Quote:
Originally Posted by Dalton
I am an atheist.
I don't know what the community is like as far as religion goes here, but it seems wherever you, atheism has a negative stigma. If you proclaim you're an atheist, it's generally followed by the association that you must be a morally-corrupt, hedonistic libertine who has no conscience.
Why is it that an agnostic can just be an agnostic, and you can even simply "not believe in god," but yet when you assert yourself as an atheist it almost always provokes a negative response?
Richard Dawkins made this same point in The God Delusion, so this is obviously not entirely my own argument, just to point that out now.
Thoughts?
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I think a lot of the negativity comes from people not understanding what the word means. There are a lot of people out there who associate the word with all kinds of unrelated sh
it from satanism to communism. And, of course, there are others who associate it with some kind of absoluteism even though it's only absolutist in the sense that any opinion can be described as absolutist. On top of all that, you have the whole "in your face" aspect wherein people in the dominant group think that smaller groups are being "in your face" simply by existing, like straight people who get in an uproar about "in your face" gay people because those people are doing things that straight people do all the time like holding hands.