@Th4DwArfY1 - I was talking about stronger opinions then just a little silly. Find plenty of things religious people believe or say silly myself.
Atheism = Not believing there is a god.
Which is not the same as 'Believing there is no god'.
That last one is semantic bunk made up by religious fundamentalist crackpots to try and put atheism on their own level.
On this I'm going to have to disagree. Trouble is I meet a lot of atheists who claim to be the 1st sentence, yet have an attitude to the topic of religion that is a closer match to the 2nd sentence. Once you start mocking the religious as stupid, gullible or ignorant you're more in line with the second (in my own opinion) & a lot of atheists do behave that way.
Sooo, some atheist people did a thing you don't like, and so you want 'atheist' to mean that thing?
Applying the same logic to 'Catholic', 'Right-wing voter' or 'BMW driver' could lead to some undesirable generalization too. Except for BMW drivers, there its entirely valid.
Why would I care whether atheism is a thing or not? Just saying there are atheists & there are atheists. Some fit the 1st sentence you gave, some fit the 2nd. It's not just a thing made up by "fundamentalist crackpots".
I will just point that back to this.
There is the dictionary definition of what an atheist is, and there is the statistically likely behavioral stereotype of how people who self-identify with that appellation have.
The two do not appear to converge.
Pointing out the lack of convergence is not making a strawman. Extrapolating from the lack of convergence to arrive at a conclusion, however, does.
Just that you have come to associate two things, doesn't change the definition of a word.
A lot of people behave badly, both religious and atheist, but making widespread generalisations to the point that you change the meaning of a word to something bad for yourself will only needlessly antagonise people you might have otherwise gotten along with fine.
That does not only go for atheists, but also for Muslims, right wing voters and maybe even BMW drivers.
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