Does one 'not believe' in square circles? Or is to speak of belief already to concede too much? i.e. that there is anything coherent to 'believe' or 'not believe' in to begin with? Shouldn't a thoroughgoing a-theism not simply reject 'belief in God', but the very 'god-problem' to begin with? Let's not grant God the dignity of even being 'dead' - there's never been anything that was - or could have been, in principle - alive in the first place, and to even speak of 'non-belief' is already to concede far too much to theology - i.e. that the very issue is at all sensical in any way: that 'God' is anything more than a grammatical mistake for which even very idea of belief is already irrelevant.

Actually my long-standing view is that the dynamics of ecclesiastical power held by the Church has a great deal to do with the way this conflict has unfolded in Western culture. This is because of the power wielded by religious orthodoxy and, conversely, the treatment meted out to heretics and schismatics. That played out over centuries in the West, and of course it also became deeply intertwined with politics, in the Wars of Religion and the 30 Years War, not to mention many bloody episodes in the Inquisition, such as the persecution of the Cathars.

I am inclined to think that is the underlying cause of the anti-religious attitudes of the so-called 'secular West'. That, in turn, grew out of the Enlightenment and the belief that science, not religion, ought to be the 'arbiter of truth' - which is, of course, true, in respect of the kinds of matters that can be made subject to scientific measurement. But religions deal with many ideas and values that are quite out of scope for science.

Actually this is a subject which Karen Armstrong's book The Case for God, talks about - that essay is basically an abstract of it. She shows how early modern science, by appealing to 'God's Handiwork', inadvertently brought about its own undoing - 'Fatally, religions tried to defend themselves against science by arguing that they knew the truth better than the geologists, rather than presenting themselves (as one feels Armstrong would have wished) as the guardians of mystery and therapeutic manoeuvres of the mind. 1.'

That impulse is what gave rise to biblical fundamentalism and the 'culture wars'. Most people don't realise that Augustine and Origen were fiercely critical of biblical literalism and fundamentalism, in the early days of the Christian church. — Wayfarer

It seems to me that the reverse has also occurred: the irreligious have dragged science and rationalism into a culture war against "religion".

Chris Hedges wrote I Don't Believe In Atheists: The Dangerous Rise of the Secular Fundamentalist. But atheists in general, the New Atheists, and others responded that they are not fundamentalists, there is no such thing as secular fundamentalism, etc.

In Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Kenneth R. Miller shows that the Intelligent Design movement is not about evolution. The Intelligent Design movement, he shows, uses evolution as a smokescreen to hide their actual agenda: changing the definition of science and in the process subjugating or destroying science. If I recall correctly, it all started with a small meeting in the home of Michael Behe.

Again, it is not about truth, spiritual well-being, improving the human condition, etc. It is various interests struggling to gain and maintain power.

If there were nothing to gain politically from it, would anybody care about what personal "beliefs" people have?

And the people who claim that they are on the side of Enlightenment liberalism seem to be very illiberal when it comes to people's "beliefs". True liberalism accommodates a diversity of beliefs, lifestyles, religious practices/traditions, etc. The "belief" police, on the other hand, say that some beliefs, such as the belief in supernatural beings, have got to go.

And I don't believe that it is all some understandable response to millennia of oppressive ecclesiastical power. It is one thing to want to liberate people from an oppressive power structure by emphasizing the rights of individuals, the primacy of the individual subject, the efficacy of reason/rationality, etc., it is another thing to say that "beliefs" determine behavior, to single out certain generic beliefs such as the belief in the existence of deities, and to treat anybody who possesses or supports the latter like they are inferior, in need of reform, deplorable, etc.

Most significantly, again, the "belief" police never hold their position to their own standard. They say that only anything "evidence-based" is reliable, but they provide no evidence to support their view that "beliefs" determine behavior. They display the same irrationality that they say religious people display.

Finally, I don't know the whole history or sociology of fundamentalism, but in Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, Richard H. Robbins shows how Protestant fundamentalism developed as a response to the expansion of capitalism. Maybe trying to prove logos with mythos set the intellectual stage for it, but if Robbins is right it is the encroachment of capitalism and globalization that has been the impetus behind the religious fundamentalist response.

Shouldn't a thoroughgoing a-theism not simply reject 'belief in God', but the very 'god-problem' to begin with? — StreetlightX

I think that doesn't do justice to the role of religion in the formation of culture. It also completely fails to grasp the kind of existential issue which religions present themselves as an answer to. And finally, it must mean that a great deal of culture and civilization, Western and Eastern, has been founded on a delusion, or even a conspiracy theory, from the very beginning.

