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[Il Palazzo]

Ideas and beliefs don't kill people, people kill people, if you want it serious then.

Oh, yes. Totally. Only some ideas make people kill people.

[Max White]

Oh, yes. Totally. Only some ideas make people kill people.

Eddie: My god.
Ivan: What is it, Ed?
Eddie: I just thought, what if we were to somehow thicken milk out into a substance we can spread on bread?
Ivan: What? I don't follow.
Eddie: I shall call it butter! People will love it!
Ivan: Your just being silly.
Eddie:...
*Eddie stabs Ivan*
Eddie: Must protect the secret of the butter.

[Il Palazzo]

Fair enough. All ideas can make people kill/harm other people.
However, some ideas do so with much higher success rate.
To kill for butter, you must be deranged. To kill for eternal bliss in heaven+72 virgins gratis, you just need to believe in one of the more popular religions on the market really hard.
The first state of mind leads to the society isolating you and perhaps treating. Doing the same with the second one is for some reason unthinkable.

Certainly, I don't mean that every religion is this conductive to violence(if only every Christian, Jew, and Muslim converted into Jainism one day, we wouldn't even have had* this conversation).

*possibly bad grammar warning.

[fqllve]

An irreligious person who is "unconcerned with whether or not a deity exists." has no interest in the matter, and would not consider whether or not a deity exists because they don't care.

An Agnostic has interest, how else would they have actually seriously considered the matter of whether a deity exists?

Some agnostics don't believe we can know whether or not a deity exists. Someone who believed that would have no more interest in the question than someone who thought the question was meaningless in the first place.

[Max White]

To kill for butter, you must be deranged.

Realy?
Because I didn't just base that example off my own life and change the names. That would be silly.

[Leafsnail]

To kill for butter, you must be deranged. To kill for eternal bliss in heaven+72 virgins gratis, you just need to believe in one of the more popular religions on the market really hard.

It's not part of actual Muslim teaching.  It was just a mistranslation of something a radical cleric said (apparently it was meant to be "72 raisins of crystal clarity").

[Il Palazzo]

To kill for butter, you must be deranged. To kill for eternal bliss in heaven+72 virgins gratis, you just need to believe in one of the more popular religions on the market really hard.

It's not part of actual Muslim teaching.  It was just a mistranslation of something a radical cleric said (apparently it was meant to be "72 raisins of crystal clarity").

I'm with Sam Harris on this one - Islam is conductive to this kind of interpretation, while some other religions are not. You can easily get a radical Muslim, who'd preach that blowing yourself up and killing heathens in the process is a sure way to paradise, but you'd never get a radical Jainist doing the same.
http://fora.tv/2010/11/10/Sam_Harris_Can_Science_Determine_Human_Values
http://fora.tv/2005/12/09/View_From_End_Of_World

[Andir]

It seems to me like Farmerbob is hell bent on placing people in easily organized groups for easy identification (and exclusion?)  The reality is that you cannot categorically identify people in such ways.

People today are so eager to label others.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

what farmbob seems to fail to understand is that atheism is a very old world, with ancient roots that predate english, and that has been used in every latin influenced language for milenia, it has an organic definition and may validly be applied to several different concepts.
as for irreligious, it is not only absolutely irrelevant to the issue of the existence or not of god, but it is an even more extreme case of organic definition, and the dictionary definition bob quoted doesn't even support his own definition.

[Willfor]

Actually, I think the problem is that he doesn't want to be in a grouping with people who he feels are completely irrational.

Well, buck up. Everyone else in the world is either grouped in with other people who are irrational, or are the people who others don't want to be associated with. EVERYONE. If you are drawing breath, you are associated with someone you would rather not be associated with. If you cut yourself off completely from society, you are also grouped in with people you don't want to be associated with. The only escape from this is death, where you will further be grouped in with everyone afterward. This starts before you are born as well thanks to both prolife and prochoice groups.

Welcome to humanity. You are either with us, or you are with us against your will.

[Bauglir]

Given the majority opinion on what Atheism means and the fact that an encyclopedia (even in wiki form) is a more authoritative source than a dictionary for any subject that has nuance because dictionary editors don't have to consider the philosophical impilcations of every word defined, I'm going to have to overrule Farmerbob here. For the purposes of this thread, an Atheist is defined as somebody without a belief in a deity. Editing chart into OP now. The issue is now closed.

[G-Flex]

I'm hoping that Bauglir as the "owner" of this thread will recognize that there is absolutely no way that one can possibly justify defining a belief based on a rational decisionmaking process (Agnosticism) as a subgrouping of another belief that is fully dependent on an unprovable concept (Atheism).  If that were the case, then Agnosticism would have to share the illogic of Atheism, and it simply does not.  The only thing that Agnosticism and Atheism share in common is a refusal to believe in a deity.  The path to that refusal is extremely important.

You do not know what these words mean, and continue to use definitions pulled out of your own ass. The sooner you stop doing this, the sooner people can actually start talking about things.

[Leafsnail]

Great.  I don't have to define myself as an agnostic on every conceivable issue.

[Shambling Zombie]

Excellent. Somebody asked an interesting question about nihilism and existentualism and how they fit into, or don't fit into, non-theism. I would be interested to hear other's thoughts on this.

[Max White]

And so, after countless lives were lost to pointless needle work, we finaly managed to define athiest. I think we achived something here today.