Atheism spreads religious awareness and biases our thinking...

No it is not. Read the definitions!

I can only say the same to you. Read the definitions supplied by Thomas. They support my understanding of the term.

Actually... no. There is a big difference between believing that gods don't exist and asserting that it cannot be known either way. When it comes to this issue I am perhaps an agnostic. I understand that this is unknowable, and I have also found that forming a belief about gods either existing or not means practically nothing to me. So I just disregard the whole concept when I try to make sense of the world.

Yeah, i'm not surprised to find you in Frank's "agnostics are superior" camp. You are willing to disregard the whole concept, but unwilling to accept that there are atheists who disregard the whole concept. How convenient for you.

Agreed. I think perhaps many who call themselves atheist because they are without any beliefs concerning gods, are calling themselves the wrong thing. If they have no beliefs concerning gods, they are neither theists nor atheists.
Dictionaries support this take on it, but people are just too sloppy in their use of language to care, I guess...

Thanks for supporting words.

Here ya go, Cyracuz--square that with your "don't know" stance. How very negatively you relate to theism. Certainly you're not creating a "conceptual awareness" (love those fancy phrases, don't ya?) that you can relate to and believe in.

Don't be dense Set. If they disregard the whole concept they are not atheists. I am perfectly aware that there are many people who just disregard the whole concept of gods. You seem unwilling to accept that to label these people as atheist is an erroneous use of the word.

Only in your convenient, quesstion-begging definition. You're the one who's being dense, and willfully so.

I don't see the problem. Theism doesn't do much for me, so instead of spending my time denying it's truth (which is the atheist way to go), I just close the door on the whole issue, leaving concepts of gods to those who want them, and do something else.

I said that I am perhaps an agnostic when it comes to this issue. I am well aware that some things can be known, and others must be taken on faith. But just because faith is involved that don't make it theism. I believe in things I cannot be certain about. These things have nothing whatsoever to do with any concept of any god, and so it is neither theism nor atheism.

Why don't you spend some time with a dictionary and get back to me.

By the way, Bubba, you are dodging the criticisms of your thesis that atheism "spreads religious awareness and biases our thinking." Are you willing to assert that theism biases our thinking? If not, i'd classify you as another closet theist like Frank.

I already have clown, and i certainly don't need lessons in my native language from you. You are playing an idiotic word game with "disbelief" equivalent to Frank's childish assertions about the word guess. Disbelief only means that one does not believe something, it does not mean that one asserts that they know something not to be true. You're a snotty son of a bitch.

Bullshit--that's question begging again. I spend zero time engaged in any such activity, except here, when confronted by smug agnostics like you. This never comes up in my life in the real world. Now you're comparing your real world experience to your witless assertions about an avatar of the atheist constructed from your question begging.

Yes.

Apparently you do. Atheism is defined as "believing there are no gods".

I'm not going to waste any more time on your mental masturbation here. I'm sure you can get Frank to join you in a circle-jerk, though.

I think that discussions of this nature which do not consider the social consequences of theism, atheism etc belong in nurseries. They represent abdication and irresponsibility as Kant explained. A teething ring is required.

It is a belief, but only in the sense we believe people who try to push gods and religion on us are full of ****.

As you wish.

Perhaps you will comment on this before you go:

Atheism can spread theistic awareness if someone were to call themselves an atheist when speaking to people who had no concepts of gods. Hypothetical situation, of course. But in that situation, the atheist would first have to explain the concept "gods" before he could move on to say that he didn't believe in them, and in so doing, he would have created awareness of theistic concepts in his listeners.

Atheism can bias our thinking because if the stance is "I believe no gods exist", it will be easy to prematurely reject ideas that involve aspects commonly associated with gods. If I start speaking of the universe as a singularity, about how I believe consciousness to be a fundamental aspect of this singularity, the bias we have from theism being forced on us makes it hard to see it as anything but theism, even though it is not. The atheistic bias will make many reject such ideas because of their similarity to theism.

This is how atheism can spread religious awareness, and how it can bias our thinking.

We will get to that, hopefully. As you might understand from my previous post here, the social and cultural consequences of having the division theism/atheism is precisely what I wanted to discuss.