True liberalism accommodates a diversity of beliefs, lifestyles, religions practices/traditions, etc. The "belief" police, on the other hand, say that some beliefs, such as the belief in supernatural beings, have got to go. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I think there is a fundamental difference between the materialist view of life - which is the view that the Universe is ultimately just dumb stuff, and life is simply a kind of bio-chemical reaction that just happened to take root in it - and any religious view, which is the universe is a drama, or an unfolding story, in which the human has a part. It's a profound difference.

I don't see the relevance of any of these points. One can well be motivated - and indeed strongly so - by incoherent ideas, and those ideas may in turn be motivated by very real 'existential issues'. None of this speaks to the coherency or sensicality of those ideas themselves, be they the idea of God or anything else. I'm just pointing out that atheism for me means simply rejecting the entire theological problematic out of hand, which includes the need to even dignify the very questions about the existence of God or belief or other theological philosophemes.

In Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Kenneth R. Miller shows that the Intelligent Design movement is not about evolution. The Intelligent Design movement, he shows, uses evolution as a smokescreen to hide their actual agenda: changing the definition of science and in the process subjugating or destroying science. If I recall correctly, it all started with a small meeting in the home of Michael Behe.

Again, it is not about truth, spiritual well-being, improving the human condition, etc. It is various interests struggling to gain and maintain power. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

If you have a group of people trying to find the truth as best they can, and another group of people who oppose the first groups efforts for political or ideological or religious reasons, it doesn't follow that what the first group was doing was motivated by political or ideological or religious reasons. It also doesn't follow that what the second group says is false; only that their methodology was designed with some purpose other than finding the truth in mind.

Some of this comes down just to avoiding implied onlies and merelies. Once science is in fight for it's very existence, defending science is also a cultural move, but not only or merely that. Similarly, opposition to science is by and large, in my country anyway, not only or merely a cultural move, but also religious. It needn't be; some people oppose science for political-theoretical reasons, and that can lead to some nastiness within the walls of academia, but the main fight is outside.

No, I think that full-blown atheism is a fully positive belief in the non-existence of God. It's an active believe with profound influences on the way you think and live your life.

If the definition of Atheism is merely lack of belief, both of these diagrams make no sense whatsoever. — WiseMoron

I'm not sure about that, since any time I see a chart like the ones you brought up, they seem to always take atheism as being merely a lack of belief or "whatever isn't theism". Really, this is why people take the whole black and white approach with regards to atheism/theism, which is what your charts seem to indicate.

I also have a counter-argument against the definition of Atheism being merely lack of belief as well. Given that someone has the opinion that God doesn't exist and yet says s/he is an atheist, in the sense that s/he merely lacks belief, isn't that a contradiction in a way? What I am saying is, "having an opinion requires believing." If you merely lack belief in God, then you ought to be under the title of agnosticism than atheism because logically that makes more sense and is less misleading. I know that atheism isn't a religion, but how can you have an opinion on the same subject that you have no belief nor disbelief in? That makes no sense to me. Also, beliefs aren't only in the systems called religions, anyways. It makes more sense to me that atheism is disbelief and not merely lack of belief. — WiseMoron

The response here, I imagine, for someone defending the definition in question is that if your stance on God does not include a belief that he exists, regardless of whatever opinion you hold on the matter, you are an atheist by definition. Your objection amounts to using a definition they already reject and the whole disagreement lies in the differing ways you both define the terms "agnostic" and "atheist".

That is not to say I don't sympathize with your definition. Indeed, the thing that irks me about the definitions that atheists have been insisting upon has always been the way in which it obscures the difference between simply not having an opinion, and disbelief (believing that God does not exist). For instance, I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun is true, and I believe also that Santa Claus existing is false, but I am on the fence on whether Donald Trump colluded with the Russians and I am not willing to say whether that is true or false. All three are clearly different stances on a particular issue, and to me it'd be better if they were distinguished with the proper terms, but by redefining atheism as being merely "not theism", we lose that distinction.

Like, imagine if we decided to flip the scenario and had atheism traditionally defined as disbelief and theism as "whatever isn't atheism". We'd have the same problem of course, but I imagine the atheists wouldn't be the ones pushing this definition for reasons I'll leave you to figure out.

