Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Is "Anti-Theist" the word we atheists should be using to describe ourselves?

yayayayasmin asks:
Have you ever heard the term antitheism? I just heard it for the first time in an interview for the Atheism Tapes and it seems like the perfect way to describe what we are. What do you think?

Yes and no. All depends on what the person thinks anti-theism means.


Christopher Hitchens:



“I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.”



Greg Epstein:


“While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.”

Sam Harris said it best:


We don’t have a word for not believing in Zeus, which is to say we are all atheists in respect to Zeus. And we don’t have a word for not being an astrologer.


via friendlyatheist.tumblr.com


Jeez—can we just be something like a “truthist”? Or maybe a “Proofian” or something a bit more specifically accurate to what “people who need to see actual evidence before assuming fact” are?

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