Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Atheism and Definitions revisited

It seems i have to spend more time on definitions of Atheism. I got an e-mail from one of the readers saying that he did not quite agree to my definitions of Atheism.
And i do not blame him. Because if he had read my post clearly,then he would have noticed that i tried to show the different definitions used. Even atheists themselves disagree on the best definitions for an atheist.

A reader recommended this video to me and others who would want to see a "clearer" distinction.

WATCH

I watched the video and i agreed to most of the content,though i found it a bit misleading.

Atheist comes from the Greek: a- "without" + theos "a god".

So a direct translation would be, "without a god".The "A" is a negator.

Consider the word Symmetry.A negator would be Asymmetry. Simply meaning without symmetry.If i was to say, Asymmetry means object lacking symmetry,it would be technically accepted in English grammar.But it would be obvious that i have imported a new word.The word being " object".

So saying atheism is "lacking the belief in god",is importing the word belief. The initial meaning was "without gods".

Meaning that even Babies or infants are atheists due to their undeveloped brains which are unable to comprehend matters such as gods.They lack the belief in gods.

But someone would ask,in which context can we use the words "without gods"?isn't it obvious that we are speaking of peoples beliefs?Not necessarily.

There are scientists who adhere to materialism.Matter is all that there is.So the universe in this case would be "without gods".In other words,the universe is materialistic in nature.Then We can say the universe is atheistic.or a-theos.

No comments: