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Old 03-10-2013
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Zairak Zairak is offline
 
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I'm not sure why you're trying to redefine a word. Atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. That's the word. Killshot summed it up best in the second post of this thread.

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Originally Posted by killshot View Post
Atheism is not a religion. In fact, that's all it is. A lack of religion. That's the definition no matter how you look at it. There are some philosophies that are often associated with atheism such as skepticism, existentialism, and sometimes nihilism, but all that is required to be an atheist is the lack of belief in gods.

To paraphrase Bill Maher, atheism is to religion as abstinence is to sex.
As he said. Trying to classify atheism as a religion is like trying to classify abstinence as a form of sexual activity. It is not. It is the lack of sexual activity.

To make another example, it's like trying to classify zero as a number in the same context that one, two, and so on are considered numbers. Yes, it represents a counting concept the same way one, two, and so on do. But it doesn't represent a number. It represents the lack of a number.

As an aside, it is incredibly offensive for you to imply that atheists think of themselves as gods. It is not a belief. It is an organized movement in the same way that religious zealots have an organized movement: That is, people trying to use a concept to force their view on the world. It is not appropriate to generalize the way you are.

I will allow your statement about differing definitions of religion, but I touched upon that earlier. You can't define religion to be the same thing as a worldview. It destroys the meaning of the word and renders any discussion pointless.
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