Actual religions have sets of ideas (rules, creation-myths, alternative epistemologies, etc.), whereas atheism has none. The term literally means "without god(s)" (which was a defining feature of religions by those who coined the term).
It is an absence of belief (at least in the way the term is commonly used; There are "atheistic religions" in the sense that they don't have a deity).
Atheism is to religion as being silent is to speaking – and you're essentially claiming it's just another way of speaking.
> Atheism is to religion as being silent is to speaking – and you're essentially claiming it's just another way of speaking.
Another way of saying it is that religions (as we know them) are answers to questions, you can get rid of those answers, disagree with them, etc. but the questions will remain and you will implicitly provide answers to them. Those answers will constitute what your religion is -- albeit one might not examine their answers in any detail.
The other way you propose of defining religions is so general and vague that it borders on meaningless, and doesn't deal with the fact that different people have different questions, formulated differently, using different assumptions and caring about the answers to different extents.
The OP was just being a little bit provocative while calling those beliefs a religion, which I think can be allowed; at least for the fact that there are a bunch of people that are religiously “atheists”.
even the utmost atheist needs to have beliefs
Only if you equivocate on the definition of "belief" as you seem to be.
> both in the ‘individual facts’ way (you can’t be rational about everything all the time)
Of course you can.
"Everyone has a God (where 'God' means 'favourite thing')"
"Everyone believes in the existence of Hell (where 'hell' means 'being unhappy')"
"Everyone believes in the possibility of "salvation" (where 'salvation' means 'self-improvement')"
Redefining words so that the original sentence is correct is a tad too "charitable", particularly when the new definition is completely at odds with how everyone uses the word.
What if some of these answers are "I don't know"?
Perhaps, but atheism does not answer questions like how the world is created. You can be atheist and believe in big bang or believe that the universe have always existed or something else, or you can just not care. Atheism just eliminates some particular answers like "a god did it".
Edit: I should also ask, from your edit, what do you mean by "deity" and "universe" when you say that atheism holds that the universe is a deity?
One could be an atheist convinced that dinosaurs are a fabrication, nothing more than funny looking rocks some weird junkie decided to give some absurd meaning to, that the universe has always been the way it is, that the Romans never existed, and that we should all live in the mountains, only eating whatever we find in some specific dark caves filled with the appropriately colored glowing mushrooms.
All for no other reason than that it makes them feel good.
Owen Barfield calls it 'the residue of unresolved positivism'
That is a total non-sequitur since lots of religions does not proselytize. So clearly this is not a defining quality of religion but rather a characteristic shared between some religions and some non-religious movements and ideologies.
This is incoherent because it presupposes "an" atheism, as opposed to a broad range of philosophies which only hold lack of religious faith in common. It's like saying "non-strawberries" is a useful and enlightening category of food.
If you want a word to describe what atheism and religion have in common, I'd go with "spirituality". Not in the sense of "burning incense" or "believing in ghosts" but rather in the sense of holding beliefs that are not rational and deciding to care about the world and about humanity in particular.
Just as some people have "religious" beliefs that are very eclectic and isolated from organized religion, a sort of personal spirituality, I think there are atheists with particular and non-social views.
I also think many atheists, sharing similar "spirituality", find a similar kind of comfort in "communing" with other "believers", and socially expressing their beliefs with other "believers". Regardless of the specifics of said spirituality, I believe we do see some commonalities between "theists and atheists".
Could that be availability bias? You don't hear from the many that don't proselytise.
> even something like atheism is a religion
That's nonsense, a rhetorical subterfuge to defend religion ("oh, but you too have a religion.") maybe. Atheism has none of the things you claim (origin story and eschatology, prescriptions on how to live). Some (atheistic) sciences indeed give us the former two, and some (atheistic) Weltanschauungen (such as humanism) the latter, but that doesn't bestow religious status on atheism itself.
And they do proselytize quite a bit. The average atheist is as separate from the process of science as the average NFL fan is from actually scoring a touchdown. They're both spectators under a similar set of illusions regarding their claims as to their relevance in each ones game. Go TEAM SCIENCE!!!
