A few years ago, I had a colleague who was extremely religious and he was genuinely convinced that “atheists” were essentially anti-theists, i.e. people trying to take his religion away.
And yeah, that does make sense that he would think so from an outside perspective. It’s only really the anti-theists that will publicly speak about their interests.
Similarly, what even average atheists might consider moderate demands, like not teaching religion in schools and separating state vs. church, likely looks like yet another anti-theistic attack from the other side.
Like these atheists are trying to take theists’ government representation away and that the atheists are saying that the Bible is not actually a factual book, when it’s clearly the most factual etc…I’ve been involved with the academic study of the biblical texts for a long time. I am the founder of ‘Ask Bible Scholars’.
These texts are rife with bias, politics, metaphor etc. Furthermore, how these texts were understood and/or interpreted is heavily explored in what academia has named ‘reception history’.
Personally, I am a ‘theist’ in the sense that I believe that there is something ‘higher’ or there is something going on that is outside of our earthly reality. To put it another way, I believe that consciousness continues past human existence.
I’m assuming this is the recent Religion for Breakfast video, assuming that’s on YouTube already?
I just watched that and thought it was ok, and even ideal if your goal is to find out all the different groups that might use the word and how its meaning differs. But it didn’t go into as much detail about the aspect I find most interesting, related to what atheists actually are and different ways of sub-categorising atheists, as well as the tangentially related concept of worldview and how theists vs atheists tend to map on to worldview.
Because interestingly, in this video by someone whose PhD thesis was on atheism, he explains that although atheism does not per se mean a particular worldview, most explicit atheists (which does not mean people who would call themselves atheists, but who have specifically rejected the notion of gods, rather than merely being atheist by never having thought or cared about the subject) do share similar beliefs. It’s very worth watching, whether or not you’ve seen RfB’s video, because they overlap a little and generally seem to agree where they do, but largely cover different aspects of the topic.
Religion For Breakfast is so great.
