Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

There is apparently a big debate over what atheism is, there are many and varied descriptions: atheism is the lack of belief in a god, atheism is the lack of belief in any god, atheism is the belief that there are no gods, atheism is a set of philosophies that one must have in order to be an atheist, atheism is a religion… etc. I will cover the semantic definition and why many sources have it incorrectly defined, why every atheist mustn’t subscribe to the philosophies of other atheists and why it’s intellectually dishonest to think that an atheist must have a certain set of philosophies.

First the etymology of atheism comes from France… at least as far as we have records. It’s derived from the Latin prefix ‘a’ which, “denotes the absence of” (or Ancient Greek as without or not), and theos which means god. So basically the etymology of atheism means, “without god” but also with the ism it means “without the belief in god.” Even with a different definition of theism, the “a” prefix still denotes “not that.” You could spend fifty pages defining theism and all atheism means is “without or absence of that.”

So what does it take to be an atheist? Well that is more simple than you may think. Just like all it takes to be a theist is that you have to believe in a god of some kind, all it takes to be an atheist is to not believe a god of any kind. While the term was originally used in a specific context in that if I was a Christian I would call non-Christian atheists because according to my beliefs, they are without god. But the modern self labeled definition of atheist means that one does not believe in any god. So just don’t believe in a god and you’re an atheist, believe in a god and you’re a theist.

As simple as it is, many people feel like making it more complicated than that, by saying that an atheism is a belief. The only way atheism can be a belief is if it meant that an atheist believes that there’s no god. However given the meaning of the word, this is inaccurate. While one who believes there is no god is an atheist, the only thing required to be an atheist is to not believe in a god.

The most dishonest tactic employed by some theists is that atheism is a specific world view and set of philosophies that every atheist must follow. The problem with this concept is that if equal standards are applied to theism, then every theist must have a certain world view and set of philosophies. This goes beyond the scope of the words and should just be ignored as an attempt to sneak in a Trojan horse definition. Also, if every atheist must agree with every other atheistic view, then equally every theist must agree with every theist view. Clearly that is impossible, so this idiotic concept needs to be dropped.

So if you’re a theist, remember that you don’t share the same world view and philosophies as every other theist, so don’t expect or attempt to force every atheist to have the same world view and philosophies of every other atheist.