tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13030925.post3817253383914055243..comments2024-01-25T13:46:11.967-06:00Comments on The Bronze Blog: Doggerel #160: "We Got More Famous People on Our Side!"Ryan Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14750814560493466382noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13030925.post-51662915470932447252008-08-01T11:28:00.000-05:002008-08-01T11:28:00.000-05:00It gets even worse when you consider that, even if...It gets even worse when you consider that, even if they do inwardly consider themselves atheists, that, due to the stigma attached to the word, they might not label themselves as atheists in public. Then you really have no idea what they actually are.King Aardvarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02785457928646226831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13030925.post-88779907487342074772008-07-31T23:55:00.000-05:002008-07-31T23:55:00.000-05:00The thing PZ's post and the (flawed) poster reveal...The thing PZ's post and the (flawed) poster reveals, though, is the host of problems involved in assigning labels to people. On one hand, it's probably best and easiest to use the labels that those people applied to themselves--and so Paine and Jefferson are Deists, Einstein's a pantheist, and Sagan's an agnostic. <BR/><BR/>On the other hand, the term "atheist" has a fairly specific meaning that many misunderstand. It is, simply, the absence of theism (belief in a god or gods); everything that is not theistic is, by definition, atheistic. And in that regard, a lot (if not all) of those people <I>are</I>, in fact, atheists. <BR/><BR/>Take Sagan, for instance. His position was that he does not believe in God because he has seen no evidence for it. He calls himself an "agnostic," but gnosticism and agnosticism address knowledge, not belief. That he does not believe in God makes him an atheist--specifically, an <I>agnostic atheist</I>, one who does not know if there is a God, and does not believe in one. <BR/><BR/>The matter of deism is trickier; it rejects (for the most part) a personal God, as does Einsteinian pantheism. Where does that fall on the spectrum? <BR/><BR/>The problem here is not necessarily that these people were not atheists, but that they did not call themselves atheists. From an outside perspective, we can't know what they actually believed outside of what they said. And yet, from that same perspective, we may be able to apply labels accurately that they would have rejected for various reasons. <BR/><BR/>And <I>that's</I> why understanding the meanings of words is so important.Tom Fosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13796424725228769265noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13030925.post-23853806575759694452008-07-31T23:41:00.000-05:002008-07-31T23:41:00.000-05:00Yeah; I thought of the same thing as soon as I saw...Yeah; I thought of the same thing as soon as I saw that.King of Ferretshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07893294460892136598noreply@blogger.com