No, neither factual belief in climate change (in general, or more specifically anthropogenic climate change) nor ideological belief in environmentalism is eschatology ("the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind") to start with, and even if they have a weak correlation with atheism, there is no essential connection between them and atheism (they may sometimes have a common cause, in that both atheism and factual belief in climate change can be grounded in scientific rationalism.)
> And they do proselytize quite a bit.
Proselytizing atheists are disproportionately visible, because people that aren't trying to shove their beliefs down your throat are a lot less noticeable. So, sure, if you aren't an atheists, the people whose atheism you notice will be very disproportionately those who are proselytizers. That doesn't mean atheists in general are proseltyizers, and atheism has no unifying belief in the value of proselytization the way, say, mainstream Christianity does.
Cause I hope they do have a theory that connects to their personal values, otherwise they are just following blindly.
PS. did you just make up "factual belief"? I mean it is a tautology on many levels. But let's take it as qualified belief. Isn't that the root of religion? It's okay, we humans need to believe in something
Because they have some concern about the quality of life people experience in the future, independent of any concept of the final destiny of humankind.
> Cause I hope they do have a theory that connects to their personal values, otherwise they are just following blindly
I'm not sure what your point is, unless you are unable to separate the idea of having values from eschatological theory. While certainly these can (and often are) ties together in religion, values can exist without any eschatology.
> did you just make up "factual belief"?
No.
> I mean it is a tautology on many levels.
It can't be a tautology because it's not a proposition, much less one that is true by definition. You might mean to say it's redundant, but it's not that. A factual belief is a belief on a question of fact, as opposed, e.g., to a question of values.
People seem to have a really hard time grasping that atheism does not imply any particular world view or ideology beside believing in zero gods.
The average liberal might like their caffè latte, but neither classical nor progressive liberalism contains a commitment to certain beverages.
In fact the branches of natural philosophy nominally used to make the determination "God cannot exist" by the atheist cannot speak to being and essence (because the sciences presuppose them) and cannot speak categorically to meaning and purpose (because those depend on what philosophy has determined about being and essence). Prescriptions on how to live (i. e. what the moral response to being must be) flow from the first two and therefore also cannot flow from science alone which presupposes whatever kind of universe the scientist finds himself existing in. "Can I derive 'ought' from 'is'" is presumed by the physicist and can only be addressed by the philosopher.
To put it another way, one cannot be an atheist without a religion - one can only be agnostic.
To put it a third way, Cicero says "religion consists in offering service and ceremonial rites to a superior nature that men call divine." The atheist says "there is none to serve" - but that is patently untrue, for in that case there would be no end to strive after and all atheists would perish by inaction. Therefore, all atheists have chosen to serve some superior nature, either themselves, or some ideal (Chaos, Order, Balance, etc.).
Not believing in a God(s) is no different than not believing in perfectly square pigs. It’s people that have a specific religious belief that put much importance on the subject.
PS: Saying the universe or your life has no purpose is hardly a cause do nothing any more than it’s a cause to build churches.
No, it may just be grounded in an epistemological approach in which entities which are not necessary to explain observations are presumed not to exist.
> To put it another way, one cannot be an atheist without a religion - one can only be agnostic.
Many self-described atheists reject the atheist/agnostic distinction as meaningless, viewing the absence of belief as equivalent to unbelief in their epistemology.
> To put it a third way, Cicero says "religion consists in offering service and ceremonial rites to a superior nature that men call divine." The atheist says "there is none to serve" - but that is patently untrue, for in that case there would be no end to strive after and all atheists would perish by inaction.
That is fantastic illogic. The absence of a "superior nature" to which one might have a reason to offer "service and ceremonial rites" does not deny that there are goals that one might strive for. Maximizing one's own experienced utility, for instance, requires no assumption of a "superior nature", nor even a rejection of solipsism, but still provides an end to strive after and motivate action.
> Therefore, all atheists have chosen to serve some superior nature, either themselves
Serving yourself is not serving a "superior nature", since "superior" is meaningful only in comparison to something else, and in Cicero's statement it is clearly in comparison to the self.
Is that a fair representation of your viewpoint?
