Looking through the wide, wide, world wide webs, it seems to me that many people hold atheism as a cult which actively believes that there is no god. I find it equally interesting and depressing that so many people fall into this three segment belief, wherein agnosticism falls in between theism and atheism. It doesn't make sense to me why people draw such a line as the one below.
In this logic of thinking, you go from belief to knowledge, then back to belief. Being an agnostic or a gnostic defines what you know, while theism and atheism apply to what you believe, because of that, I think this chart is more apt.
while there are problems with this chart as well (namely the fact that it only applies if you have an opinion on both belief and knowledge), it doesn't suffer from mixing questions and putting everything on one dimension. By creating separate axis's, both issues of knowledge and belief can be addressed independently. But what does this have to do with calling atheists cultists? Well in essence, by not mixing up knowledge and belief, the title of "cultlike atheist" now falls upon the gnostic atheist. Very few atheists actually claim that they know that there is no god, rather they do not believe and do not know whether a god exists. By defining belief and knowledge separately, the "atheist cult" starts to look like a strawman.
Carnival of Evolution #45
8 hours ago
7 comments:
I don't think I could add anything to your comments on the ridiculous notion of atheism as a "cult," but maybe I can contribute something to where this silly division of theist/agnostic middle/atheist extreme comes from.
Back when I was being indoctrinated as a proper Baptist, our evangelism courses explained that we could lump people "in the world" into those categories. Christian was good obviously and fell into theist (as did other religions, though they weren't as good as Christianity). The agnostics were people who weren't sure one way or the other. And the atheists were the people who were sure that God didn't exist.
Within that evangelical framework, it was important to understand which of those categories you could pigeonhole someone into because that determined how you would relate to them and what you would say to them, in hopes of convincing them to move to Christianity. (i.e. make the atheist an agnostic, then make the agnostic a Christian).
It doesn't seem to me that that logic pattern would work well, as making as atheist an agnostic is in essence like trying to make a republican a conservative. Liberal republicans may exist, but they are so rare that attempting to make every one of them a conservative seems to be pointless to say the least.
Oh, I agree - and as you may have noticed, it doesn't seem to work very well given the marginal number of atheists turning to evangelical Christianity. I'm just sharing some experiences that might inform why people think that way. Certainly it was the way I was encouraged to think about it.
Ahh, I gotcha. I honestly think that they could probably do better proselytizing if they used the four groups chart though, as then they would be dealing with the reality of their target audiences. Knowing who you are dealing with sure does make it easier to change their thoughts and opinions. Oh well, I suppose its their loss and our... not loss.
I keep thinking that being an agnostic and being an atheist is just as bad for believers, at least for Jews (since I was raised Jewish, and am Israeli, Judaism is more relevant to me than any other Abrahamic religion).
Since not being positively a believer makes you a heretic, it really doesn't matter to believers what you say. Not knowing is just as bad as "knowing that not"
It is just as bad, however I was talking about easiness of conversion. Most religious people see agnostics as easy pickings for conversions, unlike the self labeled atheists. They are just as bad in the eyes of yahweh/allah, one group is just an easier turnover.
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/4502/readplease.gif
I'll just leave this here.
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