Setanta wrote:I think it fair to state that these are particularist and idiosyncratic definitions which you have provided yourself. You cannot well expect others to discuss a topic on your terms if they don't know what those terms are. By the way, you have, since the post in which you first made your exposition, expanded those whom you would include in your definition of "negative atheists."
I have not expanded my definition of negative atheist. Nowhere did I ever state "one can only become a negative atheist through study" or "only those who are aware of the idea of gods" or something similar that limited the amount of people that the "lacks belief in gods" definition would apply to. I have explicitly stated in this discussion that one is either a theist, one who believes in gods, or an atheist, one who does not believe in gods. From the very start I have included newly born children in my definition because each newly born child "lacks belief in gods." (Obviously, they are not born
with belief in gods.) You are clearly imagining a broadening of the definition I gave because no such broadening has occurred.
And my definition is not an idiosyncratic one. It is the same definition that has been in use for around 419 years ago in France and then adopted into the English language. This was the same definition used by Baron d'Holbach, arguably one of the most famous atheists of all time, around 224 years ago. It is the same definition used by the vast majority of atheist and secular organizations today, including the vast majority of atheistic web sites out there. Go ahead and do a search on google for "weak atheism" (which is the same thing as "negative atheism"), which has 35,300 results, and you can confirm for yourself that my definition is accurate and not idiosyncratic. Do a general search for atheist web sites and you'll see that the vast majority of them define atheism as I have. The other definition, that atheists are those who know for certain gods do not exist, is the idiosyncratic definition.
While you're at it, look up atheism in Wikipedia and you'll see that the word atheism, which includes negative and positive atheists like the definition I have given, predates the very creation of the word theism.
JLNobody wrote:The concepts offered here of negative and positive atheism closely parallels the distinction I've offered many times: passive and active (aggressive?) atheism.
Negative, weak, and passive are all defined the same. Positive, strong, and active also share the same definition. The only difference is the words used in the label.
Jason Proudmoore wrote:Passive and active atheism? Is there any other way to explain this?
A person that lacks belief in gods is an atheist. There are two kinds of atheists. (1) Some make the assertion that gods do not exist. This is a positive claim of having knowledge about whether gods exist or not. (2) Then there are those that make no claim to knowledge on the subject but are not convinced that gods really do exist. Both groups lack belief in the existence of gods but there is a distinction between the two groups in how certain they are. As such, different labels are applied to people of each group. The first group (1) are called positive atheists, strong atheists, or active atheists--think "positive" as in having a positive claim to knowledge, or "strong" as in the strength of their convictions. The second group (2) are called negative atheists, weak atheists, or passive atheists--think "negative" as in having a negative claim to knowledge (they don't know), or "weak" as in the strength of their convictions.
With regard to newly born children, they have no idea of what gods are. As such, they cannot have a belief in gods. It would be impossible to believe something you've never heard of--for example, a preschool student cannot possibly believe such things as superstrings exist (superstring theory) because they have no idea what superstrings are. It is in the negative, weak, or passive sense that newly born children are atheists. They lack belief in gods because they have no idea what gods are. To put it more bluntly: all children are born atheists.
