I had no idea how big of a curse word atheist/atheism was to a lot of religious folk until recently. This is part of the reason why I hate labels. No matter what you try and call yourself, someone will always try to pervert it and carry their own meaning with the label. Sometimes it’s actually easier to just explain your position than to sum it up with a one word label for this very reason. The label of “atheist” is so perverted and far from its actual meaning that it could actually be detrimental to try and live by this label.

Theism is defined as the belief in a god or gods. So naturally, people that believe in and worship a god are considered theists. It’s also important to point out that theism only deals with belief, and not knowledge. When you ad the prefix a- (meaning without) to theism, you get a word that means “without the belief in god”. This word does not mean “belief that god does not exist” because that deals with knowledge and not belief. When you start talking about knowledge, you’re dealing with gnosticism. A “gnostic” is someone who claims to know something and conversely, an agnostic is someone who is (yep, you guessed it) without knowledge on a specific topic.

A lot of people that don’t believe in god try and escape the word atheism by latching on to the less threatening term of “agnostic” (and I don’t blame them since I was one of them), but when it comes to belief in god, you’re either a theist or an atheist…..there’s no such thing as an in between position where you’re not one or the other. You either believe (theism) or you do not believe (atheism). Now, if you want to talk about whether or not you claim to know that there is no god, that could be considered gnostic atheism. Most of the atheists I know are agnostic atheists though, meaning we don’t claim to know that there is no god…..only that there is no evidence to believe in a god, so we concern ourselves with other things. However, I personally have an open door policy with god, if one exists. I just happen to think there’s significantly more evidence against the existence of a god than for one, but I think I’m wise enough to know we can’t possibly know that one 100% doesn’t exist.

The thing I find interesting about theists’ perception of atheists is that theists know exactly what it’s like to be an atheist, yet they treat atheism as some disease. Theists don’t believe in certain gods for various reasons (probably because there’s not enough evidence to do so) and atheists do the same…..only we remain consistent and require this evidence from all gods, and not just the ones that you didn’t grow up with. Why demand evidence from one god and not another? I just think atheism is a more consistent position.

And as much as theists don’t want to admit it (since atheism is such a repulsive word to them) we were all born atheist. We have to be taught about god. People don’t naturally know about god, much less which god is the real god (since man has worshiped hundreds of gods over the years). We are only taught about the god that our parents worshiped, and if we don’t like that god, then we go find one that fits us. I was never taught to worship a god to begin with, so I remained at the default atheism. Just like everyone was born an asantaclausist, until your parent teaches you about Santa, Rudolph and all that cute stuff.

Atheism is not:

1. Rejecting god
2. Hating god
3. Devil worship
4. Self worship

It ain’t a bad word, but people are going to throw their own meaning to it to try and make atheists out to be the evil enemy or something. Where’s all this Christian love I keep hearing about? I know of a special pocket of people that truly live up to what they preach, but for the most part, methinks there’s too much hypocrisy going on.

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