Sunday, February 19, 2012

What is an Atheist?

beliefnet

An atheist is a person who does not believe in God, gods or goddesses. Some atheists have considered the reasons, such as they are, that theists present for the existence of gods and have reached the conclusion that the evidence and arguments of theists are lacking. Other atheists are atheists because they've simply never adopted any belief in gods.
steven_guy

As a minimalist definition where one size fits all, it works just fine. Nonetheless a Budddhist atheist has a complete paradigm covering all the important aspects of living and dying. It simply does not include God concepts.

But it seems to me that if an atheist cannot deal reasonably with those important aspects of living and dying but simply says God answers are wrong, hesh is missing the essence of atheism, which is building a valuable life that does not depend in any way on God concepts positively or negatively. There are of course off the shelf belief systems that are atheistic, skepticism and Secular Humanism as a couple of examples, but it seems to me that they are still negative systems, denying God rather than offering reasonable alternatives that do not involve God.

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