Telling myself I’m not an atheist, I’m a non-theist, no wait, what the hell am I?
Sam Harris makes a brilliant point in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok2oJgsGR6c
He points out that atheist should not actually have a designation or name. His example is a racists. If you’re not a racist people don’t call you a non-racist.
This makes sense but sometimes these things come about because of timing. For instance, calling someone a racist after slavery ended was negative thing.
While slavery existed many people were racist but weren’t called racist because it was common to accept this way of life.
Another example of why we are called atheist as apposed being called nothing would be similar to books.
I imagine many of the first books written were stories of actual events (even if they were inaccurate). And then along comes stories that were touted as being made up.
At this point you have books and fiction books. I assume fiction books quickly out numbered books since making up stories is easier than knowing someone’s story well enough to write about it. Therefore we have fiction and all books that were not made up are non-fiction.
Another explanation would be why things are named Classic. The original iPod was not called the iPod classic, it was just iPod. Now that we have dozens of models many years later they wanted to define it from the subsequent models. So we have iPod Classic and Classic Coke, you get the idea.
That would be a good explanation as to why non-fiction books don’t have legitimate designation but merely defined as not fiction.
That leads us to atheism. Am I an atheist or a non-theist? They are the same. Atheism is merely defined as not a theist (like non-fiction).
Non-theism and non-fiction oddly are the definitions for truths, facts and reality. Definition by declaring something that you’re not.
With so many Gods and religions in the world it would be impossible to go through out life declaring nothing.
Atheism at least let’s theists of all religions know were we stand.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 8:40 pm and is filed under My Own Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