Beliefs exist in a context. The majority of people on earth worship one of a number of gods. Atheism, in practice, is a characterization of the commonly espoused and worshiped gods as being mythological. All this nonsense about distinguishing between belief and knowledge is no more relevant to the discussion of the historicity/mythology of the gods than it is to discussions of any other contentious matter of fact/fiction. We hold beliefs with varying degrees of confidence, and when a belief reaches a certain level of confidence, we say we know it to be true. A belief in the mythological nature of gods is no different. I hold my belief that gods are mythological with a high level of confidence.

Wow, i cant believe the number of people who cant read a damn diagram, the four quadrant chart is not flawed in the way people here are saying it is.. it has two axis, belief and knowledge, theist / atheist is a statement of belief, Agnostic / Gnostic is a claim of knowledge, its very simple.

it does not 'leave out agnosticism' as some have said, it does not 'confuse belief and knowledge' as others have said, it explicitly distinguishes between them, thats the very point of the thing.

Atheists are NON-theists

agnostics are people who lack knowledge of whatever topic is at hand, Gnostic's are those with knowledge of the topic at hand.

And agnostic is a TYPE of atheist / theist. its a claim of how sure one is, a person who claims to be an Agnostic theist is one who believes in God but recognizes they cant prove it.

Everyone is Agnostic with regards to the existence of God.

Atheism is just one form of belief. In an essay published at "Internet Archive", titled "Believing veraciously", I tried to show that we can't avoid believing, but we should do it veraciously. I am pleading for an agnostic belief including all sorts of metaphysics.

Bare-bones definitions could be something like:

• atheism is absence of theism, or disbelief therein, hence the leading 'a'
• an atheist is a human that can be characterized by atheism

Of course most or all humans harbor beliefs of whatever kind.
In the case of atheists, I guess that could then be anything but theism.

I just tend to get a bit suspicious when discussions like this come up, because often enough they're attempts to shift the burden of proof.

Maybe the suspicion against

attempts to shift the burden of proof — jorndoe

alludes to Russel's teapot. Of course every proponent of a specific religion cannot demand a disproof from disbelievers. Rather he/she has to deliver really good reasons for believing. On the other hand an atheist stating that there isn't any form of a divine entity and one should believe in plain naturalism makes a claim, which needs to be vindicated sufficiently either. Maybe the most teapot-like (admittedly there is a problem with definition) extraterrestial object in the solar system has an amazing similarity with something that would be generally accepted as a teapot. In analogy a god-like being might exist, that shows more similarities with Gods of known religions than atheists would suspect.

Does one 'not believe' in square circles? Or is to speak of belief already to concede too much? i.e. that there is anything coherent to 'believe' or 'not believe' in to begin with? Shouldn't a thoroughgoing a-theism not simply reject 'belief in God', but the very 'god-problem' to begin with? Let's not grant God the dignity of even being 'dead' - there's never been anything that was - or could have been, in principle - alive in the first place, and to even speak of 'non-belief' is already to concede far too much to theology - i.e. that the very issue is at all sensical in any way: that 'God' is anything more than a grammatical mistake for which even very idea of belief is already irrelevant. — StreetlightX

Nothing funnier than destroying arguments with unexpected answers to rhetorical questions, don't you think? I believe in square circles.

Besides, even if we assumed they don't, it'd be because their definition is self contradicting. That's not comparable to deities.

The Intelligent Design movement, he shows, uses evolution as a smokescreen to hide their actual agenda: changing the definition of science and in the process subjugating or destroying science. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Sounds conspiracy-ish, over thought and baseless. The people behind that movement are intelligent enough to neither come up with such an agenda nor to not believe in intelligent design.

Sounds conspiracy-ish, over thought and baseless. The people behind that movement are intelligent enough to neither come up with such an agenda nor to not believe in intelligent design. — BlueBanana

It's not a conspiracy theory.

He sheds light on a lot of the politics of evolution, like how when the anti-evolution people were voted off the Kansas state school board they got elected again later by changing their strategy: instead of directly trying to get evolution taught in the classroom they stopped talking about evolution and instead tried to change the definition of science.

I know it's not but it sounds like one.

Atheism is not mere disbelief. It is primarily a form of rebellion.

It seems to me there are many conceptions of God. In saying "I don't believe in God" one must have some concept or the other in mind. In saying "I do not believe in any conception of God" it begs the question what one does believe in regard to the nature and origins of the universe. In any event one world labels rarely do justice to anyone's thoughtful worldview.