In most languages, "religion" will imply an ordered belief in a supernatural entity and set of accompanying practices.
It is NOT a synonym for all belief, philosophy, ethical framework, world paradigms, etc. If it does become a synonym, then we'll simply need a NEW word to distinguish between "belief in supernatural entity" vs "no belief in a supernatural entity"
Buddhism is considered a religion and does not fit that description.
Your emphatic capslock notwithstanding, there's no single defining element. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion
That's a can of worms. A pretty big one, actually.
https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2015/05/27/why-did-the...
"Religion" isn't a word in "most languages". "Religion" in English and the closely-related terms in closely-related languages may mean (or at least strongly imply) something like that (though with a god or God, specifically, not merely "a supernatural entity") simply because of the dominant belief systems to which the terms applied in the West (mostly, varieties of Near Eastern Monotheism), but even so they are frequently applied to systems from outside which don't have an "ordered belief in a supernatural entity", such as Confucianism.
> If it does become a synonym, then we'll simply need a NEW word to distinguish between "belief in supernatural entity" vs "no belief in a supernatural entity"
With, again, the caveat that it is more specific (referring to one or more gods, not merely any supernatural entities), we already have such a word, adopted specifically to focus in on that aspect and not the other elements of belief and practice which "religion" typically includes and may sometimes be used to refer to without an identifiable god anywhere in sight: "theism".
That is simply not true.
"Religion is a modern Western concept.[12] Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages."
Ah, so there are entire cultures that are atheistic. Your argument has just achieved circularity!
Rather, in modern, western English we consider "religion" to mean that. Islam for examples uses the word 'Deen', the meaning of it includes how you looked at the world and your entire way of life.
Deen means basically exactly the stuff you say religion is not a synonym for :)
If you don’t believe we are zombies you hold a supernatural belief.
Really fascinating book, I can't recommend it enough.
Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture. For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context. Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different.
Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean? Is expressed spoken belief the final decider? Or does action factor in too?
This is a really long-winded way of saying that what "religion" is defined as is constantly changing. The book I recommended explains it much better than I can.
That makes sense only if you redefine "Christianity" to mean "respect for universal human rights". By that logic most everyone is a Christian. Most Hindus and Buddhists would be Christian too.
The problem is that changing the definition of a word does not change boundaries in reality. I can call my automobile a "Leaf", but that doesn't mean my car does photosynthesis. Similarly, you can say that Christianity just means "respect for human rights", but that doesn't mean that everyone accepts the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Today, in our global world, the same values absolutely have changed previously different cultures. Japan prior to 1946 doesn't have a universalist (formed in Christianity) democratic tradition, which was forced upon it by the West. India has a similar story with the caste system. It doesn't mean that they are Christians, but simply that ideas strongly formed by Christianity are now extremely powerful there.
"The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian.""
Where you effectively claim that "Christian religion" can be one where somebody is even one who doesn't believe in supernatural. Because... some other values count too?
Can really somebody who doesn't believe that Jesus is a "Christ" (the anointed one, a "Messiah", it's not a surname but the specific role in the universe of believers) be a Christian? And somebody who doesn't believe in any supernatural deity at all?
I for example admit I grew up in the area where traditionally most of the inhabitants were real Christian believers, but I surely am not a Christian. The Church would surely not accept that claim.
Edit: user keiferski answers below that to him "it's unclear what "supernatural" means in this context." Let me write that even more clearly: I don't believe in the existence of any supernatural deity, i.e. one which can influence the events on Earth that occur among humans or one which can "change the rules" how the universe functions, as established by the scientific experiments and research. I also define the belief in life after death as a belief in supernatural, and I assert that I don't have that belief. Also, the area I grew up was never inhabited by majority of "protestants." I was also never in life an object of any religious ceremony (and I consider myself lucky for growing up in such an environment, learning how most of people in the U.S. live). Most of the people I know who were baptized as children later officially renounced the Church, and the Church wiped them out of its records. All of them never went to any religious school, just state schools (some of them had a subject where they explicitly learned about religion though). People I knew who already died don't have any religious sign on their graves, and didn't believe they will "live" after their death. People who live together with their partners and even have children didn't even officially register in the state institutions, and they even less had any ceremony in any church. It's not "complicated" at all. And I'm not even some special exception -- exactly because not every area in the western world functions like an average "contemporary American" would expect. What is that that those people in my environment and I "do" which you believe could make us "Christians" then? (I also admit I know a few people in the circle of people around me, a very small minority, who do say they believe in Jesus Christ and that they have Christian morale, and attempt to behave according to that, while also not being consistent though their life. But they are a minority, and like I've said, even they don't "do" consistently what "the religion" would "expect" from them).
