What if your meaning for the word "leprechaun" doesn't cover all leprechauns? There are a great many putative beings that I believe are mythical--gods, angels, demons, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, goblins, fairies, ogres, leprechauns, dragons, etc. My judgment that they are mythical is based on my understanding of those words and my experience of the world. I don't see a big problem here. If someone else has a special interpretation of the word "god", I'll listen to what it is and decide whether it falls into the same category as my concept of "god". If that person has evidence or a good argument for their god, I'll examine it.
So you reject all mythical things and thereby reject all gods... fine, as long as you can say
with certainty that anything that can be validly considered a god must be mythical. Unless you can exclude the possibility that someone might someday present you with some sort of god concept that's not mythical, then you can't say that you've rejected all gods.
Suppose you see something that is halfway between a door and a hatch. If everyone calls the thing a door, you might extend your internal door "model" to cover it, or you might invent a new word--"hatch-door"--or you might consider that usage just another usage of the same word, or you might refuse to call it a "door". All of these possibilities are within reason. What sounds unreasonable is to claim that you do not know what "door" means because you haven't examined everything that someone might choose to call a "door".
None of this is relevant. I'm not saying that we don't have a general sense of what "god" means in everyday speech. I'm saying that unless you can be sure that
everything that's rightly called a "god" belongs to some sort of category you've rejected, then you can't say you've rejected
all gods.
Perhaps you need a lexicographer or a linguist to reacquaint you with what the term "all" means. It means "all", not "
almost all, with some vagueness around the edges".
There are always borderline cases. Semantic vagueness does not bother me. It is a natural phenomenon in language.
Yes... and it's why it's near-impossible to actually reject an entire category of thing unless the category is defined in such a way that this vagueness is eliminated.
I reject belief in all gods because of the properties they have and the flawed way in which people try to justify belief in them.
What properties do gods have?
Since you say use them as the basis for your rejection of them, you should be able to tell us what they are, right?
Well, I have come up with a rejection that works for all supernatural entities, and gods do fall within that class of beings.
Do they? I've run into people who have argued that their "God" was not supernatural.
We were talking about classifying something as a "god", not whether that thing would be a believable being. If you can find a bona fide entity that qualifies as a "god", then I'll revise my opinion. Right now, they are looking very unreal to me.
It's not up to me. When you defined atheism as the
rejection of
all gods,
you took on the burden of proof of demonstrating that you actually do reject anything that could rightly be called a god.
Remember... it's not enough to merely not believe in a particular god, because even babies are capable of doing that.
Every word is unique. So what? Atheists are a type of religious skeptic--a type that denies the existence of gods. The world is full of skeptics, and there is nothing special about the word "god" that makes it impossible to reject belief in gods. The fact that we do not have similar labels for leprechaun-deniers and centaur-deniers tells us more about the social status of god-deniers than the special linguistic nature of words like "god" and "atheist".
You've got the definition of "skeptic" wrong, too.
Skepticism isn't automatic
rejection of claims; it's the position that claims should not be
accepted until supported. Lack of acceptance does not imply rejection; even if I don't trust you, this doesn't necessarily mean I think that you're lying.
In fact, equating lack of acceptance with rejection misses the entire point of skepticism.
Also, atheism doesn't have to be a form of skepticism. Atheists are often skeptics, yes, but it's entirely possible to be an atheist for non-skeptical reasons.
The prefix "non-" is productive for nouns. Welcome to Morphology 101. That is just one of many non-geology courses.
Good grief. My word choice didn't even matter! What was relevant to my point was the definition I gave. The word was just a label of convenience... a placeholder that I defined right in the argument; I could've used "dancing hippo" instead of "a-geology" and the point would've been the same.
Yes, and I maintain that that is just what atheists do. They reject belief in all gods. If they don't, then they do not merit the coveted title of "atheist". I'm not really trying to exclude them. We can still all belong to the "non-believers" club.
It's just that the word has a centuries-old usage in English that is still perfectly good.
The centuries-old usage in English is more like "non-Christian" than "person who rejects (or lacks belief) in all gods". Apparently, it can change to suit you, but no further.
Really? I think that "skepticism" implies active rejection. Again, we disagree on word usage.
Yes, because you miss the point of skepticism, apparently. Defining it as
rejection implicitly contradicts the skeptical position.
Yes, but you do take your audience into account when you say things, don't you? We calculate how the audience will judge our intent.
We take them into account based on our assessment of them, sure. But if that assessment is wrong, then the reader doesn't get to wind back the clock, climb into the author's head and somehow change things so that the author meant something else.
As an example from my own life: I often have to write reports for a technical audience. In that context, I often use terms that have one meaning when used in my field, but somewhat different meanings in common speech. Say I write a report for a technical reviewer with one meaning in mind, and then a member of the general public gets ahold of it and gets another meaning out of it... the meaning that the member of the public got from my report is likely
not my intended meaning.
Yes, and I haven't moved anything. Read my words. If you move that empty set out of the rejection space, then you have my original definition and no division by zero. You were the one who erroneously moved it in there in the first place. I have not changed my definition.
I didn't put it anywhere. I'm saying that as an empty set, its location is undefined - I'm saying that we can't say where it is, and therefore that we can't say with certainty that it definitely
isn't in any particular region.
On the "atheist baby" survey, I was actually surprised to get that many in your favor, but I think that that had more to do with partisanship and the discussion that ensued. The Secular Cafe survey had almost no "atheist" hits until someone started spouting off with the "lacks belief" definition. Then it picked up a few more, the stats are still 2-1 in favor of saying that the label is inappropriate.
IOW, you had some knee-jerk responses that agreed with you, but once people put some thought into the matter, a significant number of them agreed with me?
No. What distinguishes atheists from other people is that they actively deny the existence of gods. Theists may feel that they are delusional and rebellious, but they still use the term "atheist" appropriately.
How is it appropriate for a person to say to an atheist "you know, you're not really an atheist." Is that "appropriate" use?
There is no number. Lexicographers rely on usage panels, who analyze citations and debate word senses.
So what was the point of your surveys, then?
