Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Atheist "identity"/reply

I direct you to this:



The point is, can you make an "identity" around that; as in, how do you communicate the answer to "so, what do you believe?" and find like-minded people to group yourself with (insomuch that you should do that).

I think atheists actually do have something politically in common; they're atheists. But this is only in the same sense you have "Christian" thrown around the political sphere to unite people. Penn Jillette briefly notes a point not too dissimilar here - except he concludes, and I agree, that if you're just interested in truth and discussion then you wouldn't try to unite people that way because it would be dishonest, just like uniting people under "Christian".

I'll see about writing a Part II type thing to address this more clearly, but in short I don't see conflating different philosophies to be a problem if, in fact, they're the same or you believe both in some degree and you see them as related. Though it can be a bit chicken-and-egg; are you an atheist because you're a naturalist or a naturalist because you were an atheist? For me I became an atheist out of apathy, became a philosophical naturalist through atheism other mechanisms, and stayed an atheist because of this. It all depends on how well you intend to answer that question "So what do you believe?" and what's the most useful answer - and there's another can of worms as to how context can completely change what is the most useful answer there. The ubiquity of religion gives "I'm an atheist" quite a bit of meaning, but only in the context that we're implicitly aware of what religion is. This is why atheists aligning against the "religious" have some degree of identity. On its own, however, "I'm an atheist" doesn't mean that much.