• grue@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Thanks for replying!

    Many atheists take the label to mean simply: absence of belief. That is: atheists require evidence before making a claim.

    Well, yeah: that’s weak atheism (including “explicit weak atheism”, going by that Venn diagram’s categories). I don’t see any contradiction between that and what I wrote; weak atheism certainly still counts as atheism.

    Are people getting offended because they think me calling their atheism something other than “strong” is some sort of judgement against them and not simply a categorization?

    As such, those that “believe” in nonexistence wind up falling into another category: anti-theists.

    That’s not quite what antitheism is. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitheism :

    Antitheism, also spelled anti-theism, is the philosophical position that theism should be opposed.

    Antitheism has been adopted as a label by those who regard theism as dangerous, destructive, or encouraging of harmful behavior.

    In other words, antitheism isn’t so much about the question of god(s) existence directly as it is about considering the behavior of those who answer in the affirmative to be harmful and dangerous. It’s more of an ideological or even political position than a purely philosophical one.