the rabbit, being what is now known as a theist, holds his beliefs based on an idea he invents called faith. The deer stays grounded in his beliefs as well, that is, the belief that there is nothing to believe in. The two animals argue and argue until they\\\'re exhausted beyond belief. They needed to come up with a name for what one\\\'s stance on the meaning of life is. The rabbit thinks there is a man in the sky that puts everything on Earth into place. The deer does not believe life is caused by any kind of power in the sky. They both decide that they have seperate religious beliefs, and that the deer\\\'s religious belief is not having a religion at all. However, the deer\\\'s stance is still a religious belief, that is, the belief that religion is totally gay.

"People who can eat are the luckiest people in the world." says the deer.

[trent bortknob]

atheism makes no attempt to answer life's big questions, nor does it even ask them.

this is what i keep telling you over and over taylor. an atheist may very well have a different worldview than a theist, but his worldview is not defined by atheism, because atheism is not a worldview. atheism is the lack of a belief in a god, gods or the supernatural. that is it. that is not a worldview, it is a denial of the supernatural.

what i'm saying is that EVERYONE HAS TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS. if atheism says there is no god, you have to ask why there isn't a god otherwise you wouldn't have a legitimate reason to deny god in the first place

one of life's big questions: does god exist

atheistic answer: no

THATS ALREADY ONE BIG QUESTION ANSWERED

WITH THAT ANSWER YOU HAVE TO ANSWER OTHER QUESTIONS:

if god doesn't exist then what is the meaning of life? - there isn't one. all purpose you find is just what you create for yourself in the time that you have on earth
if god doesn't exist then where does morality come from? (this wuestion has a lot of different answers provided by different atheists, which ties into my next point)

you would consider theism a religion most likely, but you wouldnt actually get the same answer from all theists because really theism is just a category of religions. the same could be applied to atheism - if you don't call atheism a religion, you couldn't really call theism a religion either. they're both just categories, and atheism has a category of non theistic belief systems (humanism nihlism etc). all of those are definitely worldviews

so if you want to argue that theism and atheism are not religions or worldviews then that's ok i guess, but all of the different beliefs in the atheistic and theistic categories are religions

[Mew_User]

Big questions.

[trent bortknob]

bamyasi if you're incapable of having interesting or insightful opinions on issues that affect everybody's lives then please stop posting in threads that revolve around them

[Necronomitr0n]

i have to agree with taylor's most recent post