With Christianity, for example, the history there is immensely complicated. There are perhaps an infinite number of interpretations of Jesus' teachings and actions, many of which place far less focus on belief than on works (actions.) Other groups don't care whatsoever what any organized church says and base their beliefs and actions on traditions or on the Bible itself. Paul, the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and innumerable others have shaped "Christianity" over the last two thousand years, so to say that the contemporary American definition is all that counts is a bit historically ignorant.
Beyond that, it's also unclear precisely what "supernatural" means in this context.
In sum: it's complicated.
Nevertheless, even having that "ethic" doesn't make one a believer in supernatural "messiah" properties of a person called Jesus or in the afterlife or expected punishment or reward then or in the mere existence of some almighty supernatural entity with any capability which conflicts with scientific knowledge.
To quote user keiferski from another post: "to say that the contemporary American definition is all that counts is a bit historically ignorant."
We're trying to explain that coming from an entire culture and moral tradition means that you can decide God isn't real and you're still mostly flavored by that culture and moral tradition. The real-ness of God is just a little detail.
One can see this in the many analogues from specifically Christian traditions like repentance, confession and original sin to the current Social Justice movement. God not required.
Most who claim "respect for universal human rights" as their motto actually have a belief system that's heavily influenced by specifically Western sources. When the rubber meets the road, their biases, blind spots and points of emphasis will reveal this.
Someone from a different cultural tradition will have a different set of biases while still believing in "universal human rights". Up to and including which rights are more important when they come into conflict.
Both sides of that claim are fantastically false. First, while most describe the Enlightenment as novel, almost noone describes it arising ex nihilo rather than as a product of preexisting social forces, both building on and reacting against things present in its immediate context.
Second, while obviously it arose in a largely Christian context, there were significant non-Christian influences, and particularly the repopularization of pre-Christian influence (in part from interaction with contemporary non-Christian cultures) played a significant role in the Renaissance which itself set the stage for the Enlightenment.
> For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context.
Much of our idea of human rights is a reaction against the practices on all sides of the divides within Western Christendom.
> Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different.
Sure, social evolution is path dependent. And if we adopted a cladistic taxonomy of belief systems, those stemming from the Enlightenment might usefully described as being subsets of "Christianity" because of their origin. But while cladistic taxonomy makes some sense for biological life, it really doesn't make sense for social movements.
> Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean?
It probably means that you and the people who think your "values and actions" make you part of X have radically different definitions of "X", and are essentially speaking different languages on that point.
But that doesn't mean I practice or believe in a religion or deity?
Idk, this argument seems pretty facile and I've spent a lot of time reading philosophy of religion.
I'm not arguing that this is absolutely the case, but simply that it seems extremely plausible to me.
We can expand the definition of religion to include those sets of cultural values, but then I worry that:
a. the word religion loses meaning
b. someone who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim? Even if they weren't one to start with? That seems absurd to me.
b. That's more of a sociological labeling question, but I don't think that's a good example.
That's dodging the issue, which is that if you are going to argue that secular humaninsm is identical with christianity, then logically, you must accept that christianity is identical with secular humanism: No God, no creation, no Trinity, Christ is not the son of God in any sense... and if you do, then all the explicitly theological and christian concepts can be stripped out with Occam's razor.
And not that it's particularly definitive, but I'd note that cult and culture share the same Latin etymology.
"Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals."
I've already read it. I agree that there are implicit religious values, perhaps even pseudo-religious, I disagree that it is an actual "religion" as such.
Nor do I particularly subscribe to American civil religion itself.
