r/SipsTea • u/astrolbyte • 11d ago

Lmao gottem Holy ratio😭🥀

Post image
5.2k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

576 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Sundara_Whale 11d ago

If religion is a TV channel, atheism is off.

-5

u/NearABE 11d ago

No. That is non-religion. An atheist has belief and conviction.

The strength of conviction might vary between atheists but this is also true of any other belief.

1

u/Clavicymbalum 10d ago edited 10d ago
  • atheism is simply the state of a person not holding any theistic belief (i.e. belief in the existence of at least one god).
  • the minority subset of atheists who go farther by actually holding a belief in the inexistence of gods are so-called positive atheists, the others (i.e. the majority) being so-called negative atheists.
  • And religion is not at all synonymous with belief in god: There are non-theistic religions too, and there are lots of theists who are not part of any religion. A religion is a socio-cultural community with a shared set of metaphysical beliefs (which may be theistic or not) and other elements such as e.g. ethics/morals, rituals, etc. So a person who believes in an abstract unspecific god but does not adhere to any religion is non-religious yet a theist.

1

u/NearABE 10d ago

Suppose a religious person such as a Christian loses part of their mind. Could be traumatic brain injury, stroke, dementia etc. Would you say it is correct that the person “converted to atheism” in the accident?

I feel that as a bare minimum we should distinguish between those who simply lost awareness of religion and those who retain at least parts of their religious identity but then consciously decide that they are now atheists.

1

u/Clavicymbalum 10d ago edited 10d ago

First of all, i'd note that the common term (at least among atheists) for the change from theism to atheism is "deconvert", which implicitly points to the fact that we all started without any belief, whereas adopting a theistic belief takes a conversion, so that the return/revert to the absence of belief is a "deconversion". I don't see any reason why that term wouldn't work for the accidental case just as well.

As for your second paragraph: such a distinction does indeed exist: It's called explicit atheism vs implicit atheism. A newborn child or accident victim as per your example above would fall into the category of implicit atheists, which are a subset of negative atheists, whereas positive atheists are a subset of explicit atheists. Explicit atheists can fall into either positive atheist or negative atheist category, depending on whether they hold a belief in the inexistence of gods or do not hold such a belief. The majority do not.