is Atheism a “religion”? Are Atheists “religious” about their Atheism? Well, in the spirit of NOT being abolutist, let’s say it depends mainly on the Atheistic individual or Atheistic group in question. Is their so-called “Atheism” related more to a view that the ”Truth Values” of certain claims are unknown or, is their Atheism more rooted in an un-yielding dis-BELIEF? Now we’ve all heard many an Atheist say things like… “There’s no such thing as god”. or… “god does NOT exist”. or… “There’s no such thing as a soul”. So therein, they stand exposed of maintaining a very rigid set of beliefs. Beliefs that just so happen to be “dis-beliefs”. Perhaps a better way to determine if a specific worldview could be seen as being “religious”, is to look for certain the characteristics they share. The framework set forth by Ninian Smart, commonly known as the “Seven Dimensions of Religion”, is widely accepted by anthropologists and researchers of religion as broadly covering the various aspects of religion, without focusing on things unique to specific religions. The seven dimensions proposed by Smart are Narrative, Experiential, Social, Ethical, Doctrinal, Ritual and Material. Not every religion has every dimension, nor are they all equally important within an individual religion. Smart even argues that the “secularisation” of western society is actually a shift of focus from the doctrinal and ritual to the experiential. With these parameters, would should — if we have an objective approach — see that Atheism does constitute a “religion”. But to be fair, perhaps we should contrast this with the “Agnostic State of Mind/Being” (essentially NEITHER a belief nor disbelief) and we could illustrate that it is likely, that a large proportion of self-proclaiming Atheists confuse “Agnostic” with the dis-BELIEF-system of Atheism. A “religion” that HAS IN FACT been co-opted by the even more pervasive religion of… STATISM. Something we will get into later.
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 03:40:37 +0000
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