No, according to GP, insofar as that person believes in the sanctity of the individual and human rights etc, that person was Christian all along, no matter their belief in the resurrection of Jesus, or what they think their religion is.
A thesis I disagree with.
Frankly, I find these redefinitions of common words somewhat annoying, as eg. in one of the earlier talks of Jordan Peterson with Sam Harris, where Peterson insisted on defining "truth" as "that which confers long-term evolutionary advantage". No, that's not what truth is. Just invent a new word for it.
Similarly, one can easily say that today's Western secular societies hold many values dear that arguably arose in Christianity (see, I just did!), without then adding that those secular societies are not, in fact, secular, but religious.
> If your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean?
Nothing more than that human thought and behavior is not a consistent logical system, let alone a sound one. As there is no reason to think that it is, this is not problematical, and there's nothing theological to see here.
Everything else is simply not "a religion." And I also have a whole book to cite:
https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Versus-Fact-Religion-Incompatib...
"Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible" by Jerry A. Coyne
"Evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions."
Also, Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion
"Definition of religion
1a : the state of a religious (e.g. "a nun in her 20th year of religion")
1b(1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural
1b(2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith"
If you think "4" fits with the bad attempt to redefine the real meaning, it in to explain the use in the sentence like "rock'n'roll is his religion."
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
This kind of logic doesn't transfer well to other beliefs. God is omni-present, omni-powerful and all-knowing. Transferring the same logic, we assume people worshipping God always feel distant, powerless and knowing nothing.
Yes there is
Those ethics were created from within a theistic worldview, they weren't born from reason. Adopting the ethics of a religious culture while denying the underlying assumptions is pretty unreasonable.
Why is that unreasonable? I've "adopted" the basic idea of Newton's gravity but deny the fundamental assumptions regarding the flat spacetime and "gravity as just another force" because general relativity showed those to be incorrect.
Animals behave ethically/morally and they have no religion.
It's possible that ethics were first written within a theistic context but that has no bearing on how they were created.
In many case, they were both; the existence of a theistic worldview does not prevent the application of reason.
> Adopting the ethics of a religious culture while denying the underlying assumptions is pretty unreasonable.
But we do adopt the relevant foundational assumptions, just not the irrelevant ones, where the conclusions are shared.
Of course, the conclusions are often different, because post-Enlightenment society often rejects substantive, morally significant elements of its precursors (in some cases, pre-existing religions have adapted to this and adopted, in whole or in part, Enlightenment values as well.)
Why? Are you saying that just because Islam stresses peace, hospitality, and philanthropy, that one cannot be peaceful, hospitable, and philanthropic without reasonably adopting Islam?
Furthermore, let's suppose a theologian - for the sake of example, let's say a christian one - insists that I am really a christian, on account of my ethical positions. Well, OK, but if that so, then it follows that being a christian does not involve believing in the Trinity, or that Christ is the son of God, or that God created the universe... in fact, that it does not involve anything beyond holding certain ethical positions, and that christianity is identical with secular humanism!
Of course, it is rare to find an avowed christian who follows this line of thinking to its logical conclusion. Motte-and-bailey argumentation [1] is rampant in theological thinking.
For example, how much value do you put into close relationships versus distant ones? Is charity worthwhile if it helps someone who can't help you back? Maybe someone who doesn't even know you?
edit: reworded.
Having beliefs is not the same as having religion.
Even having theistic beliefs isn't the same as having religion.
Btw, even taking a very atheistic perspective, only focused on how humanity evolved (which is a selfish process in spite of your future protestations of how you have trascended it) we can see we evolved to be nice only out of self-preservation.
One would think that is the ultimate personal gain but I'll grant you that reminding yourself you are a good person must be a psychological gain of its own.
EDIT: since some have asked what I meant by "everyone already has...a religion," I meant that even something like atheism is a religion. It has a story of the origin of the universe, various accounts for why and how you should live your life, and an eschatology (where the universe is headed). Many atheists think they don't have a religion because they don't worship a personal God, when in reality atheism holds that the universe itself is functionally an impersonal, all-ordering deity.
In my experience, many atheists also seem to proselytize with a religious fervor as well (famously, Dawkins et al.).