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Aren't you using the word 'suck' as a slang?
) Yet, even here I make all kinds of communication mistakes that don't make themselves known until they've been responded to.
Since the implication here is that atheists can't be ignorant, I'll choose to take this as a compliment.
Since the implication here is that atheists can't be ignorant, I'll choose to take this as a compliment.
From a purely etymological perspective, you are correct. However, the word "atheism" is not necessarily perceived that way by every speaker (especially those who tend to spell it "athiest"), and we know that modern English only has a productive prefix a- that attaches to adjectives. So you are committing an etymological fallacy to argue the meaning of this word based on etymology. I'm sorry, but that is a recognized fallacy.
But it doesn't work with other nouns. So you cannot call someone who is not a politician an "apolitician". The productive privative prefix in the case of nouns would usually be "non-", as in "non-politician". And you can have a "non-theist", which is simply anyone who is not a theist. The word "atheist" is an older word in the language that came into English via French with its Greek morphology already intact.
It isn't too broad if you use "believer" as a synonym for "theist", which we frequently do in this forum.
When you really examine word meanings, it turns out that there are no pure synonyms. However, "non-theist" can be a euphemism for "atheist", so it is used as a synonym sometimes. Normally, it just means anyone who is not a theist, which could include people who have no concept of a "god".
We are no longer talking about the prefix "a-" here, so I'm not getting your point.
Well, the question here is one of how people use the words "atheism" and "atheist". I would maintain that most English speakers associate the concept with rejection of belief, not mere lack of belief. So, if Tarzan doesn't know about gods because he was raised by animals in the jungle, one might refer to him as a "non-theist" more readily than an "atheist", which carries a lot more semantic baggage.
But theism gets eliminated by the qualifier "Given that a baby does not have a concept of a 'god'" even before we consider whether theists are ignorant or not.
I'd say it's more cultural baggage than semantic baggage.
I already conceded that your definition of the word was the standard definition that atheists prefer in this forum. This experiment was an attempt to see how many in this forum would go to the extent of calling a baby an atheist, which is not something I would expect in the general population of English speakers, most of whom would not have been exposed to your definition or taken a rigorous stand on what it means.
Yes, I saw that. It was an interesting thing to say, since it would appear to be inconsistent with his judgment about babies. I cannot explain the discrepancy, which agrees with neither of our positions.
If true, that would be an interesting position to take, but I must have missed the post where he explained his response this way.
Ah. That's your interpretation of what he said. I'll wait for him to clarify, if he chooses.
I would say that that is a false dichotomy. All linguistic semantics is grounded in a speech community, which has a culture. You cannot really dissociate meaning from culture.
Not in this speech community, but that should not surprise us, given the number of times we've been exposed to the stock definition "lacks belief in gods". Not everyone likes that definition, and, as you know, I'm one of them. I still doubt very much that the same opinion would follow from the general population of English speakers.
These are good points, and only the first one had occurred to me before. People do tend to classify children according to the religious beliefs of their parents. Calling a baby an "atheist", which is a pejorative label, clashes with the instinct that babies are inherently innocent. That would tend to skew the answers in my favor in the general population. A better survey would try to set up a more neutral question--like the Tarzan case. It is just very hard to believe that an adult who knows English has no knowledge of what gods are. When someone claims to hold no opinion about the existence of gods one way or the other, we tend to call that person an "agnostic" (even though there is a different understanding of the term "agnostic" for many of us here).
D. A,B, and C all imply giving some kind of intellectual assent to an idea. This is not possible until the baby has acquired language and, in this case, some degree of abstract thought.
Sure you can. This is how we're able, for example, to still use the word "Jew" as an inoffensive descriptor of a member of the Jewish religion and/or culture, while having discarded the very offensive use of the term "Jew" as a verb that relied on prejudicial stereotypes.
Out of curiosity, what was your reason for creating this thread?
No, it doesn't. All it points to is that people consider the term "atheist" to be bad. I think this has more to do with things like the idea that atheists are immoral people than it does with some implicit assent to your definition on the part of people.
We do? Who is "we"?
A person who does not know if the moon landing happened would be ignorant about the moon landing.
This would be a 'conspiracy theorist,' unless of course they are still investigating.
Also ignorant.