Like stu said: I know whether I have no religious belief or whether I have a religious disbelief. You don't. I know whether it is no belief in God or whether it is a belief there is no God. You don't. You don't get to tell me I have a belief, because your fascist religion tells you what to believe, and so to tells me that I have a belief, when I don't.
Arrow - you are missing the point. Typically atheists do no behave like Stu. Stu is a zealout. He interjects himself into religious threads as a matter of course. It is almost like he works for the church of atheism. As someone who has lived in large cities his entire life (save 3 years in fla) I do not know the religious views of half my friends. So here are my beliefs Interest groups do not get to define words the way they chose. I do not give a crap if an atheist wishes to believe that atheism in non belief. Atheism is a word and a word is defined by dictionaries and common usage. So if you have no belief you are not an atheist. And even if you could argue the definition of atheism is changing.... it is still screwed up to come on here and start calling people dishonest because they use the traditional definition. I expect atheists to be logical and rational. It is irrational to say you know God does not exist. It is irrational to think atheist have a right to change the meaning of atheism.
Funny how that point didn't come across when you referred to atheists as turds. Face it, jem, you're the real troll in this thread. You mean like the way homosexuals thought they had a right to change the meaning of "gay"? If a word applies to me (e.g., "atheist"), you bet your arrogant ass I have some say over how it's defined. And any outsider who doesn't like it can go fuck himself.
Actually you don't have any say . Your attempts to change others objective reality concerning you won't change due to your self created lexicon.
As long as the dictionary contradicts itself on the subject, I have a say. Look up the definition of the word 'god': you'll find 'deity'. Look up the word 'deity': you'll find 'god.' ROTFL!! Your simplistic notion that the fucking dictionary is always the final authority on anything just reveals how clueless you are. Seventy years ago, the word 'computer' invariably defined a human being who did computations. Less than a decade later, the word referred to computing machines. Language is plastic. Especially the English language, which has done wholesale pillage and plunder of other languages. Get over it.
You & stu are such frickin tools it's pathetic. 1) I never mentioned the dictionary so the voices in your head are talking again or you fwelt obligated to create a strawman argument. 2) Others are merely commenting on your behavior /bias and using universally accepted terms. They see blue light(475nm) and identify it as blue. Now you can sit there and call it orange , red or loopy liberal if you want to, but you wont change the "objective" wavelength 1 iota no matter how hard you try by red herring attempts to create your own vocabulary.
If you weren't implicitly referring to the dictionary then what was your point? What "objective reality" is there for the meaning of atheism other than a common source like the dictionary? Doesn't talking out of your ass give you both constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth? Nice strawman. Blue has an objective scientific definition. Atheism does not. Nobody but you is talking about acting like the catepillar in Alice in Wonderland and using words to mean anything whatsoever. Let's look at the "objective reality" dictionary: atheism - the doctrine or belief that there is no God. Hold on, check this out: antitheism - Disbelief in the existence of God. So according to the dictionary, atheism and antitheism are synonyms. I guess that means apathy and antipathy are also synonyms. LOL The fact is that atheism IRL has more than one meaning, something most theists are completely clueless about because they're stuck on the original theistic definition. An atheist wrote a book a while in which he described two different types of atheism. The extreme type can best be described as antitheism. The more common type can best be described as "apathy towards the concept of god(s)". Too bad if this creates confusion for theists but at least there aren't 10,000 different types of atheists the way there are 10,000 different types of theists.
Here are my personal definitions: antitheism - Belief that the number of gods is zero. agnosticism - Belief that the number of gods is unknowable. atheism - Belief that the number of gods is unimportant. I have a better (for me) definition for atheism that I readily admit other atheists are free to accept or reject as they please: Atheism is "apathy towards the concept of god or gods."